Maturation by practice:shaping the EU’s international identity in the absence of formal institutional change

This article examines the interplay of the maturation of the EU’s identity as an international foreign and security actor with the institutionalisation of its foreign and security architecture. While the formal policy- and decision-making modes within the CFSP/CSDP have changed little during the past 25 years, the EU’s international identity did still change over time, potentially indicating a “coming of age”. How can we explain this maturation of the EU’s foreign and security identity despite the critique of the EU’s inefficiency and lack of adequateness in security policy? By means of re-interpreting existing scholarship, we argue that the relative maturation of the EU’s foreign and security identity since the Lisbon Treaty is not so much linked to formal institutional change (“maturation by design”), but rather to changing informal institutional practice and the selection and use of respective instruments (“maturation by practice”). This dynamic, we argue, is due to an interplay of internal and external factors, accompanied by ongoing socialisation of member states in how they perceive the nature of the CFSP/CSDP and the EU as an international foreign and security actor.