Cooperation in EU disaster response and security provision: circulating practices

The EU Response to COVID-19: From Reactive Policies to Strategic Decision-Making.

This article addresses conceptually the European Union (EU)'s security actorness, explaining its meaning, identifying the factors that are constitutive to the concept, and analyzing whether the EU is a security actor in Georgia, through its increased presence and engagement in the country and its eventual implications for the South Caucasus. The article argues that the complementary nature of the different EU tools deployed on the ground and their comprehensive nature have contributed to the EU's consolidation as a security actor in the South Caucasus. However, and despite the successful assessments of the European Union Monitoring Mission in the context of common security and defense policy development, the mission's deployment and its contribution to regional stability are influenced to a great extent by the role and involvement of external players, in particular in this case, that of Russia.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has strengthened its foreign, security and defence policy in a remarkable way. Several new supranational security and defence initiatives have been launched and implemented, which have given the European Commission a new and central role in European security and defence policy. These swift developments are puzzling, since foreign policy and security and defence policy have long been understood as the ‘last bastions of sovereignty’ for EU member states and have thus been regarded as the least-likely cases for supranational integration. This thesis shows how the Commission has been the central driver behind these changes; it does so by conducting three focused case studies/articles to explore and explain the evolution of a new and enhanced role for the European Commission in EU security and defence cooperation during the period 2014–2023. By researching the establishment of the European Defence Fund, the EU Military Mobility project and the new policies and initiatives developed after Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, this dissertation analyses new competences for the European Commission within EU security and defence policy. This dissertation conceptually and analytically builds on diverse strands of integration literature, drawing on neofunctionalism, the Commission’s policy entrepreneurship and agenda setting, and crisis pressure to retrace in detail these three important empirical processes. The main contribution of this dissertation is to show how the European Commission’s initiatives and strategies have been indispensable in the strengthening of EU integration within security and defence.

How does the European Union (EU) include ‘gender’ within its support to security sector reform (SSR) programmes? The EU has committed to include gender perspectives by implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda (WPS) within its foreign security practices. While researchers and practitioners recognise the importance of integrating gender issues into SSR operational effectiveness, there is limited knowledge about how this functions within the EU's security architecture. This article uses Feminist Institutionalism (FI) to understand the process of gender mainstreaming within the EU's support to SSR programmes. It does this by using two crucial theory‐testing cases of SSR programmes – Ukraine and Afghanistan. It finds that the EU's ability to promote gender inclusive approaches to SSR is limited by the structure of the EU's own assumptions and capabilities, and institutional constraints in third countries. At the same time, the cases underscore the importance of individuals as agents of change.

The European Union (EU) is a multilevel governance whose dynamics of change cannot be understood outside the perspective of each member state. France has contributed to the politics and policies of the EU, but the EU has also had an impact on French domestic politics and policies. As a founding member state of the European Communities (EC), France has played since the 1950s a major role in the development of European institutions, policies, and reforms leading to the EU. France has also, however, always had a paradoxical position regarding the institutional design of the EU. On one side, France has supported the principle of supranationality in the economic areas of EU integration (market and monetary policy). On the other side, it has preferred the intergovernmental method for foreign policy and defense. France’s influence in the EU was for a long time exercised in co-leadership with Germany. The return of Germany to full sovereignty after its reunification, the enlargements of the EU toward the East, and a growing asymmetry between French and German economies made the Franco-German partnership less central in the 1990s. France’s influence on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has diminished to the benefit of Germany, while it has remained central for the definition of a EU foreign and security policy. Like most of the EU member states, France has also to cope domestically with a growing politicization of the EU issue in the domestic context since the middle of the 1990s. Opposition to the EU has arisen among French public opinion and has restrained the autonomy of the French executive (president of the republic and government) in the EU negotiations. The dominant narrative in France about EU membership has four main components: being a founding member state, being a big member state, co-leading the EU with Germany, and making sure that the EU maximizes the French national interest. The relationships of the main French institutional actors with the EU focus on the president of the Republic, the prime minister, and the National Parliament, as well as major national courts and interest groups. The political debates on the EU in the French public sphere involve the mainstream political parties, the rise of Euroskepticism, the referendum campaigns on EU issues, and general trends in the public opinion. France’s contributions to the main EU policies include membership in the EMU, the commitment to the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the attitudes toward the enlargement processes, and the future of the EU institutional reforms.

Creating a European internal security strategy involving space applications

This article provides a theoretically informed analysis to understand why and how security sector reform (SSR) norms have been integrated into the European Union (EU) security architecture. It investigates the role of epistemic communities in advancing the security-development/good governance agenda underpinning SSR and in fostering institutional learning. Shared knowledge and expertise have driven policy and institutional change, since they yielded a new policy consensus that transformed the EU's approach to security in the post-cold war international system. Empirical findings, based on content analysis and on 25+ semi-structured interviews, suggest that transnational expertise-based networks did play a leading role in shaping SSR conceptual development. However, they also show that cleavages between epistemic communities across the security/development dividing line are ultimately responsible for the EU's failure to achieve a coherent SSR policy implementation. Moreover, the article concludes that the institutionalisation of SSR in the EU did not originate in a single norm setter, nor in sheer ideational stimulus. Change occurred through the complex interplay between ideas and interests, that is between knowledge and power, leading specific norms to be visualised as consensual and dominant.

This article analyses the development of the European Union (EU) as a global actor in the area of climate security. Building on this, it explicitly draws on constructivist concepts such as norm entrepreneurship and epistemic communities. To this end, it adopts the framework of epistemic communities, as developed by Peter Haas, in order to suggest that there is a group of EU officials, EU member states and think-tank activists, who drive the climate security agenda of the EU. Thus, it examines the precise actors involved in this EU epistemic community for climate security. This group promotes a reason for action at the global level, resulting in the attempt to diffuse this norm: climate change has consequences for international security; thus, it requires the development of appropriate policies and capabilities within the EU and globally. This article suggests that the epistemic community on climate security has been effective at diffusing this norm at both levels, albeit with differences.

Policies and discourses that construct the European Union (EU) as an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ (AFSJ) present threats to EU citizens as mainly being of cross-border nature. They produce a binary opposition of a safe ‘inside’ (that is the EU territory) set against an unstable and threatening ‘outside’. Neighbouring Eastern European countries belong to the ‘outside’; they are presented in the EU's official discourse as the zones of origin and/or transit for risks to the EU's public order and security. The ways in which security threats are construed, as well as the EU's role in mitigating or eliminating those threats, have significant implications for relationships between the EU and its European neighbours. The formulation of foreign policy relies upon discursive representations of identity, and it is a specific boundary-producing practice that co-constitutes both the ‘foreign’ and the ‘domestic’ (Campbell, 1998). From this perspective, the EU's discourse on the external dimension of the justice and home affairs emerges as one of many ways through which a common European identity is being forged. The construction of the AFSJ establishes the EU as a territory with a special ‘home affairs’ model and distinguishes the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’.

Global economic, demographic and geopolitical as well as internal developments since the signature of the Cotonou Partnership Agreement in 2000 have had a profound impact on relations between the European Union (EU) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group. The paper analyses the process of adaptation in the areas of development cooperation and in the political and security context, reflected in two revisions in 2005 and 2010. It discusses the influence of the Lisbon Treaty on the objective of poverty reduction, and the role of EU values and security concerns. The negotiation of new trading arrangements compatible with the World Trade Organisation triggered a veritable storm in ACP–EU relations. The paper discusses factors, which proved to be major hurdles to the successful and timely conclusion of the Economic Partnership Agreements, as real trade between the two groups saw a reversal of the downward trend and the ACP recovered part of the previously lost market share of ACP goods in total EU imports. The exclusivity of the flagship partnership has started to crumble as the importance of new partners increased both on ACP and EU side. The author maintains that with the Cotonou Partnership Agreement's purpose defined as solely supporting the development of the ACP countries, it is not surprising that it does not count among the strategic partnerships from the EU perspective. Yet, it is too early to predict the future of the ACP–EU relationship beyond 2020, but both the EU and the ACP have an interest in starting off their discussions and negotiations on their future relationship on the right footing. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The purpose of this essay is first, to examine European Union’s conceptualization of peace and security; and second, to discuss how the European Union (EU) seeks to contribute to international peace and security. It begins with a discussion of the EU’s understanding of peace and security and then proceeds with the EU’s identification of threats to international peace and security. The paper then focuses on the EU’s security strategy to identify how the EU seeks to address challenges to international order and stability. Finally, the paper employs the concepts of ‘civilian’, ‘military’ and ‘normative power Europe’ to demonstrate how the EU attempts to create international security and stability both at the regional and international levels. It argues that the EU employs both ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ means in the application of its ‘normative’ power.

This article furthers the debate between European Studies and Critical Security Studies by demonstrating how European Union (EU) single market integration functions as a security practice in the area of cybersecurity. It explores how the EU has rendered digitisation as a security concern and cybersecurity emerged as an object of EU governance by developing an analytical approach based on problematisation. Situating the problematisation approach in the genealogical tradition of Foucault, it argues that it provides us with an analytical toolbox enabling inquiry into the conditions that make contemporary security problems possible, powerful and changeable. Tracing EU security problematisations of digitisation over four decades, it shows how the single market has come to function as a security practice and stresses the political implications of it. The final part of the article re‐problematises the findings to afford insights into how they can be rethought at the intersection of European Studies and Critical Security Studies.

The member states of the European Union (EU) coordinate, define, and implement foreign policy in the context of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). This policy area, often referred to as EU foreign policy, has a broad scope covering all areas of foreign policy and all questions relating to security and defense. The CFSP is supported by a unique institutional framework, in which member states diplomats and officials from the EU institutions jointly make policy. It is led by the High Representative, who is the “face and voice” of EU foreign policy, and supported by the substantial European External Action Service and 140 EU delegations in other countries and international organizations. Because foreign policy is normally the business of sovereign states, the exceptional nature of the CFSP has long been a subject of inquiry. The CFSP has particularly puzzled advocates of the traditional theories of European integration and international relations, who have failed to appreciate what the EU does in the field of high politics. Given the absence of formal diplomatic recognition and a strong reliance on the resources of the member states, the EU is still not a full-fledged actor, yet it has a strong international presence nonetheless. Its presence and the gradual increase in “actorness” have also raised questions about whether the EU presents a different type of actor, a civilian or normative power, which derives its influence from nontraditional sources of power. Under the assumption that the EU has some actorness, the Europeanization of foreign policy has become an area of interest. Member states can act through the EU structure to achieve more impact internationally, can adjust national foreign policy on the basis of EU positions, and are socialized into greater European coordination. The relationship between national and EU foreign policy is thus a significant topic of debate. Finally, governance perspectives increasingly provide insight into the organization of the CFSP. How the member states and the EU institutions collectively coordinate, define, and implement EU foreign policy is not only an important question in itself but also matters for policy outcomes.

When the European Union (EU) launched its first military naval mission, EU NAVFOR Somalia, Atalanta, the states who are members of both the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made a political choice: to prioritize the EU over NATO in their multilateral military efforts to fight piracy and its consequences. Thereby, Atalanta challenges the conventional assumption that EU security cooperation will remain limited. It also challenges the widely held belief that the European states will chose to act through NATO if dealing multilaterally with international security issues. How can we explain this decision? This analysis suggests that it can be explained in two phases where different mechanisms were at work. In the first phase, which can be accounted for from a neo-realist perspective, France, who held the Presidency, used particular favorable geopolitical conditions to put an autonomous EU operation on the agenda. However, agreement on the EU option cannot be explained as a result of strategic bargaining. Instead, in a second phase and in line with an alternative hypothesis building on the theory of communicative action, the EU member states came to support the French suggestion due to legitimacy considerations regarding the legal framework of the two operations.

The paper operationalizes the notion of strategy for energy transition enhancement (SETE) as a specific set of energy transition diplomacy (ETD) instruments tuned to a particular external/ third country or region/ context. The paper shows that the ideational parameters and structural components of a (supra)nation's energy transition strategy influence its ETD. Being a geographically specific form of a (supra) nation's ETD, SETE is susceptible to the shifts in global, (supra)national, and third country/ region contexts. The paper examines the European Union (EU)'s and Japan's approaches to fostering energy transition in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). Central Asian economies' robust renewable energy (RE) development potential is barely tapped due to technological, financing, and institutional constraints. The EU and Japan pursue energy transition security, possess certain technological advantages, and seek greater normative power in global decarbonization. The study argues that these aspects make cooperation among the EU, Japan, and Central Asian economies feasible and mutually attractive. Received: 9 June 2024 | Revised: 18 November 2024 | Accepted: 26 December 2024 Conflicts of Interest The author declares that she has no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in United Nations Climate Change at https://unfccc.int/NDCREG, in United Nations Climate Change at https://unfccc.int/node/61095, in United Nations Trade and Development Data Hub at https://unctadstat.unctad.org/datacentre/dataviewer/US.FTRI, in Climatescope by Bloomberg NEF at https://www.global-climatescope.org. Author Contribution Statement Elena Shadrina: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition.