To Compete In International Crisis Management In The Eu And Nato - And Cooperative Relations

It is the trend that crisis management becomes important and hot topic after cold war. The fall of socialist camp not ceases the war but inspires the trouble. Therefore, crisis management is the most powerful force to keep security and peace. But the traditional researches focus on the national power and neglect the third force who intervene the crisis or war directly by military, diplomatic or economic channel. For various reasons the different organizations all saw crisis management as a new and central field of activity in the 1990s. The defense organizations, NATO and WEU, had to find new, broader activities after their traditional defense function ceased; but so had the EU, which was looking for ways to act and to give credibility to its common foreign policy. From two opposite directions, therefore, the organizations' tasks and fields of competences started to converge and increasingly overlap. The new overlap implied that there was a need to find rules and roles, if not altogether a real division of labor between the organizations in crisis management. From the interests of each side, EU and NATO develop new areas of cooperation and harmonization of their respective activities with amazing speed, the most widely documented example of which was the 2002 Berlin Plus agreement on the borrowing of assets by the EU from NATO for its crisis management operations in the Pan-European area. It is the paper that examines the relations between the ESDP and NATO in the perspective of force in the issue of crisis management. It aims at explore the relation between NATO and ESDP through the operations, and then addresses the competition-cooperation relation between the two organization in crisis management, because the relation refers to the future of the European security.The appearance of the decision trees which have widened spectrum of options is the rational choice. For the Europeans, it was the dissatisfaction with dependence on US military assets, the implications of which had been manifest in the Balkan Wars. But EU should appeal to NATO as a way to insistent development. For the Americans and NATO, it was the diminishing strategic interests for the European theatre in relation to other trouble spots in the world, coupled with military overstretch. Use of the EU civilian capability and legitimacy, NATO can continue existence after the cold war.From other perspective, Berlin Plus is another significant example to cite the emerging new balance in European security between NATO and the EU. The general trend is the cooperation between NATO and EU which is the way of development of EU independent force. Although NATO primacy (the 'right of first refusal') now is irreplaceable, the 'lessons learned process' between NATO and EU develops. EU force thus takes steps one by one. It is undoubted that the relation between NATO and EU will cooperate in competition.This thesis consists of five parts. Part I gives an introduction to concept of crisis management. It mainly informs the new development of international crisis management theory. Part II notifies the origin of European Security and Defense Policy and retells the development with European crisis. Part III discusses the reform of NATO after the cold war and the harmonization of European and US. The IV is the main part in this paper. It clarifies the current situation of cooperation and competition in Europe. In begin with the discussion of division of labor, we contrasts the NATO primacy and the requirement of independent EU force. After exploring the operations combined with documents, we analyze Berlin Plus format and how the decision-tree proceeds. In the summary, we evaluate the importance of the cooperation-competition relation. The lessons learned process will continue and this balancing process relates with the future of European security.