Common Security and Defence Policy and Common Armed Forces/European Army in European Union official documentation 2009-2015

Abstract

The current thesis concentrates on two aspects of the idea of creating EU Common Armed Forces/European army. The first part of the thesis clarifies the necessity of having its own credible military capabilities within the EU. Also in general terms it provides an overview of classical and modern armed forces created in the framework of international organisations. In addition, an overview of the progress made in the EU on this field and an assessment based on different authors is given. The second part of the thesis covers the description of procedure and outcomes of the conducted quantitative documents survey. The survey was designed on publicly available internet based database Eur Lex, which includes unclassified documents created by different EU institutions. The main outcome of the survey is that ongoing crises in Ukraine and refugee crises have not significantly affected the dynamics and content of created documents. Despite the temporary raise of the number of documents concerning the Ukraine crises, no evidence was found indicating the increase of interest from the EU supranational institutions of deepening EU military cooperation in the framework of Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). From the thesis it can be concluded that it is not likely that in the near future there will be any significant progress made towards creation of common armed forces/European army.