European State-Building: National Selfdetermination Vs. Political Economic Stabilization In The European Union’S Common Security And Defense Policy

The goal of this paper is to critique European integration noting political psychological dynamics relative to current policy trends that shape the EU’s effectiveness as a peace strategy. EU capabilities for conflict prevention include opportunities it offers to procure national security and prosperity for established states. The EU enjoys an advantage in competition with Moscow for influence in southeastern Europe. The EU is a multinational political entity that effectively projects an image of not being under the national dominance of a particular member state, i.e. Germany. The EU’s institutional policy-making complexity and authority dispersion suppress perceptual patterns suspecting it as a vehicle for neo-colonial projection of the power of a member state or coalition of states. The EU’s conditionality for loans to address the sovereign debt crisis is thus less prone to be seen as erasing the national sovereignty of a debtor state through capitulation to particular national dominance. A challenge lies in the EU’s perceived relationship with the US. Moscow’s prevailing view of the EU assumes it to be a vehicle for expansion of Euro-Atlantic influence at the expense of Russian national security. It intensifies suspicion of pro-Euro-Atlantic nationalities existing also as national minorities and in diaspora in Europe and in North America. The EU’s emphasis on state building and stabilization through economic development is problematic because of resistance to sovereign national self-determination for these national minorities