Re-imagining EU Foreign and Security Policy in a Complex and Contested World

ABSTRACT

The European Union (EU) increasingly formulates and implements foreign and security policy under the constraints of internal contestation, regional fragmentation and multipolar competition. While such contextual challenges can inhibit the EU from adopting an ambitious foreign and security policy, this Special Issue shows that the EU and its member states have developed ways of mitigating their impact. Through institutional, functional and diplomatic measures, the EU has managed to reduce the adverse effect of the contextual factors on its foreign and security policy towards conflicts and crises.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• foreign and security policy
• contestation
• regional fragmentation
• multipolar competition

Acknowledgements

The section ‘Three contextual challenges to EUFSP’ of this article is informed by the research paper by Riccardo Alcaro, Pol Bargués and Hylke Dijkstra with Zachary Paikin, “A Joined-Up Union, a Stronger Europe: A Conceptual Framework to Investigate EU Foreign and Security Policy in a Complex and Contested World”, JOINT Research Papers No. 8, updated August 2022, https://www.jointproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/joint_rp_8.pdf.

This Special Issue as a whole collects revised versions of a series of reports produced in the context of the JOINT project (https://www.jointproject.eu). JOINT has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 959143. This publication reflects only the view of the author(s) and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Notes

1 The notion of a Zeitenwende to describe the epochal nature of Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine was introduced by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in his speech before the Bundestag a few days after the start of the invasion. See Federal Government (2022).

2 Christopher Hill (1998, 18) defined European foreign policy as “the sum of what the EU and its member states do in international relations”. Precisely because the EUFSP is a multi-actor system, in which the member states and EU institutions jointly formulate and implement policies, this Special Issue looks beyond Brussels and also considers the role of member states. This is important, as this Special Issue shows, because the institutional formats and boundaries of EUFSP are increasingly fluid in order to deal with a range of contextual challenges.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Riccardo Alcaro

Riccardo Alcaro is Research Coordinator and Head of the Global Actors Programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Rome, Italy.

Hylke Dijkstra

Hylke Dijkstra is Professor of International Security and Cooperation at Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]