Michael Smith asks and answers a question about the foreign policy of the European Union: How do we explain its surprising growth and development over the past 30 years despite the many obstacles? The question is timely for scholars and practitioners. For practitioners, the EU is beginning to matter more in international politics as it finally begins to operationalize the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) in the Balkans and Africa. For scholars, a theory of European foreign policy has not enjoyed the attention paid by theorists to internal economic integration (neofunctionalism), interstate bargains struck at intergovernmental conferences (realism, liberal intergovernmentalism), and the impact of ideas, preferences, identities, and interests (constructivism) that influence institutions.

Dissatisfied with mainstream theories of international cooperation that he argues are too narrow or simplistic to capture the impact of institutions on cooperation, Smith applies a theory of institutions to explain the evolution of European foreign policy cooperation among the EU member states. He is intrigued by the cumulative relationship between institutions and cooperation. European foreign policy cooperation began in 1970 as a loose, informal, non–treaty-based foreign policy consultative mechanism designed to keep international political issues from dividing the member states or harming the European Community. Over the next 23 years, European political cooperation became increasingly institutionalized and grew into the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) established in 1993 when the Treaty of Maastricht created the European Union. CFSP is a formal, high-profile, treaty-based process by which the EU and its member states seek to develop foreign policy actions and positions in order to play a proactive role in world affairs and to contribute to international peace and security. The evolution from reactive to active to proactive foreign policy cooperation is of keen interest to Michael Smith and other students of the role of the EU in the world.

For Smith, institutions matter. He is interested in understanding why, over time, European foreign policy became institutionalized and why it has developed its own internal momentum. He is equally interested in how institutionalization promoted European foreign policy cooperation; how the EU developed a sustained track record of foreign policy cooperation; and how CFSP has grown to become greater than the sum of its parts. He prefers a theory of institutionalism to other theories because institutionalization is a nonstatic process by which norms, or shared standards of behavior, are created and developed over time. Institutionalization involves the reciprocal, circular, and dynamic links between institutional development and the propensity of states to cooperate to achieve joint gains. Institutionalization, Smith writes, encourages actors to build institutions that foster cooperative outcomes that later influence the process of institution building.

The thesis of the book is that European foreign policy cooperation benefits those for whom it was originally intended: the EU member states. European integration is an ongoing discourse about how institutions translate common values or aspirations into specific collective policies or behaviors through application of norms and rules. CFSP has advanced, he argues, in a cycle involving crisis or opportunity, small-scale innovation, and institutional codification until the sequence repeated itself and eventually took foreign policy cooperation into new directions. Institutions filter which internal/external demands are focused on the EU; they make collective behavior stable over time and help condition state interests. As institutions develop, they generally make it easier for states to reach decisions and make judgments about the scope, demands, ends, duration, effectiveness, and desirability of cooperation. Smith argues that institutionalization and cooperation are related dynamic processes. State preferences are altered by institutionalized interactions with other states, meaning that domestic and international politics are linked in complex ways.

The author operationalizes his theory of institutions by examining the historical development of European foreign policy in stages over the past 30 years. These stages include information sharing, norms creation and codification, and actual governance—the authority to make, implement, and enforce rules. Relations among EU states progressed from narrow instrumental rationality characterized by intergovernmentalism to a more collective rationality characterized by legitimate procedures of governance and corresponding changes in domestic politics. He opines that since the EU is the most densely institutionalized network of states ever devised in world politics, a theory of institutions is appropriate in explaining how cooperation and institutions are related to one another. Smith concludes that there is a future for CFSP: He predicts reproduction and incremental adaptation, rather than rollback.

The author sets out to achieve a better understanding of the interplay between the EU's higher-profile foreign policies and its more significant institutional elements. Does he succeed? He does. He provides a fluid read that avoids excessive jargon and is accessible to both specialist and generalist. However, no book is flawless. Smith could have more extensively weaved into the text the results of the elite interviews of an impressive 60 EU officials and documented these primary sources with more specificity, given their importance to the volume and its arguments. The text is more an historical study than a contemporary one. Since there was a lag in time between writing and publishing, the events of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the intergovernmental conference for a new EU constitution, and the fast-breaking developments in the operationalization of ESDP are not given the full attention needed. Although Europe's Foreign and Security Policy was primarily designed to examine the process of institutionalization, the author might have drawn more extensively from other works that have focused on assessing the outcomes of European foreign policy actions, given how critical outcomes are as feedback for further institutionalization.

Quibbles aside, Smith's important work deserves to be included in the canon of European foreign policy theoretical texts. It nicely rounds out our theoretical knowledge of the role of institutions in European foreign policy cooperation and is strongly recommended to those, like Smith, who are intrigued by the unprecedented degree of foreign policy cooperation among the 25 members of the European Union.