Description
As both the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) strove to demonstrate their relevance in the post-Cold War security context, the overlap on the basis of the two organisations’ membership, mandate and resources has increased. In addition to these areas, an additional area of overlap emerged between the two organisations, namely their crisis management operations. Extant research on temporally and geographically proximate EU and NATO operations mainly focus on the operational, on-the-ground dynamics. As a result, different explanations of member state preferences about these operations are used rather unsystematically and separately. In order to explore the ways in which member states engage with these operations, this paper applies an ‘overlapping operations’ perspective for the analysis of member state decision-making regarding the crisis management operations of the EU and NATO. In doing so, it argues that the existing explanations of member state preferences regarding the EU and NATO operations can be classified under four categories: material interests, domestic-level preferences, transatlantic relations, and identities. These sets of propositions have different intervening factors which turn them into member state preferences about engaging with EU and NATO operations deployed in the same theatres, with converging timeframes and similar mandates. These propositions are tested in a case study of the French, German and British engagement with police training missions of the EU and NATO in Afghanistan. The analysis suggests that two factors appeared most frequently during these three member states' decision-making processes: Their contingent relations with the US (transatlantic relations) and their long-term preferences regarding their own roles and those of the EU and NATO as international security providers (identities).
