A Discussion of Case Selection

The Iraq and Libya crises first came into notice in the descriptive statistics displayed in Chapter 5 about EU voting behaviour in the UNSC. Out of 1,264 voted UNSC resolutions, there were six on which EU member states voted inconsistently. Of all these six “deviation” cases, three resolutions on which France abstained referred to the situation in Iraq, and one on the military action against Libya was notoriously known for its bitter EU debacle for Germany‟s abstention. Considering the relevant rarity of abstentions at the level of the UNSC, the sensitivity and intensity of the Iraq and Libya crises make them outstanding cases that are worth further exploration.

The case studies adopt a “most-similar systems” design, where the independent variable of interest is the implementation of the ToL.118 A close-range study of the Iraq and Libya conflicts reveal many parallels. Both cases exhibited roughly similar salience as security crises and attracted substantial international attention, e.g., both crises were covered extensively by world media, addressed at the UNGA and intensively debated within the UNSC. The purpose of both conflicts was to eliminate the dictatorial regimes, which were considered threats to their own people. Ironically, both dictators, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi encountered a sudden fall despite their claims that they would prevail. Therefore, the durations of both conflicts were relatively short. Both conflicts were subject to foreign military intervention and involved similar interlocutors, including NATO-led coalitions and EU member states. One more thing, the primary export of both countries is oil, although whether this factor was crucial during the two conflicts is still debatable.

For the EU specifically, both conflicts constitute litmus tests of reformed delegation structure of EU representation brought by treaty reforms. In need of addressing the failure of the Union to act cohesively during the Balkan crises in the 1990s, the Amsterdam Treaty appointed the HR/SG to assist the revolving Presidency in order to bring more coherence to EU external representation. The Iraq war was the first major security issue that occurred after this innovation. Similarly, the unrest in Libya – which broke out about 14 months after the ToL was ratified and less than two months after the EEAS was declared operational – offered a timely opportunity to test the new CFSP-related institutional structures. Therefore, the fact that they are divided before and after the ToL‟s entry into force can be exploited to detect the effects of the ToL on representation coherence.

Moreover, the EU was reported to be highly divided during both conflicts (e.g., Springford 2003; Hughes 2003; Bluth 2004; Gaffney 2004). The statistical evidence presented earlier in Chapter 5 about EU representation coherence at the UNGA find that although EU voting cohesion has been incrementally increasing over time and although the Union performs more coherently in general than the UNGA as a

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The most-similar systems design means that “the chosen pair of cases is similar on all the measured independent variables, exceptthe independent variable of interest” (King et al. 1994). If the independent variable of interest and the dependent variable differ in both cases, it can be concluded that this independent variable is likelyof relevance when explaining the outcome. This design is useful to exclude alternative variables strategically. But notice that when it comes to explicit qualification, few events in social science can be explained by only one variable.

whole, there is no obvious evidence between the implementation of the ToL and an increase in EU voting cohesion, either in general or in specific issue areas. A possible cause could be the remaining agency problems and new institutional tensions that were discussed in Chapter 4. However, due to the limitations of quantitative measurements – as mentioned in the introductory chapter – that voting cohesion is not able to measure every aspect of representation coherence, it is unclear whether these findings drawn from the context of the UNGA also apply to the UNSC. Close-range case studies can provide rich information and complement the limitation of our insights drawn from the descriptive statistics on EU voting behaviour at the UNSC in the previous chapter. An elaborate discussion of the EU‟s representation from the perspectives of both horizontal and vertical coherence makes up the weakness of quantitative analysis that cannot demonstrate the precise coordination mechanisms of the EU. Considering the attention of these two cases gained from the UN, and especially the UNSC, they are more than suitable for test the hypothesis regarding the variation of EU representation coherence at this body. In addition, by examining the recent events of the Libya crisis, which rooted in the Arab Spring, the case study gains the advantage to analyze the status of EU representation in the CFSP field as it is to date.

Obviously, a research involving two cases will not be able to seek statistical generalization as the quantitative analyses conducted in the previous chapter were trying to accomplish. But it is possible to have analytical generalizations by comparing the empirical evidence with the hypothesis generated from the principal-agent theory (cf. Yin 2009). As explained earlier, the Iraq war and the Libya crisis can be seen as contested cases. If EU representation coherence managed to increase in highly politicized and sensitive conflicts like these two cases, it would be logical to assume a similar trend in less contested cases.