The EU's Responses to External Threats: Between Power and Institutions (Working Title)

My research analyses the increasingly topical issue of the European Union's responses to threats in its near abroad, assessing the respective role of Member States and EU Institutions in shaping responses and - by using the process tracing method - inductively theorising the conditions under which each factor exerts a greater impact on responses and the causal mechanisms through which it does so.
An Institution will be defined as 'a set of rules and norms that stipulate the ways in which states should co-operate and compete with one another'. The rules and norms guiding EU foreign policy are codified in Article 21 of the Treaty on European Union. Drawing on a broad conception of security (Ullman, 1983; Buzan/Wæver/de Wilde, 1998; Mathews, 1989; Buzan, 1991), threat will be defined as 'an entity or phenomenon that has the potential to damage the European Union's security'. The thesis is based on three empirical case studies: the EU's response to the Ukraine crisis (early 2014 -mid 2016), to the migration crisis (early 2015- late 2016) and to civil war in Libya (mid 2014- mid 2016). The dependent variable of my analysis is the EU's response, namely its policy output in the three cases. This is limited to output within the framework of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy and does not include the foreign policies of individual Member States. The independent variables are: i) Member States' security preferences and ii) EU rules and norms.