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Publishers Abstract:
For most of their lifetimes, the European Communities (EC) and the European Union (EU) were regarded as a purely civilian and diplomatic power. However, in combination with a number of weaknesses of the Common Foreign and Security Policy framework, this orientation necessarily resulted in a peculiar imbalance of European influence and policy options. The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), triggered by the Franco-British summit of St. Malo in December 1998, marked a significant departure from this image. It is the aim of this article to identify the legal scope and meaning of the Petersberg Tasks in the Treaty to the EU (TEU) and of their modified version in the Constitutional Treaty. The result will be an image of the military and operational dimension of the ESDP and, more precisely, of the legal scope given by the TEU to launch military operations. The Petersberg Tasks in Article 17(2) TEU do not exhaustively describe the scope of the common defense policy, but they provide the only specific catalogue of military activities of the EU.
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