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Since British Prime Minister David Cameron stated his intention for the UK to hold an in/out referendum on continued EU membership in 2017, there has been much debate regarding the impact of the EU on British policy-making. A potentially fruitful method of assessing this impact is by utilising the conceptual framework of Europeanisation. This paper will illustrate the analytical utility of Europeanisation in this role, and apply it specifically to post-Cold War British security policy-making. This serves the dual purpose of placing a range of documents on important developments in security policy and British involvement in the European integration project into a conceptual framework, whilst also contributing to the wider debate on the causality of the EU on policy-making by Member States.
Europeanisation
Europeanisation concerns "the central penetration of national systems of governance," achieved through the dual processes of "uploading" and "downloading" between the national and European levels.1 "Downloading" involves a national adaptation that takes place due to the pressures placed upon a state by the European Union, either as an institution or as a collection of states. Heritier notes that it essentially constitutes "the process of influence deriving from European decisions and impacting on Member States' policies and political and administrative structures."2 It is possible to broaden this definition further to say that it refers to the process by which the rules, norms, practices and acquis politique of the EU come to have an effect upon the Member States' politics and polity. "Uploading," in contrast, is the upward projection of states' domestic preferences, policy ideals and models from the national level to the European level. Through this mechanism, the nation state influences the EU as an institution and the policies it produces. This, in sum, illustrates the co-evolution and mutual adaption of European and national levels.
Europeanisation has traditionally been applied only to policy areas wherein the existence of mutual adaptation was deemed rather simple to detect, due to the prevalence of EU-wide legislative action, such as agricultural policy. However, this trend has changed with increased security policy integration at the European level through the CFSP and the CSDP over the past decade.3 Compelling research questions have thus arisen, regarding the causal significance of EU membership for Member States' security policy-making and the reciprocal...