Description
This project will look at the effects of EU membership on the denationalization of critical security infrastructure. Specifically, it will focus on sat-nav, a military asset generally considered to be critical for the execution of modern military operations. It should consist of three case studies, one baseline case to represent standard national behavior, and two European cases which will illustrate divergent behavior. European states, instead of independently developing this capacity and keeping it under national control, developed sat-nav supranationally in the form of Galileo. They then gave control of the asset to the European Union, a fact which Brexit has laid bare quite strongly.
On EU membership, it should look at identity and heuristics within the minds of decisionmakers attempting to document how framing works within the European context. It’s expected we will see that a distinct European identity tied to a specific problem-solving heuristic in the minds of decisionmakers which caused European states to forgo normal international relations behavior (understood in a realist sense). The implications of this are of course many for European Strategic Autonomy and the development of a distinct European security apparatus.
