Common Security and Defence Policy and the Lisbon Treaty Fudge: No common strategic culture, no major progress

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With the establishment of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in 1999, the EU achieved considerable progress regarding the institutionalisation of its foreign policy. Various innovations were included in the Lisbon Treaty to address the cohesion and effectiveness problem of the EU. The renamed Common Security and Defence Policy has not found it easy to establish a common policy, however, and the strategic actorness of the CSDP has so far been mostly limited to relatively small missions. But such cautiousness risks rendering the EU a repository of small symbolic humanitarian missions with little impact on the global geopolitical agenda, argues Vasilis Margaras, a visiting Research Fellow at CEPS.