Description
EU defence integration has endured for over two decades despite producing limited strategic returns. Mainstream IR theories – whether emphasising rational adaptation to threats or institutional efficiency – struggle to explain the EU’s recurring pattern of crisis-driven institution-building that repeatedly falls short of its stated ambitions.
This article argues that European defence integration has been driven less by strategic adaptation than by the internal imperative to sustain the European community during ontological crises – periods of profound disruption to collective self-identity. Such crises generate a community dilemma: in order to maintain a sense of progress and safeguard a community integral to their self-conception, leaders are compelled to engage in rapid institution-building. Yet, fearing further division, they pursue this in improvised and deliberately ambiguous institutional forms, producing outcomes that signal unity but lack strategic effectiveness.
The argument is substantiated through process-tracing of three defining episodes of EU defence integration (1999, 2004, 2016), drawing on newly released archival material and 40 elite interviews. By showing how uncertainty compels cooperation to sustain community rather than conflict to preserve autonomy, the article inverts the logic of the Security Dilemma and significantly broadens the range of conceivable state action in international relations.
