The coherence of EU Crisis Management in the eastern neighborhood: the case of South Ossetia

The objective of the thesis is to investigate the way(s) in which the EU’s inter-institutional structure can impact its capacity to formulate and implement a coherent crisis management policy in relation to the Georgian-South Ossetian frozen conflict. The crowded institutional arena of EU crisis management, in which diverse institutional actors perform interrelated functions within the same policy field, makes coherence a relevant analytical concept for exploring the inter-institutional dimension of EU crisis management. Based on the ‟new institutionalism” argument that “institutions do matter” in EU crisis management, the thesis applies the theory of “Bureaucratic Politics” to assess the extent to which the overlap of inter-institutional mandates affects the coherence of the EU crisis decision making process. The study notes that external coherence within EU crisis management is expected to develop, if inter-institutional coherence already exists. The thesis considers coherence as a dependent variable, assessing the concept at the nominal level, thereby contributing to specific strands of literature on EU crisis management in the eastern neighborhood and policy coherence respectively. Applying a typical single case study technique, the research chooses a within-case analysis approach followed by process tracing, and tests the main hypotheses in the two main policy areas, Security and Development Aid, and in the planning and implementation levels. The empirical results confirm, that the overlap of inter-institutional mandates without further coordination leads to incoherent decision making processes in the Security and Development Aid policy areas. Thus, institutional coordination mechanisms influence the degree to which the overlap of inter-institutional mandates affects the coherence of the EU crisis decision making process.