European security and minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific

This article examines Europe's approach to minilateralism in the security sector and how it influences its Indo-Pacific security policy. It argues that Europe has an ad hoc bottom-up approach to minilaterals in the sense that groups of states take initiatives to address new challenges that are informally coordinated with EU institutions and then tested in practice. If successful in attracting additional member state participation and achieving objectives, these minilaterals are transformed into EU policies. This approach has not only been used within Europe to establish initiatives such as Permanent Structured Cooperation in defense, but also in the Indo-Pacific with France and Britain initiating freedom of navigation operations in the mid-2010s to create a maritime security footprint for Europe that is now formally recognised as part of the EUs Indo-Pacific strategy. It is argued that the European approach is effective in testing the viability of a new policy on a small scale and then slowly build a constituency of supporters that is large enough to obtain approval at EU level.