Soldiers and diplomats: The institutionalization of the European security and defense policy, 1989--2003 (France, Germany, United Kingdom)

Why would nation-states pool their foreign policy instruments and military capabilities? Looking at the development of the European security and defense policy, to this day the most ambitious project of military integration in times of peace, this dissertation argues that the role of states, political leaders and organizational actors in international relations must be recast within domestic and international "fields of power," that is, overlapping social spaces wherein organizational struggles and collective representations shape policy-making. The field metaphor helps us account for why European defense came about but also why it is painfully slow to take root.; Through a comparison of three different but contemporaneous fields of power---i.e., security policy making in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom---I explain how they generated distinct collective representations in regard to security problems. Within each domestic field of policy making, I distinguish and stratify the organizational actors who shape government policy. Their behavior and collective representations are mapped out, compared and traced to the structural position and institutional history of these actors.; This allows me to explain why, in spite of the different views held by domestic actors and the failure of previous attempts, the European security and defense policy emerged in the late 1990s as a credible alternative to both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and national defense policy. The increasingly complex and pervasive mechanisms of European integration, compounded by transformations in the international environment, stripped foreign ministries of many of their competences in external affairs. This encouraged diplomats across the European Union to seize on the EU's foreign and defense policy as an ambitious project over which they could enjoy exclusive authority. Meanwhile, defense policy-makers faced strong budgetary pressures and operational challenges that forced them to contemplate new ways of cooperating with each other. The domestic concerns of foreign and defense policy-makers in France, Germany, and the UK converged on the perceived necessity of bringing European defense to the fore. But this aggiornamento rests on the use of an ambiguous vocabulary that obfuscates the multiplicity of collective representations held by organizational actors.