The European Union and the Syrian Crisis

Subject Areas : Iranian Political Research

Seyed Morteza Oreizi Maybodi ¹

1 - University of Tehran

Received: 2018-06-08 Accepted : 2018-08-10 Published : 2018-12-21

Keywords: Syria, European Union (EU), Moravcsik, Foreign policy, Liberal Intergovernmentalism,

Abstract :

In the 1950s, the European region made integration in the form of European community. Various views were presented by scholars, including Andrew Moravcsik who brought up the theory of “Liberal Intergovernmentalism” by examining the strengths and weaknesses of the European community. Since this theory, compared with other theories, shows the integration among European Union in a more practical way especially in the context of the common agricultural policy, the present study examines the common foreign and security policy of the European Union towards the Syrian crisis based on this theory. The present study’s research method is library research and descriptive correlational research. The hypothesis of the article is that the common foreign and security policy of the European Union has not been met due to the different behavior of the main actors of the European Union (UK, Germany, and France) over the Syrian crisis. The results of this research show that considering the assumptions of identifying states as the main actors of integration and rationalizing their behavior, the theory of “Liberal Intergovernmentalism”, in contrast to other similar theories, has a more realistic view of European integration. In this theory, integration between governments was examined in three stages of identification of national preferences, bargaining between governments, and institutional selection, among which integrated institutions and the common foreign and security policy of the European Union after the Maastricht Treaty was of great importance among the integrated institutions.

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