國立臺灣大學政治科學論叢

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Compared to other policy areas, the integration of common defence in the EU is happening at a rather slow pace. Although member states have been encouraged to engage in the institutionalised cooperation of common defence via the CFSP and the CSDP, the EU was hardly able to get rid of the image of being ‘an economic giant, a political dwarf, and a military worm’. The launch of the European Union Global Strategy by the European Council in 2016 is therefore considered to be an ambitious manifesto for promoting further defence integration. On the other hand, Germany, as one of the wealthiest countries in the EU, for a long time kept a distance from engaging in out-of-area military operations but published a new white paper on security policy in 2016 promising to take more responsibility in leading common defence. This ambitious movement is appreciated as ‘a paradigm shift’. To explain this development, this article applies the analytical framework of liberal intergovernmentalism to explore how the factors of national interests and power affected the formation of German preferences and the engagement of the intergovernmental bargain at the EU level. The author argues that the paradigm shift of Germany on the security policy is to respond to the increasingly serious geopolitical challenges since the 2010s, and it is favourable for further defence integration. But the concern of some member states about the PESCO and EI2 reminds us that the divergence between inclusive equilibrium and great convergence is still unresolved, and insisting on the principle of inclusive equilibrium, nevertheless, is not conducive to overcoming divergences.