The Advancement of European Security Integration

For almost a decade and a half the European Union has been steadily developing as a global security actor, attempting to unify disparate national security polices into a more coherent, European security policy. The progress of European Security Integration (ESI) is the subject of this thesis, and has been examined in terms of three critical elements. By studying an EU-level defense institution, several individual member states, and an EU-led crisis management operation, a more comprehensive sense of the process could be obtained. The European Defence Agency is analyzed in Chapter 2, followed by the states Denmark, Sweden, and Finland in Chapter 3, and finally the EU Training Mission in Mali is examined in Chapter 4. Several propositions have been crafted to ascertain the success of ESI in general and within each element in particular, and so were tested both within and across chapters. Overall, although individual states retain a great deal of influence in the advancement of ESI, it appears that ESI is being successfully accepted and implemented, though largely in a limited manner as of yet