To what extent has the development of the European Security and Essay

To what extent has the development of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) made the European Union (EU) a strategic actor - Essay Example s, a creation of new governmental institutions, a great exchange of ideas, policies and approaches to national and international security and defense. Webber et al. assert that â€Å"the Europeanisation of security has been the great political revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries† (19). One of the outcomes of the process, which is considered to be of a great importance, is the innovative European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). This paper is aimed to discuss the role of the ESDP development process in a building of European security competence and in a strengthening the role of the European Union (EU) in the context of the world security and defense policy. During the period of the Cold War, prior to 1999, the EU played a quite passive role in the own security area. According to the terms of a settlement, made in the early 1950s between the US and the Western European Union (WEU), the EU was a civilian institution, while the responsibility to assure security in Europe was laid upon NATO and WEU (Deighton, 720). In 1990s immense changes shook the Europe, forcing the EU to adapt to these historical changes. The fall of the Berlin Wall and re-uniting of Germany, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Iron Curtain, the collapse in Yugoslavia and the Balkan War – there are one of the major events of 1990s that changed the old European coordinate system. Since 1991 the role of NATO in the European security has been questioned, and in 1994 the European security and defence identity concept (ESDI) was developed as â€Å"a framework for combined joint task forces, coalitions of the willing for military security provision† (Deighton, 724). In 1997 the EU member states signed the Amsterdam Treaty, which provided the basis of development of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), of which European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) is a significant integral part. The political push for this progress was made by France and