The Franco-British led intervention in Libya was the litmus test for the newly intensified bilateral security and defense cooperation, enshrined in the 2008's Joint Declaration and the 2010's Defense and Security Co-operation Treaty. While the documents were pay tribute to both NATO and the EU and reflect the uncomplicated view of the then-French president Sarkozy towards the Alliance, the Libyan intervention was the first crisis where the new framework for cooperation and its institutional implications were put to a test.
Focusing on France, the interest of this paper is three-fold. First, it investigates the construction of commonness and a joint security and defense identity in mapping the discourse around the two agreements mentioned above, and thus aims at explaining the achievement of hegemony in discursive practice. Second, the paper turns towards the Libyan intervention for both understanding the discursive construction of intervention and the enactment of Franco-British cooperation. And third, it analyzes statements on NATO and the EU's security and defense policies (e.g. CSDP) as interdiscursive moments of the two discourses' practices.
The paper does so by interpreting presidential and parliamentary documents, applying a framework of poststructuralist, Laclauian discourse analysis and interpretive policy analysis (frames, narratives) to explain the construction of policies in discursive practice. The paper argues that the personal beliefs of Sarkozy on transatlantic cooperation (and the United States) have been important for initiating cooperation, that they are embedded into a hegemonic discourse on pragmatization, and that this formation entails consequences for the sense-making of what NATO and European security and defense cooperation are and should be about, giving testimony of a French policy change.
