Introduction
The 2016 European Union Global Strategy (EUGS) is the first post-Lisbon comprehensive strategy aimed at reforming and relaunching the European Union (EU)'s foreign and security policy. The ultimate purpose of the document is to offer a renewed strategic framework capable of facing both internal dilemmas and external challenges ‘in times of existential crisis, within and beyond the European Union’ (EEAS, 2016a: 7). As far as the EU foreign and security policy is concerned, the events of the so-called Arab Spring (2011–onwards) and the Ukrainian conflict (2014–onwards) opened a phase of renewed concerns for Europe, which found itself (and its vision) challenged in its very periphery: it is no coincidence then that the EUGS considers ‘State and Societal Resilience to our East and South’ and the elaboration of an ‘Integrated Approach to Conflicts and Crises’ as two of the five top priorities for the European external action (EEAS, 2016a: 7).Footnote 1 The welding between resilience and conflict-management is definitively established in the follow-up to the Strategy published in June 2019: the development of an integrated approach to conflict and crises and the strengthening of resilience are treated as a single topic having EU's neighbouring regions to the south and to the east as its main target (EEAS, 2019).
The academic literature has widely discussed the implications of the adoption of the concept of resilience in orienting international policies and practices (Barrinha, Reference Barrinha2016; Juncos, Reference Juncos2017; Paul and Roos, Reference Paul and Roos2019). At the European level, resilience marks a new stage in a crucial field of action – conflict and crisis management – in relation to which the EU has elaborated its approach in collaboration with other international actors (Charbonneau, Reference Charbonneau2009), tested its own capabilities (Olsen, Reference Olsen2009) and accumulated an extensive experience from the Balkans to Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the Sahel (Smith, Reference Smith2013). Different European policy communities and institutions (e.g. the European Parliament and the EU Commission) contributed (successfully or not) to framing a European vision and guidelines for action, in an attempt to find a shared consensus and elaborate a common line of intervention on the EU initiatives in conflicts and crises.Footnote 2
By taking stock of the by now abundant academic, grey and policy literature on fragility and resilience, this article analyses how the European approach to conflict and crisis management has changed over time and what are the main assumptions informing this change. The article takes fragility and resilience as distinct policy paradigms – frameworks that define how policy and political actors understand and interpret their environment, delineate the nature of the problems they are facing, identify their role and elaborate policy solutions (Hall, Reference Hall1993; Campbell, Reference Campbell2002; Juncos, Reference Juncos2017) – and proposes a novel structured, focused comparison of how they informed the EU approach to conflict and crisis management. For this purpose, the article primarily focuses on the level of discourse, intended here as both the element encapsulating and articulating ideas and values (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2008) and the process of interaction which leads to policy formulation and communication (Schmidt and Radaelli, Reference Schmidt and Radaelli2004).
Consequently, the comparison is built upon the analysis of the founding documents respectively endorsing fragility and resilience, namely the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) and the 2016 EUGS, in addition to the corollary of policy documents published in the same period and informed by the existing literature on these topics. The 2003 ESS and the 2016 EUGS are different in breadth and depth: while the ESS is a short document (14 pages) that sketches the first explicit EU's common security strategic framework in the aftermath of the Amsterdam Treaty (1999), the 60 pages EUGS is wider in scope. However, as noted by Natalie Tocci – former Special Advisor of the EU High Representative Federica Mogherini – the EUGS represents first and foremost a revision and an expansion of the ESS, aiming at being more in line with the current times (Tocci, Reference Tocci2017a). Accordingly, the two paradigms are examined in terms of (1) what understanding of the international system they advance; (2) where they identify the locus of the threat; (3) which role they attribute to the international community (4) and the type of solutions they proposed.
The article shows that the EUGS represents an attempt to introduce a new policy paradigm around the idea of resilience based upon a transformed interpretation of the role of the EU within a ‘complex and contested’ international system marked by risks and uncertainty (EEAS, 2019). The threat is intrinsic to the (in)capacity of societies to adapt to change and shocks, making societal resilience amenable to minimal and bottom-up interventions on behalf of an international community adopting a more pragmatic approach to external conflicts and crises. This is in contrast with what the fragility policy paradigm advocated at the turn of the new millennium: a responsible international community active to rectify those threats emanating from fragile or failed states through top-down interventions endorsing universal values such as democracy, liberty and prosperity. The comparison it proposes adds to this debate by arguing that at the EU level, resilience as a departure from fragility has more to do with ideas of international security and the role of the EU in it rather than actual conditions in conflict-affected contexts.
The article proceeds as the following: the first part briefly traces how fragility and resilience emerged in the international policy and academic debate and serves as a background for the comparison the article builds. The second part takes a deeper look into the role of the EU in adopting and adapting fragility and resilience in its security strategy. Through a comparative analysis of the 2003 ESS and the 2016 EUGS, this section highlights how the European approach to conflict and crisis management has changed over time.
From fragility to resilience
Fragility and resilience share a comparable trajectory in both the academic and the policy domains, as they have followed similar definitional and evolutional processes (Bueger and Bethke, Reference Bueger and Bethke2014; Pospisil and Kühn, Reference Pospisil and Kühn2016). The two concepts entered first the political debate as the international development community was in search of renewing its approach in the development, humanitarian and conflict management sectors, in accordance with a changed international landscape (Bøås, Reference Bøås2017; Juncos, Reference Juncos2017). From there, the two paradigms have been adopted formally or informally in most, if not all, Western capitals. As part of the conflict-management and, more broadly, the security jargon, they reinforced that policy (and ideational) convergence which is now widely known as the security-development nexus (Tschirgi et al., Reference Tschirgi, Lund and Mancini2010). Fragility gained a central position in the international security debate at the end of the Cold War and more pronouncedly, with the beginning of the Global War on Terror and the ‘peacebuilding as state-building’ approach to conflict management (Patrick, Reference Patrick2011; Call, Reference Call2015). Perhaps in reaction to, and certainly as the limits of fragility as a paradigm became indisputable – in particular with reference to the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq – resilience made its appearance as the world entered the second decade of the 21st century and reframed the nature and the way to intervene in conflict and crises situations.
With the aid of academic scholarship,Footnote 3 state failure and fragility entered the policy vocabulary of the 1990s, in continuity with an international ethos and vision that depicted Western liberal values and institutions (i.e. democracy, market economy and sound state institutions) as the winning and in a sense, inevitable model for all the polities around the world (Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama1992). State failure and fragility represented a conceptual continuum describing a condition where state functions and capacities did not meet – to different degrees and in different domains – the Weberian standard of (mostly Western) statehood:Footnote 4 in a 1992 Foreign Affairs article, Gerald Helman and Stephen Ratner (Reference Helman and Ratner1992) identified in the failed nation-state a disturbing new phenomenon; Madeleine Albright – back then US Ambassador to the UN – called Somalia a ‘failed state’ in 1993 (Jones, Reference Jones2008: 183); a year later, Kaplan (Reference Kaplan1994) gloomily associated the disintegration of the state system with the ‘coming anarchy’. The end of the Cold War showed the frailty of many states in the Global South, which became associated with multiple threats ranging from crime to poverty and economic collapse. It is, however, with the 9/11 terroristic attacks that state fragility turned into the building block of a political and policy narrative justifying the War on Terror and the new era of liberal statebuilding. From being a descriptor, state fragility became a policy paradigm and became institutionalized in multiple offices based mostly in Western capitals dealing with crises around the world (e.g. the US office for Reconstruction and Stabilization, the World Bank's Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit, to mention just a few). Prevalently interpreted as a security rather than a development domain, state fragility entered the US and EU security strategies.Footnote 5
As state fragility gained policy and political popularity,Footnote 6 it also attracted great criticism at the academic level. Some authors contested a lack of definitional rigour (Call, Reference Call2008), the absence of empirical evidence linking state fragility with international security threats (Patrick, Reference Patrick2006) or the notion of the state upon which it was based (Eriksen, Reference Eriksen2011). Others doubted the empirical validity of the term or questioned its explanatory power as it clusters together very different experiences (Call, Reference Call2008). While providing a snapshot of the contemporary world, it hardly explains how state fragility came about and how state experiences transition along the assumed continuum between failed and consolidated statehood (Carment, Reference Carment2003). Steps towards better analytical constructs moved the discussion beyond Westphalian and Weberian constrains suggesting, for instance, notions of hybrid governance or limited statehood or as better suited to analyse contemporary forms of governance (Boege et al., Reference Boege, Brown, Clemens and Nolan2009; Risse, Reference Risse2011). From a critical perspective, scholarship voiced instead, the political and normative assumptions and concerns that state fragility brought to the debate on international security (Grimm et al., Reference Grimm, Lemay-Hébert and Nay2014): they lamented its Western-centrism (Nay, Reference Nay2013), its Orientalist qualities (Hill, Reference Hill2005), its imperial aspiration (Jones, Reference Jones2008) and its ahistorical character (Bilgin and Morton, Reference Bilgin and Morton2002).
Considered ‘one of the most important foreign policy challenges’ (Krasner and Pascual, Reference Krasner and Pascual2005: 1; see also Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama2004) in the 1990s and 2000s, state failure and fragility lost their centrality under the pressure of ineffective programmes to remedy such condition. Indeed, during the last decade, resilience has made its appearance in the security debate as a result of the ‘disillusionment with liberal internationalist understandings that Western or international actors could resolve problems of development, democracy and peace through the export of liberal institutions’ (Chandler, Reference Chandler2013: 276). The adoption and the spreading of resilience in the broader security debate occurred in reaction to the American-led interventions in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), by then widely seen as spectacular failures of external statebuilding interventions (Chandler, Reference Chandler2014; Belloni and Costantini, Reference Belloni and Costantini2019). While being virtually absent in previous documents, the 2010 US National Security Strategy makes extensive reference to resilience (Selchow, Reference Selchow2017) – a development that suggests also the Obama Administration's effort at distancing the US security approach from its precedent articulation, even at a semantic and conceptual level. Beyond the security domain, other international developments contributed further to the emergence of resilience: the 2007/08 financial crisis drained national resources and undermined the role of the US as the ordering power of the international liberal system (Ikenberry, Reference Ikenberry2018). In addition to the economic crisis, the migratory crisis following the derailing of the Arab Spring challenged the cohesion of the EU and its capacity to respond to conflict and crises. Taken together, the financial and migratory crises have challenged the EU's foundations and essential values (Krastev, Reference Krastev2018), pushing some observers to contemplate the rise of a ‘post-liberal’ international system (Chandler, Reference Chandler2014; Chandler and Richmond, Reference Chandler and Richmond2015).
Alike fragility, resilience is a ‘conceptually loaded term’ whose meaning depends on a variety of knowledge fields (Menkhaus, Reference Menkhaus2013). Its adoption in the security, humanitarian and development domain draws on meanings elaborated in the ecology, psychology and risk management fields. The ecology literature defines resilience as the adaptability of ecosystems to short-term instabilities or longer-term changes (Holling, Reference Holling1973). In this sense, crises play a constructive role ‘forcing us to consider issues of learning, adapting and renewal’ (Joseph, Reference Joseph2014: 286). Accordingly, resilience can relate to the ways in which societies – similarly complex systems – adjust to externally imposed change or shocks (Joseph, Reference Joseph2013: 39). The psychology literature understands resilience as ‘the coping mechanisms and state of mind which allows an individual to “bounce back” from negative events or stress, or even to “bounce back better”’ (Menkhaus, Reference Menkhaus2013: 3). In this case, the focus of resilience is on individuals rather than societies, thus becoming a useful tool for enlarging and deepening the concept of human security (Chandler, Reference Chandler2015). In the risk management literature, resilience is ‘learning from adversity how to do better’ and becomes a strategy to secure safety in alternative to anticipation (Douglas and Wildavsky, Reference Douglas and Wildavsky1983; Wildavsky, Reference Wildavsky1988).
The policy community and some academics conceived resilience as capable of going beyond some of the main limits encapsulated in the concept of fragility and representing an opportunity for elaborating ‘a radical new approach that opens up new ways of thinking and understanding’ (Joseph, Reference Joseph2016: 11; see also Chandler, Reference Chandler2013; Bourbeau, Reference Bourbeau2015). This view of crises-as-opportunities and more generally of resilience has however attracted widespread criticism. Some authors warned that the lack of a clear conceptualization and operationalization of the term could lead to its misapplication (Menkhaus, Reference Menkhaus2013). Others accused resilience of being a way to ‘act on the cheap’ removing responsibility from the international community, as local actors become the main protagonists – and in case of failure, the main culprit – of conflict management, also potentially leading to an indirect legitimization of dysfunctional local practices for conflict and security management (Wagner and Anholt, Reference Wagner and Anholt2016). From a critical perspective, instead, the focus on governance, civil society and individual initiatives led some scholars to underline the contiguities between resilience and the neoliberal rationality informing previous approaches.Footnote 7 Resilience is then seen as a form of neoliberal governamentality and a ‘distant form of governance’ (Joseph, Reference Joseph2014) producing neoliberal subjects (Joseph, Reference Joseph2016), with a tendency towards the de-politicization of the actors in conflict (Chandler, Reference Chandler2016, see also Scott-Smith, Reference Scott-Smith2018).
Comparing fragility and resilience in the European Union's security strategy
Fragility and resilience are the two paradigms at the heart of the European approach towards conflict and crises management, in relation to which Europe demonstrated to be mostly a norm-taker able to strategically re-appropriate and diffuse concepts proposed by other international actors rather than being a protagonist in elaborating an original position (Grimm, Reference Grimm2014; Wagner and Anholt, Reference Wagner and Anholt2016). The EU adopted and reproduced the state fragility narrative, without, however, making it its own. Indeed, the state fragility policy paradigm was and has been US-dominated. If state failure and fragility were among the threats Europe invoked in 2003, the EU did not provide any official definition beyond saying that it was an ‘alarming phenomenon’ (Council of the European Union, 2003: 4). Only in 2007, the European Commission made a step towards a European conceptualization of state fragility and failure, by which it refers to
weak or failing structures and to situations where the social contract is broken due to the State's incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions, meet its obligations and responsibilities regarding service delivery, management of resources, rule of law, equitable access to power, security and safety of the populace and protection and promotion of citizens' rights and freedoms (European Commission, 2007: 5).
However, as the European Commission's Communication never received the final approval by the Council, fragility remained only ambiguously defined (Hout, Reference Hout2010) and was not translated into an action plan (Grimm, Reference Grimm2014). Ambiguity around fragility (and resilience alike) is not, however, the irrational output of an inefficient meaning-making process. On the contrary, the lack of a clear definition allows different European actors to accept the concept on the basis of different understandings, fostering a minimum agreement between them. As observed by various scholars in different policy sectors, this ‘constructive ambiguity’ allows the EU to rapidly adapt its actions to developments at the international level (Jegen and Mérand, Reference Jegen and Mérand2014).
For its part, the concept of resilience entered the European debate since 2012 (Wagner and Anholt, Reference Wagner and Anholt2016)Footnote 8 although not in a systematic way as demonstrated by the virtual absence of the term in the 2013 EU Comprehensive Approach (European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 2015) and its adoption instead in the European Commission's Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis Prone Countries 2013–2020 (European Commission, 2013). However, the shift towards a new paradigm emerged clearly with the publication of the EUGS. Even if the EUGS underlines the European interest in resilience – without, however, abandoning its focus on democracy, development and trustable institutions (Wagner and Anholt, Reference Wagner and Anholt2016) – it does not propose an operational and original definition of the concept. In a rather broad and ambiguous way, it stated that
resilience – the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crises – benefits us and countries in our surrounding regions. […] A resilient state is a secure state. […] A resilient society featuring democracy, trust in institutions, and sustainable development lies at the heart of a resilient state (EEAS, 2016a: 23–24).
In 2017, the Commission and the High Representative of the EU for Foreign and Security Policy elaborated a joint communication to the European Parliament and the Council in which they aimed at defining a strategic approach to resilience for the whole EU's external action (European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 2017). In it, resilience is employed as a silver bullet capable of addressing insecurity at different levels, spanning from states to communities and individuals. At the same time, it is mentioned as a guiding principle to tackle issues as diverse as conflict and crises, climate change, economy or migration.
Although resilience, alike its predecessor, state fragility and failure, lacks a clear and operative definition, it has nonetheless informed how policy and political actors have understood and interpreted their environment, it has delineated the nature of the problems they have been facing, identified their role and elaborated policy solutions. Table 1 provides a comparative summary of the EU strategies in 2003 and 2016, and in the following, the article examines how these key documents reflect and inform shifting approaches to conflict and crises management. Although the ESS and the EUGS are products of different times, within the process of developing a Common Security and Defence Policy, their scopes, functions and roles in articulating and projecting the EU's values and external actions are similar, and thus comparable (Mälksoo, Reference Mälksoo2016; Tocci, Reference Tocci2017b).
Table 1. Comparing the 2003 European Security Strategy and the 2016 EU Global Strategy
The international system
At the European level, the shifting understanding of the international system is reflected in the changing wording of the 2003 ESS and the 2016 EUGS. The former opens by recognizing that ‘Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free. The violence of the first half of the 20th Century has given way to a period of peace and stability unprecedented in European history’. The latter rectifies this vision by saying that well into the 21st century ‘we live in times of existential crisis, within and beyond the European Union. Our Union is under threat. Our European project, which has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy, is being questioned’ (EEAS, 2016a: 1; see also Tocci, Reference Tocci2017a). Coherently with a vision that sees risks as structural and pervasive, domestic and international security are considered as inextricably intertwined in a ‘fluid landscape of global challenges and risks’ (European Commission and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 2017: 3).
As the wording of 2003 ESS well illustrates, fragility as a policy paradigm is fully anchored in a liberal vision of the international system, characterized by a teleological principle of progressive order and where states should tend towards a functional homologation under the benign pressure of democracy and market economy diffusion. This ordered system is characterized, as Lake (Reference Lake2016: 51) puts it, by a ‘decentralized mechanism for controlling violence’ anchored in the principle of state sovereignty. According to this vision, each state has the responsibility to uphold international security by controlling violence within its territorial jurisdiction, while at the same time, the international community has the responsibility to uphold functioning states capable of fulfilling this task. State fragility, or even worst, state failure, defies this order and invites the international community to intervene in order to re-establish the principle of decentralized violence control, bypassing sovereignty. Moreover, as it is understood through the policy paradigm of state fragility, the international system is imbued with normative elements: anchored in the liberal peace ideology, it reflected the belief that the international system could see the spread of those liberal values so central in the Western experience of consolidated statehood (Paris, Reference Paris2004, Reference Paris2010).
In turn, the uptake of the concept of resilience in the EUGS expresses an important shift in the European perception of the international system. Resilience implies a pessimistic vision of the international system, in which Western powers convey a certain fatigue about their active role in international interventions (Chandler, Reference Chandler2013). As a departure from the liberal vision envisioned in the fragility paradigm, resilience reflects a reality where risks and uncertainty are constitutive features of the international system. Whether resilience ratifies a realist turn in EU foreign and security policy is a debated issue, with some scholars suggesting to consider the concept as a tool for furthering international cooperation in the pursuit of a justice-oriented EU foreign policy (Tocci, Reference Tocci2019; Tonra, Reference Tonra2020). Yet, resilience may be seen as endorsing a post-liberal paradigm in which the most powerful (liberal) actors no longer have the capacities to re-order the system or diffuse universal norms. This is, for instance, conveyed by the HR Mogherini when saying that ‘the United Nations and the very idea of rules-based global governance have come under increasing pressure’ (EEAS, 2019: 1). As a result, the EU endorses a pragmatic rather than a normative approach to international politics (Juncos, Reference Juncos2017), according to which resilience is not about creating the conditions for building an order based on democracy and market economy, but rather a tool for adapting to a constantly changing insecure environment (Menkhaus, Reference Menkhaus2013).
A post-liberal tendency is found, for instance, in the European approach to the Libyan crisis since 2011. Following the NATO-led intervention that eventually resulted in regime change – an overstretch of the UNSC mandate to protect civilians (Bellamy and Williams, Reference Bellamy and Williams2011) – European countries abdicated their responsibility to assist in the reconstruction of the country in favour of ‘a Libyan solution to a Libyan problem’. As noted by Chandler (Reference Chandler2012: 221), ‘without Western responsibility for the outcome of the intervention in Libya and without any transformative promise, Western powers were strengthened morally and politically through their actions […] Libya was an intervention freed from liberal internationalist baggage, where the West could gain vicarious credit and distance itself from any consequences’. Indeed, as the Libyan transition derailed, European action has been oriented by security concerns (foremost, the control of migration and the fight against terrorism) rather than liberal values and fragmented in the foreign policies of European members pursuing different visions of stability in the country (Costantini, Reference Costantini2019; Raineri and Strazzari, Reference Raineri and Strazzari2019).
The role of the international community
Within this changed international system, the EU also revised its role in dealing with conflict and crises. At the turn of the 21st century, reflecting and contributing to the broader understanding of the international responsibility to act in conflict and crises situations, the EU interpreted itself as ‘inevitably a global player’ (Council of the European Union, 2003: 1). Clearly demonstrating a call for shared responsibility, the EU continued by saying that ‘Europe should be ready to share in the responsibility for global security and in building a better world’ (Council of the European Union, 2003: 1). The EU reserves for itself a wide spectrum of intervention options, from military to civilian, preventive or (no better defined) ‘robust intervention’ (Council of the European Union, 2003: 11) in an overall active engagement abroad and in its southern and eastern peripheries to mitigate those conditions of state fragility or failure that threatened its security.
This reflects a vision according to which crises are inevitable, but still manageable events that can be corrected by the international community (UN, 2004). Accordingly, the international community has the responsibility to lead situations of fragility towards the standard set by Western experiences of consolidated statehood. Despite recognizing the limits of previous international interventions in areas of crisis, Europe reiterated its role, as for instance, in the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. In other words, the feasibility of adjusting fragile or failed states was not questioned until the late 2010s. Joining such endeavour were not only European states, but also international organizations (i.e. the UN and International Financial Institutions) and non-governmental ones (World Bank, 1997; Call, Reference Call2008; Chandler, Reference Chandler2010; Heathershaw, Reference Heathershaw and de Guevara2012). The international community was adamant that it could intervene in fragile contexts without intermingling with politics through a technocratic exercise invoking governance. In all, the fragility policy paradigm granted the responsibility of correcting deviant situation to the international community, while taking it away from local actors – a point that resilience later sought to mitigate.
In the 2016 EUGS, the EU continues to perceive itself as a potential global actor, acknowledging, however, that normative considerations should be integrated with ‘a realistic assessment of the current strategic environment’ (EEAS, 2016a: 8). The EU must act globally not because of the presumed position it occupies within a liberal ruled-based order, but because ‘our security at home depends on peace beyond our borders’ (EEAS, 2016a: 7). Here lies the shift from an outward-looking normative Europe, to an inward-looking pragmatic EU (Juncos, Reference Juncos2017). To compensate for the envisioned EU cautious and distant role, the resilience paradigm advances that local actors (state and non-state actors) are the main protagonists of conflict and crises management initiatives based on the recognition that ‘positive change can only be home-grown, and may take years to materialise’ (EEAS, 2016a: 27).
Accordingly, contrasting the explosion of violence or recovering from a crisis is no longer considered a task entrusted exclusively to international actors. A widely intended conflict management approach must involve not only local governments but also all those societal actors, that actively (even if informally) participate in local governance, abandoning a top-down and state-focused strategy to recovery. Conflict management is no longer about teaching how to end a crisis, but rather about learning how to contain it (Wagner and Anholt, Reference Wagner and Anholt2016). This means that a new and minimal role is attributed to the international community: while local solutions and capacities for dealing with and adapting to risks and challenges are encouraged, both the material and the normative engagement of the international actors is reduced (Wagner and Anholt, Reference Wagner and Anholt2016). As such, resilience acts as an organizing principle and a minimal blueprint. According to an EEAS’ employee, applying a resilience approach means taking into account the entire cycle of conflict, with the aim of reducing the extension of the intervention by acting before it escalates.Footnote 9
The case of the Sahel is particularly illustrative of this shift. Considered as a ‘laboratory of experimentation’ for the renewed EU's approach to conflict and crisis management (Lopez Lucia, Reference Lopez Lucia2017), the integrated approach pursued in the Sahel is also envisioned by the EU as a potential new ‘norm in the way in which we address the crises plaguing our surrounding regions’ (EEAS, 2019: 25). The European strategy of intervention in the region is characterized by two main elements. On the one hand, as clearly stated by the EEAS (2016b), EU's initiatives in the region must primarily pursue the political priorities of the EU, notably in the domain of migration management and the fight against illegal trafficking – a quite striking illustration of the EU's pragmatic and inward-looking turn. On the other hand, European actions in the area do not aim to re-build local states, rather they are aimed at sustaining domestic institutions, albeit sometimes they operate in a non-transparent and effective way (Raineri and Baldaro, Reference Raineri, Baldaro, Cusumano and Hofmaier2019).
Locating threats
Among the key threats listed in the 2003 ESS, the EU established a causal relationship between state fragility and insecurity (European Commission, 2007: 4). In a more explicit way, only a year before, the US National Security Strategy argued that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’ (White House, 2002). By establishing a direct link between state failure and fragility and domestic and international insecurity, institutional approaches translated into policy solutions and accentuated the role of institutions in multiple processes: institutional failure became the explanation of state (and market) failure, thus potentially leading to conflict (Harris et al., Reference Harris, Hunter and Lewis1995; North, Reference North, Harris, Hunter and Lewis1995; Hameiri, Reference Hameiri2007; Chandler, Reference Chandler2010; Lemay-Hébert, Reference Lemay-Hébert, Chandler and Sisk2013). The latter is no longer interpreted as a struggle between warring parties but rather as the result of a lack of the right institutions (Call, Reference Call2008: 1493). The state failure paradigm prevailed, albeit all its flaws. Indeed, institutional failure while it correlates with conflict does not necessarily explain it (Sørensen, Reference Sørensen2001); similarly, institutional failure may explain why certain states fail, but not necessarily provide a generalizable explanation of the phenomenon (Milliken and Krause, Reference Milliken and Krause2002).
In the 2016 EUGS, the challenges the EU identifies are not dissimilar from previous ones, even if the sources of insecurity and threat are broadened in order to include new factors such as climate change, energy insecurity, migration and the vast category of hybrid threats. As a large part of the (post-)statebuilding literature recognizes, resilience is meant to be a solution to state failure and fragility, bypassing the state and focusing instead on society or state–society relations (Pospisil and Kühn, Reference Pospisil and Kühn2016). Indeed, the EUGS indirectly establishes a cause-and-effect logic when it states that ‘a resilient society featuring democracy, trust in institutions, and sustainable development lies at the heart of a resilient state’ (EEAS, 2016a: 24) because ‘states are resilient when societies feel they are becoming better off and have hope in the future’ (EEAS, 2016a: 27). The locus of the problem is no longer the state, but society: interpreted as atomized communities formed by the simple sum of single and de-politicized individuals (Joseph, Reference Joseph2013), societies become the main subject exposed to and producing security threats. Insecurities are not caused by institutional failures or conflicts around power and wealth, but they mainly result from a dysfunctional or ineffective process of lesson learning and adaption of societies vis-à-vis structural and exogenous risks (Duffield, Reference Duffield2012).
However, the local state is not completely out of the picture: indeed, the 2019 revision of the EUGS stresses that ‘state and societal resilience can only go hand-in-hand’ (EEAS, 2019: 23). Within the resilience approach, the state's basic functions (i.e. security and border control) are targeted with a view to manage threats. This latter point is well captured by the initiatives undertaken by the EU, for answering to the ‘migratory crisis’. The Trust Fund for Africa – created in 2015 – in particular, insists on the need to reinforcing local capacities in managing migratory flows. The strategy is thought to be developed in two phases. The first one focuses on the furthering of security and border control capacities of selected partner countries – mainly the so-called ‘countries of transit’. The second one is directed towards the societies of the ‘countries of origin’, in a move reiterating the idea that societal resilience, or the lack thereof, become the main driver of, but also solution to, those threats identified in Brussels (Global Health Advocates, 2017; Oxfam, 2020).
Finding solutions
As the locus of the international and domestic security threats shifted from the state to society, the evolution from fragility to resilience brought with it new policy solutions. The fragility paradigm entailed the existence of a universal solution, which obscured the peculiarities of individual crises: institutional transfer and capacity-building were at the centre of the models of intervention, focused on exogenous and top-down solutions aimed at strengthening state capacities (Hameiri, Reference Hameiri2007, Reference Hameiri2010). Statebuilding emerged as the best solution for facing conflict and crisis: if state fragility was the first driver for conflict, the reconstruction of statehood appeared as the most effective long-term solution to crises (Call, Reference Call2015). In this case, state fragility and failure were seen as an institutional failure linked to a top-down vision of the state, where central government structure could guarantee order, control, security and development. In its paradigmatic application in Afghanistan and Iraq, statebuilding became a security strategy.
In contrast, the resilience paradigm abandons universalistic claims to advance the position that there are no one-size-fits-all models of intervention (Chandler, Reference Chandler2014). As such, the resilience paradigm moves beyond the rigidities of a vision based on institutional efficiency, acknowledging that every context follows its own logics and power relations and transfer responsibilities to local actors (including state actors). Furthermore, the application of the resilience paradigm to conflict and crises management translates into the pursue of stabilization, rather than a transformative statebuilding approach. The conservative approach that stabilization pursues led the 2019 revision of the EUGS to warn that resilience ‘does not mean supporting stability by condoning authoritarianism’ (EEAS, 2019: 23). Recent scholarship studying the articulation and implications of stabilization as a practice in conflict contexts notes that stabilization is different from previous approaches as it avoids a universal model, it has a short-term horizon, it focuses on security and service provision, and it involves multiple agencies (Muggah, Reference Muggah2014; De Coning et al., Reference De Coning, Aoi and Karlsrud2017; Belloni and Moro, Reference Belloni and Moro2019). Illustrative of the meaning of stabilization in crisis-prone contexts, a representative of the EEAS described the European security policies towards the Sahel in the following terms: ‘Our presence there, it's not about bringing peace or solving their problems … it's more about finding a point of equilibrium … we try to reach that minimal level of stability, that should allow us [both the EU and the local states] to continue to pursue our respective interests’ (Table 2).Footnote 10
Table 2. Comparing fragility and resilience
Conclusion
Four years on since the publication of the EUGS, the overall internal and external environment in which the EU operates does not present a better scenario. Whilst the EUGS triggered important developments in the field of internal defence and security, the EU foreign and security policy continues to address uncertain and complex environments: ‘the challenges stemming from our surrounding areas, east and south, have increased in scale rather than changed in nature’ (EEAS, 2019: 22).
As acknowledged by Tocci (Reference Tocci2019: 1) ‘since the publication of the European Union Global Strategy (EUGS) in June 2016, the term ‘resilience’ has been much in vogue in European foreign policy circles’. Three years after the approval of the Strategy, the former Special Advisor to the High Representative captures the evolution of resilience by highlighting two key aspects. First, the rise of resilience in the European discourse and the consequential turn towards EU pragmatism is clearly connected to a shift in the EU's self-perception and ideas about the international system, rather than to actual and radical change in conflict and crises contexts. At the same time, even if resilience was introduced for, among others, furthering joined-up approaches between the different EU's policy communities, the paradigm has not been fully able to break the ‘silos logic’ sustaining EU's foreign policy. Rather, it favoured a security-first approach of the European initiatives towards external partners, in particular towards its eastern and southern neighbourhood. Informing the change in the EU approach to conflict and crisis management, resilience would have been at odds with the celebratory ethos of the 1990s as much as fragility can no longer justify expensive and intrusive missions in conflict-affected countries. However, both fragility and resilience appear as two faces of the same coin: Western-rooted and formed assumptions that inform how uncertainty in its periphery is interpreted and acted upon.
Second, and of particular interest for our argument, Tocci highlights the distinction made by the European foreign policy circles between societal and state resilience. While the former, mostly endorsed by the development community, seems to fit with the approach to conflict and crisis discussed above, the latter reproduces policy solutions with a focus on hard security, which creates a continuity with the former fragility paradigm. Policy paradigms are not fixed or eternal, but rather fluid and evolving. When resilience began to propose an alternative policy paradigm, fragile states were still on the map together with all the threats previously identified as emanating from them. A change in focus from the state apparatus towards society lifted the international community from its responsibility to restore institutional efficiency while devolving the onus of recovery to local agency. However, as actions in Libya, in the Horn of Africa, or in the Sahel demonstrates, the EU still operates according to strengthen the old repositories of (local) statehood, such as border control and the monopoly over security delivering. The conceptual and policy boundaries between fragility and resilience remain thus malleable to mutual influence.
Funding
This work was supported by the Scientific Independence of Young Researcher Grant (SIR) of the Italian Ministry of Higher Education ‘STREETPOL – From Tunisia to Oman: post-revolutionary participatory challenges’ under Grant number RBSI14JI7V.
Dr Edoardo Baldaro is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of Naples ‘L'Orientale’ (Naples, Italy) and holds a PhD degree from the Institute of Human and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, Italy). His main areas of interest include foreign policy, North–South relations, critical security studies, African security and the redefinition of statehood in Africa. He published in various academic journals, including Small Wars & Insurgencies, Nationalities Papers and European Review of Organised Crime.
Dr Irene Costantini is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Politics and International Relations at the University of Naples ‘L'Orientale’ (Naples, Italy). She holds a PhD degree from the University of Trento (School of International Studies). Prior to her current position, she worked as a Research Fellow at the Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit, University of York and at the Middle East Research Institute (MERI), Erbil, Iraq. Her research interests include the politics of international interventions, the political economy of conflict and post-conflict transitions, and processes of state transformation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, focusing so far on Iraq and Libya. She published in various academic journals, including International Peacekeeping, Ethnicities, Ethnopolitics, the International Spectator and International Migration and she is the author of Statebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa: the aftermath of regime change (Routledge, 2018).
