Description
This article investigates the recent evolution of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK)’s intelligence-sharing relationship, and its reliance on mutual trust to overcome legal, political, and strategic challenges. In fact, despite continuing to share security interests, the quick succession of Brexit and the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine have demanded the EU and UK to rethink and adapt the way they share intelligence for foreign security policy. Building on sociological and relational approaches to intelligence cooperation, I unveil the Euro-British relation as composed of an inter-polity, an inter-organisational, and an inter-personal level, revealing how cooperation and trust in intelligence sharing are understood and operationalized differently on each. Through elite interviews with security professionals, I explore how each level reacted differently to change, due to varying reliance on more formal or informal elements of trust. For this reason, the paper concludes by offering policy suggestions for the relationship’s long-term future. At the same time, the theoretical and conceptual framework provides a valuable tool for granular investigations of evolving intelligence relationships, in Europe and beyond. This addresses a crucial gap in the discipline that still focuses on alliance formation but lacks insight on how alliances address and overcome crises.
