The more the merrier? Overlap and forum-shopping in the EU and NATO crisis management operations

Undertaking similar tasks in same spaces and timeframes with separate chains of command and contingent of forces, overlapping crisis management operations of the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) present important decisions for member states, who have scarce resources to deploy in multinational crisis management operations. Whilst many different explanations are offered for member states' choices about which EU and NATO operation to support, very few of them pay systematic attention to why member states make such choices and how precisely they practice their choices. Those studies that analyse member states' choices within overlapping EU and NATO operations often do so by focusing on the processes at the inception of operations, such as planning and launch phases, and by applying various hypotheses in a disparate and unsystematic way. This leaves the question of whether member states might be choosing from the operations, or 'forum-shopping', as a result of multiple factors and exercising these choices in different ways. Furthermore, it has generally been assumed that because the operational stages in the EU and NATO are separate from each other, member states' policymaking processes regarding the EU and NATO operations are not linked within themselves. Therefore, it also remains underexplored whether member states' organisation of decision-making shapes the extent to which they can use the EU and NATO

operations to accomplish their interests.

This thesis argues that investigating how member states' strategies shape, and are shaped by, the overlap between the EU and NATO crisis management operations calls for a different approach. At the centre of this thesis is a multifactor model based on literatures on the EU and NATO crisis management operations, regime complexity, and foreign policy analysis. This multifactor model offers a framework of analysis to the driving forces of member states' choices about engaging a crisis situation through the EU and/or NATO, the ways in which member states exercise these choices, and member states' organisation of decision-making in foreign and security policy.

Using this multifactor model, this thesis pursues a threefold argument. First, the overlapping and sequential nature of member states' commitments under an operation shapes their decisions within the other operation. Second, rather than simply choosing the operations that are most favourable to their interests, member states exercise their choices by following different and heuristic practices. Third, how member states organise their relevant policymaking mechanisms and instruments is a strong indicator of the degree to which they can instrumentalise the EU and NATO operations to attain their goals. In developing this line of argument, this thesis outlines a research design based on in-depth case studies with a qualitative analysis of decision-making processes in France, Germany and the UK across the operational overlap between the EU and NATO in Afghanistan, the Gulf of Aden, and the Mediterranean. To test the multifactor model across these theatres of overlap through a case study method, the thesis uses an empirical perspective based on comparative foreign policy.