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Foreign and Security Policy

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Book cover Britain and the Maastricht Negotiations

Part of the book series: St Antony’s Series ((STANTS))

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Abstract

The idea of adding a foreign and security policy dimension to the European Community was one of the explicit Franco-German aims in transforming the EC into a European Union. The reason why foreign policy became intimately linked to security policy in the IGC-PU, however, needs some comment. First, foreign and security policy raised the same sorts of issues concerning national sovereignty and autonomy. A foreign and a security policy role for the EC implied that Member States were surrendering their traditional nation-state functions, and that the integration project might eventually produce a superstate which was more than the mere sum of its parts.1 Second, both foreign and security issues raised similar questions about the relationship between the EC and United Sates. If the Europeans had their own independent foreign and security policy, this would have inevitable repercussions for the American relationship and commitment to Europe and West European defence structures. Finally, though the British government may not have linked foreign and security policy, the issues were linked in the minds of its major partners France and Germany and indeed formed the centrepiece of the IGC-PU negotiations. Given the leading role Britain played in both these areas, the government’s reluctance to consider any further supranational enhancement to foreign policy cooperation and outright opposition to a defence role, it was thought by the British negotiating team ‘to be the issue that might break Maastricht’, and it is to this issue which this chapter now turns.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nottingham, UK

    Anthony Forster (Lecturer in Politics)

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© 1999 Anthony Forster

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Forster, A. (1999). Foreign and Security Policy. In: Britain and the Maastricht Negotiations. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333984178_5

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