Towards a European military culture?

Recent discussion of the Common Security and Foreign Policy has focussed on the international relations between European member states. Such a focus is entirely valid since the project is being driven forward by nation states. However, the success of the Common Security and Foreign Policy and especially the development of a specifically European military capability under the European Security and Defence Policy will depend not merely on the will of the participating nation-states. Above all, it will depend on the development of a common military culture at the level of weapons development and procurement and at the level of doctrine. The problem is that at neither level is the development of a European culture remotely in sight

Eastern Partnership and the Eurasian Union: bringing 'the political' back in the eastern region

Drawing on the post-structuralist traditions and especially Jenny Edkins’ (1999) interpretation of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, this article sets to conceptually rethink the geo-strategic dynamics of the EU-Russia relations in the context of the eastern region. It argues that while the EU’s and the Russia-led Eurasian (EEU) projects may be appealing in their own right, their visions for the ‘shared’ eastern neighbourhood remain self-centred and exclusionary. The root of the problem, as this paper contends, is that the EU and the EEU struggle to imagine a new social order, which would give a relational value to the Other as pari passu, and assume cooperation as an interplay of differing normalities rather than subjection to one’s norms and authority. Presently, the EU and Russia find themselves locked in parallel rather than complementary relations with the ‘shared’ region, each attempting to institutionalise their respective political orders, and not by way of contestation – ‘the political’ – but rather by a depoliticised means of technocracy or compulsion. This, if anything, is likely to destabilise the region further, if ‘the political’ is not back on the agend

The EU’s ontological (in)security: stabilising the ENP area … and the EU-self?

The 2016 EU Global Strategy and the 2015 European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) review have made stabilisation of the ENP area one of their main priorities. Our argument here, however, is that the Global Strategy and the ENP review not only seek to mitigate the numerous crises currently affecting the neighbourhood; they also aim to address a set of intra-EU vulnerabilities linked to events in the ENP area that are threatening the EU’s own ontological security. We employ narrative analysis to explore how insecurity in the EU and in the ENP area is affecting the EU’s relation to the neighbourhood-other and its understanding of the EU-self. Our main findings point to the Global Strategy and the ENP review providing ample measures to stabilise the neighbourhood. However, whether they have provided a sufficiently compelling narrative to enable the emergence of new emotional structures for the EU and its member states to make sense of themselves and their relation to the neighbourhood-other remains an open question

Towards a European Energy Union. The Need to Focus on Security of Energy Supply

Energy has been at the core of the EU integration since its inception. However, following the path of a shooting star, the key role of energy gradually declined over time, to the level of being basically left out from the Treaties, at least up to Lisbon. The EU has struggled to circumnavigate this energy-gap of the Treaties by legislating on energy-related issues by making use of its shared competences in the areas of internal market and environment. However, this effort has resulted in a very fragmented EU energy policy, also characterized by the absence of a major element: security of energy supply. After the 2014 Ukraine crisis a new momentum has emerged in the EU about the urgent need of creating a truly European energy policy, with both the new President of the EU Council and the new EU Commission calling for the creation of a EU Energy Union. This paper argues that the EU should seize this historical opportunity to fill the main long-lasting gap of its energy policy: security of energy supply. To this end, the paper proposes a set of new actions that might be undertaken in this field, also outlying that the most feasible option to the development of a new EU Energy Union seems to be the formation -through a scheme of differentiated integration- of a smaller coalition of Member States committed to quickly advance the integration of their energy policies under the principle that only by acting together the EU will be able to meet the growing energy challenges of the future