Europe in World Politics and EU Foreign and Security Affairs

This research domain includes Europe’s international relations, and its role in international and security affairs. We seek to integrate theoretical and conceptual grounding from a wide range of perspectives in international relations, the social sciences, and international law with empirical research and political relevance. This thread explicitly ties the study of Europe in international affairs to the central changes and challenges in world politics and international security of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The RSCAS seeks to address some of the main areas pertaining to Europe’s place and role in the world, such as the rocky and still tenuous consolidation of the EU as a ‘high politics’ actor in global affairs; the (uneven) emergence of pan-European foreign, security, and defense policies; issues of European strategy and purpose; internal and external aspects of European security and defense; as well as the foreign, security, or defense policies of individual European states or groups of states.

As one part of this research agenda, Ulrich Krotz investigates the causes and motivations behind the EU’s twenty-five military and civilian missions abroad to date, along with several ‘negative cases’ in which joint action did not materialize. Tentatively titled ‘Divided We Stand’, the book project elucidates the bumpy emergence of common European foreign, security, and defense stances – and thus central aspects of the EU’s growing external involvement in international security affairs over the past fifteen or so years. Drawing from general international relations theory, the book develops hypotheses on differing degrees of cooperation or its absence with respect to the possibility of joint action. The project focuses on explaining variation in cooperative outcomes, as well as cases of failure, since the process began in the mid-1990s.

In another research project, Ulrich Krotz scrutinizes the phenomenon of ‘special’ interstate relations in international politics. This project develops a conceptual framework to investigate diverse kinds of special relationships between states and to study their political impact on international affairs. It distinguishes among different types of special relationships, and analyzes the diverse conditions from which special relations have emerged historically. In the investigation of the character, diversity, and significance of special interstate relationships, this project combines matters of general international relations, European foreign relations and transatlantic affairs, issues of global and regional governance, and comparative methods and research design.