At the end of the Cold War, the Western international community embarked on a large-scale project of promoting democratic change and consolidation in Eastern Europe. This book explains its mixed results. It examines the strategies of European organizations and the conditions of their success and failure.

Since the path-breaking work of Karl Deutsch on security communities and Ernst Haas on European integration, it has been clear that international institutions may create senses of community and belonging beyond the nation state. Put differently, they can socialize. Yet the mechanisms underlying such dynamics have been unclear. This volume explores these mechanisms of international community building, from a resolutely eclectic stand point. Rationalism is thus the social theory of choice for some contributors, while others are more comfortable with social constructivism. This problem-driven perspective and the theoretical bridge building it are the cutting edge in international relations theory. By providing more fined-grained arguments on precisely how international institutions matter, such an approach sheds crucial light on the complex relationship between states and institutions, between rational choice and social constructivism, and, in our case, between Europe and the nation state.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This cutting-edge book explores the practices and socialization of the everyday foreign policy making in the European Union (EU), focusing on the individuals who shape and implement the Common Foreign and Security Policy despite a growing dissension among member states.

In recent years, the question of the post-Cold War NATO, particularly in relation to the former communist countries of Europe, has been at the heart of a series of international reform debates. NATO in the "New Europe" contributes to these debates by arguing that, contrary to conventional assumptions about the role of international security organizations, NATO has been systematically involved in the process of building liberal democracy in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The book also seeks to contribute to the development of an international political sociology of socialization. It draws on arguments developed by political theorists, sociologists, and social psychologists to examine the dynamics and implications of socialization practices conducted by an international institution.

This volume offers a timely and important study on how norms are transferred from the international into the domestic domain through processes of socialization. It seeks to understand the process of change in post-Cold War Europe from a divided continent into a community with a common identity, based on shared values and ideas. It also offers an explanation for why the process of change has occurred easily in some countries and with more difficulty or not at all in others.

EU foreign and defence policy is largely formulated in the working parties and committees of the Council of the EU and the vast majority of decisions in this field are made by the national diplomats working in the around 35 groups of the CFSP/CSDP. Although the importance of these committees and their participants has been increasingly recognised, we still know relatively little about them. Using an original database of 138 questionnaires and 37 interviews, this book addresses this lack of knowledge, studying what these committees do and how they negotiate and resolve issues. It explores three key areas: the formulation of the national position; the identity of CFSP/CSDP policy-makers; negotiation practices and outputs. In doing so, it provides an innovative observation point from which EU foreign policy can be analysed. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU foreign and defence policy, external relations of the EU, European integration and politics, diplomacy and more broadly international relations.