EU And NATO Security Mechanisms Overlap

Interactions and overlaps between and among international organizations have becomeeminent with the surge of international organizations, which leads to nested, partially overlappedor parallel institution and is termed as regime complexity by international law and internationalrelations researchers. Institutional overlap is part of regime complexity, which manifest itselfthrough convergence in membership, mandate and strategic culture. How to handle it becomes apolitical issue as the nation has to decide whether to build a new regime to strengthen or completewith the extant organization, to curb the new institution or to divide labor among them and suchlike.The end of Cold War marked a fundamental change in European security environment, underwhich situation, NATO has been undergoing strategic transformation and becomes apolitical-military organization, while EU began to build its own security institution and madesome breakthrough in common defense. All of this leads to increasing overlap between NATO andEU in membership, mandate and strategic culture.UK’s deal with overlap between NATO and EU could be divided into two phases: from1997to2007and from2008to2014. During the first stage, impulsed by Kosovo crisis, UK tookEuropean capability building as its core target, and began to strongly push forward EU securityinstitution, which led to overlap between NATO and EU. The goal bought about UK’s tolerancetowards EU-NATO overlap. However, phase two witnessed UK’s evident discourse thatduplication and competition was unbearable, jointed by UK’s clear positioning for thetwo,containing new development in EU to avoid any further overlap. This did not mean that UKforsook capability building in Europe, but that UK had instead pursued this goal throughmultilayered security, characterizing strikingly with bilateral cooperation and block building.Centering on sovereign state as UK when exploring nation’s approach to institutional overlap,this paper find a close link between core goal and nation behavior. Driven by its core goal, anation may positively establish and tolerate institutional overlap; but when its core goal can not beeffectively realized through overlap, the nation may lower its tolerance and choose to avoid anyinstitutional overlap and turn to other approach for its main target.