While the crisis of the euro currency has been the most visible issue facing the European Union in recent years, the EU has moved quietly ahead on cooperation in the area of security and defense over the last decade and a half. Indeed, more could argue that this has been the most successful endeavor of Union members in that period, particularly in light of the financial bailouts of numerous debtor Eurozone members. Two recent books, European Security in NATO’s Shadow by Stephanie Hofmann and The European Union and Military Force by Per Norheim-Martinsen, try to make sense of this process, both past and future.

Hofmann’s purpose is to explain how the European Union, after decades of failed efforts, finally managed to create an autonomous European capacity in security and defense. After hesitating in negotiations at Maastricht and Amsterdam, the EU surged ahead in 1999, creating institutions to manage small-scale crisis-management operations, such as peacekeeping, without the direct participation of the United States, as well as some collective capacity to do so in the form of national forces earmarked to a European Rapid Reaction Force. The Europeans have put these capacities to good use, undertaking a number of small military operations in the last decade.

As Hofmann points out, this is something of a puzzle for international relations theory. Given that most of the EU members are also NATO members, why would they duplicate the functions of the most successful military alliance of all time, one that had engaged in an extensive process of reform to be able to undertake the very same type of operations? This was hardly a shrewd utilitarian choice. Nor did it go nearly far enough to indicate any kind of soft balancing strategy vis-à-vis the United States.

The author argues that major progress in the area of an autonomous European capacity for military operations was made possible by the alignment of similarly minded political parties in the major European capitals—Berlin, Paris, and London. Once governments had compatible ideologies, they found it much easier to move forward. Headway in European security cooperation, she argues, is facilitated by the commitment to similar values, in this case those of Europe as a political community, multilateralism as an end in itself or at least a means to an end (i.e, not unilateralism), and intergovernmentalism or supranationalism (as opposed to a vehement defense of sovereignty).

Theoretically, Hofmann claims that her contribution is to integrate political parties and their ideologies as causal factors into the study of foreign policy, as well as to point out the importance of ideological congruence for foreign policy. This is too much to claim. The “notable exceptions” included in the book broke this ground in a virtually identical fashion long before, and they explain how the unique ideologies that parties bring into the decision-making process help define the national interest in a way that differentiates them from others, even in the same structural circumstances (p. 14, n. 1). Core values give rise naturally to particular preferences in regard to international institutions, including the European Union.

Hofmann distinguishes herself by taking a more inductive approach to uncovering those values, arguing that such a step is necessary lest one miss the multidimensionality of ideology in regard to European integration. However, in an effort to differentiate herself from previous work, she falls into a trap. If one does not deduce foreign policy preferences from broader ideologies evident in preferences on other issues, such as domestic issues, one can only measure foreign policy ideology by reference to support for the very policies she is trying to explain. How do we know, for instance, that the Socialist Party has a preference for Europe as a political community, leading to support for European defense? If the answer is, as in Hofmann’s book, by reference to previous statements of support for European integration and European defense, induction leads to tautology. And in the end, the author is telling us to expect consistency in the policy preferences of political parties. The past predicts the future. This is surely true, but perhaps not very interesting.

There are also some issues with the ideological space that Hofmann hypothesizes, tautological concerns notwithstanding. She sees a three-dimensional policy area. Conceptually, however, it is very difficult to distinguish unilateralism from a concern for sovereignty, for instance, or a preference for supranationalism as compared to multilateralism as an end in itself. If there is such a three-dimensional space in which each dimension is truly orthogonal to the others, we would need to be able to imagine a party whose position was simultaneously isolationist, that prefers multilateralism as an end in itself, and that is fervently European. Alternatively, we must imagine a party whose position is unilateralist and supranationalist at the same time. The far-fetched nature of such combinations seems to speak for ideological consolidation.

Empirically, European Security carefully lays out the expectations at each period of negotiation over European defense in the 1990s and early 2000s. European defense cooperation finally gains steam in the late 1990s when the obstructionist and anti-European Conservative Party in Great Britain loses office and cooperates with a cohabitating Gaullist president and Socialist prime minister in France to articulate a new goal of “European Security and Defense Policy.” The Germans, always agreeable to greater European integration, follow along obediently. The story is surely convincing, although it also does not differ significantly from that offered by those who are less theoretically minded. It is commonly known, for instance, that Tony Blair’s more “pro-European” approach was a precondition for any British endorsement of an autonomous EU capacity. Hofmann’s greatest contribution lies in showing how impoverished the typical rationalist and realist approaches are in explaining post–Cold War developments in European and transatlantic security relations.

Norheim-Martinsen picks up where Hofmann more or less leaves off. His book is devoted to the post–St. Malo period, after which the European Union had made the strategic decision to move into this new area of cooperation. Cooperation in defense is, at least formally, solely intergovernmental in character. In EU-speak, this means that states cede no decision-making autonomy to any supranational governments, or to member governments for that matter. All members retain their veto rights. No one can force them to spend more on defense or to send troops to Africa in an EU operation.

Nevertheless, Norheim-Martinsen asks whether the European Union might be considered a “strategic actor” in the defense area despite these formal limitations on supranationalism. He sets a number of benchmarks that would need to be met and judges the EU on them. Strategic actors can formulate common security interests, generate capabilities, and show their willingness to use them. The author finds that the EU has met them. I am not so sure, and I know that the book does not give me the tools to judge.

Norheim-Martinsen argues that the EU’s efforts in the area of defense are best understood through the concept of governance, the “dispersion of authority and increased complexity of social and political interaction that follows in a globalizing international system” (p. 9). Governance is marked by “heterarchy,” in which there are multiple centers of power and nonstate actors who also contribute to the process. The EU, the book claims, exhibits such a modern structure, which enables it to act as a strategic actor.

This is a very different kind of book than Hofmann’s. While the latter looks backward to try to account for key events in the development of an EU security policy by weighing one theoretical alternative against another, Norheim-Martinsen’s book looks at the present and future and speculates about what the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) is. There is no theoretical explanation of a particular set of outcomes, weighed against another. As such, it might appeal more to policy analysts than to academics.

Even so, while not every book need engage in such a positivistic comparison of theory against evidence, even an effort like this should use the conceptual standards set by other approaches to better judge whether the author’s “argument” is credible. Readers will wonder what would constitute disconfirming evidence for the claim that the EU is a strategic actor. The individual members of the Union, for instance, could collectively meet all three of the author’s criteria for a strategic actor merely by acting in their own interests, that is, “intergovernmentally,” if that is a word. The book’s most interesting passages describe all of the substate and quasi-supranational players involved in formulating policy in this new space—the Council Secretariat, the Political and Security Committee, the European planning headquarters, and the European Defence Agency, to name some. This is a great primer for those who want to understand the nuts and bolts of the process. Yet mere demonstration of such heterarchy does not in and of itself provide evidence for assertion that the CSDP would look different at all were it strictly confined to national capitals, the author’s implicit argument. Demonstrating this requires at the very least some sort of counterfactual reasoning to make its claims.

While reading the book, I found myself asking whether it was simply too soon to engage in this type of speculation. Is it possible, just over a decade after the beginning of the EU’s move into defense, to establish whether it indeed acts as one? Optimists like Norheim-Martinsen criticize security-studies scholars who point to the EU’s lack of capabilities and unity on major foreign policy issues and dismiss the EU prematurely. Yet one could just as easily ask whether it is overly rash to make any claims about just what the CSDP is.

Both books curiously neglect NATO, something that points the way to future research. The implication of The European Union and Military Force is that anything that the EU takes on cannot help but become more than intergovernmental precisely because it is situated in the European integration process. Yet one could easily make the same case about governance in the North Atlantic alliance. Indeed we frequently hear about the same phenomena of “Brusselization,” in which ambassadors go native and privilege the interests of the organization as a whole rather than their home country. There would be more history to draw on; such a claim would attract much more interest from non-EU specialists. Similarly, while Hofmann treats a feeling of Europe as a political community as a dimension of ideological conflict, identification with the United States is not mentioned. Might we describe the French less as pro-European and more as anti-American? Is allegiance to the United States not a deeply ingrained ideological factor in Germany? A closer look at NATO might tell us whether we can consider Europe a strategic actor and reveal something about the proper way to think of the ideological space underlying support for the CSDP.