The Political and Security Committee: A Case Study in 'Supranational Inter-Governmentalism'

The distinctive profile of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) as it has emerged to date is complex and far-ranging. It involves the mobilisation – in the cause of international crisis management, regional stabilisation, nation-building and post-conflict reconstruction – of a vast range of policy instruments: from sophisticated weaponry and robust policing capacity, to gender mainstreaming techniques and cultural assistance; from rapid-reaction “battle-groups” and strategic transport aircraft, to judges, penitentiary officers and human rights experts; from state capacity-building resources to frontier-control expertise. The role, in this gestation, of the key policy-shaping instrument which has underpinned ESDP – the Political and Security Committee (PSC) – has been noted by several scholars. The principal substantive argument of this study, the first comprehensive analysis of the workings of this committee, is that the normative socialisation processes which inform the work of the PSC have succeeded to an appreciable extent in allowing a trans-European strategic culture to begin to stamp its imprint on one of the EU’s principal foreign policy projects. A supranational culture is emerging from an intergovernmental process. The PSC has emerged, to a significant degree, as script-writer for ESDP.