Paradigmatic or Critical? Resilience as a New Turn in EU Governance for the Neighbourhood

Rising from the margins of EU aid documents, resilience became a centrepiece of the 2016 EU Global Security Strategy, especially in relation to the neighbourhood. While new resilience-thinking may signify another paradigmatic shift in EU modus operandi, the question that emerges is whether it is critical enough to render EU governance a new turn, to make it sustainable? This article argues that in order for resilience-framed governance to become more effective, the EU needs not just engage with ‘the local’ by way of externally enabling their communal capacity. More crucially, the EU needs to understand resilience for what it is – a self-governing project – to allow ‘the local’ an opportunity to grow their own critical infrastructures and collective agency, in their pursuit of ‘good life’. Is the EU ready for this new thinking, and not just rhetorically or even methodologically when creating new instruments and subjectivities? The bigger question is whether the EU is prepared to critically turn the corner of its neoliberal agenda to accommodate emergent collective rationalities of self-governance as a key to make its peace-building project more successful

How to Reflexively Decentre EU Foreign Policy: Dissonance and Contrapuntal Reconstruction in Migration, Religious and Neighbourhood Governance

This article develops a timely new model for EU foreign policy by advancing the call for a ‘decentring agenda’, focused on the challenge of inclusive ‘reconstruction’. It does so by first staking out an ontological space at the intersection of empirical multiplexity and normative pluriversality. Within this space, it proposes an ethically informed methodological tool: the contrapuntal negotiation of dissonant perspectives on common governance challenges. It then suggests ways to reconstruct analytical and policy-making processes and outcomes on the basis of mutuality and local empowerment. Using three scales of ‘contrapuntality’ (micro, meso, and macro) to read key empirical sites at the intersection of the EU’s internal and external policies (migration, religious and Neighbourhood governance), it argues that by decentring in these and further arenas, the EU can seek to become a more reflexive global actor in sync with the ethical and practical demands of our multiplex worl

Paths to Resilience: Examining EU and NATO Responses to the Tunisian and Egyptian Political Transitions

The unfolding of the Arab uprisings has shown that fostering the ability of countries affected by regime change to withstand crises is necessary for the EU and NATO to ensure the stability of the broader Southern Mediterranean region. The political transitions in Egypt and Tunisia arose from pressures to democratise. Yet, as the region’s security environment was deteriorating, EU and NATO have mostly addressed the symptoms of local instability, but largely neglected the long-term causes of insecurity in the two countries. By doing so, Euro-Atlantic diplomacy essentially enhanced state resilience at the expense of the broader societal resilience. In perspective, further political and operational coordination between NATO and the EU is needed to avoid risks of duplications and/or inconsistencies in their regional action

The Pandora's box: democratization and rule of law in Turkey

A prominent question in the literature on democracy is concerned with the role of external factors in stimulating the process of democratization and uploading rule of law. This paper tackles the following questions: How does the political conditionality of an international organization—the EU in this case—stimulate democracy in third countries? Equally important, does conditionality always have a positive impact and could it be possible to witness the EU undermining democracy in an unexpected manner? This paper addresses these questions through an analysis of the Turkish democracy in the light of its accession to the EU and through an application of the EU membership conditionality by looking at rule of law in Turkey. The general contention in the political conditionality literature is that the EU enables an acceding country to adopt its democratic principles, and facilitates transition to democracy, while strengthening rule of law. However, the Turkish transformation seems to challenge this contention. This paper proposes that the EU’s political conditionality in bringing about political transformation in Turkey as a membership precondition unexpectedly illuminated the underlying anti-democratic tendencies and tensions in Turkish politics. The democratization process in Turkey since 1999, partly stimulated by the EU, has opened up a Pandora’s box releasing the conflict between the secularists and religious conservatives in Turkey that has long been suppressed. This paper analyzes these cleavages through the prism of EU political conditionality with regards to rule of law