EU and NATO

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International organizations are instruments of international action and have the competences, systems, and numbers that lend legitimacy for them to take up action. The development of the European security and defense policy (ESDP) as an advancement for the European Union (EU), evolved into the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), and acts as an agent for a common European defense structures and cooperation between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EU. The common defense policy was put into action through the signing of the ‘Berlin Plus Agreement’ in 2003. This protocol allows the EU to use NATO structures and assets to carry out military operations, if NATO is not partaking. An EU planning cell in now in full operation at SHAPE, NATO’s military epicenter.1 Ideas harbored and contrived from cold war rhetoric argue that cooperation between NATO and the EU will not last. Some players with in the organizations even have the attitude that the two organizations should not work together. However, in a world where military means alone will not resolve conflict and maintain peace, EU civilian capabilities working in tandem with NATO military expertise is the answer to managing crisis and perpetuating liberal democracy and content stability. Investigating this postulation will require an answer to three key questions: can these two organizations work together towards a common security defense policy? Are the goals, values and structures of each organization too fundamentally different for cooperation? Will the CSDP undermine the capabilities of either organization? The purpose of asking these questions is to undermine the assumptions that NATO and the EU cannot work together and to break down the base pillars for ...

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