Responding the European Challenge. Narratives About European Security and Defence Policy Within the US-Foreign Policy Discourse.

Since the end of the Cold war, the Atlantic order seems to be in a fundamental transition with an unclear destination. Especially 9/11 and the Iraq war crisis discovered one of the major challenges the United States are confronted with at the beginning of the 21st century: Europe. The process of European integration not only transformed internal European affairs between sovereign states, but also created a common European foreign policy. Most notably in this context is neorealism which argues, that the ESDP is an attempt to limit US-power in Europe and to balance American hegemony globally in the long run. Following this assumption, the dominant position of the United States in Europe will be at risk. But how will the U.S. respond to this challenge? From a neo-realistic point of view, the United States are expected to develop “anti-balancing” measures to remain the central power within the Western order maintaining the unipolar moment. But is anti-balancing inevitable? What about alternative responses? I will argue that the possibilities of the United States to respond the European challenge are discursively enabled and simultaneously constrained by dominant narratives about the meaning and consequences of the ESDP (what is the ESDP, what desires it in the future, how should the U.S. react). I assume, that these narratives fundamentally differ within the expert discourse on US-foreign policy and consequently a “spectrum of possibilities” emerges. The ambition of this paper is to illustrate the contingency of foreign policy by identifying different narratives and the “spectrum of possibilities” about how to respond the European challenge. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]