On common foreign and security policy, the European Union has so far achieved an operating model which combines a sound and
relatively independent
institutional framework and inter-governmental cooperation amongst its member states. The emergence of this model reflects the need for readjustment of the European security structure as well as the urgent requirement of the further deepening of European economic and political
integration in the post-Cold War era. Institutional coordination of common foreign and security policy is an evolving process of accommodation that goes between the centripetal force of “Europeanization” and the centrifugal force of “state control”. An institutional analysis comes to the conclusion that common foreign and security policy in essence is neither inter-governmental cooperation in the strict sense of the term, nor a supranational integration process, it is instead a result of compromises between two conflicting forces of inter-governmental cooperation and supranational integration, the common foreign and security policy takes the form of inter-governmental cooperation in the process of integration.