Theorising the EU’s role in regional conflict management

Abstract: This article seeks to contribute to the underdeveloped discussion about the way we theorise and conceptualise externally induced peace and security operations in regional conflict, with a particular focus on the EU’s role. The framework draws on three theoretical components emphasised in this special issue: the construction of conflict, security governance and the impact of EU security practices. The EU’s construction of the conflict is tightly linked to decisions about the mode of security governance and here we need to pay more attention to the often-neglected relationship between the external intervening party and the parties in conflict that are subject to the intervention. Furthermore, the impact of peace operations are usually analysed in terms of implementation and coordination failures, and in our view it is necessary to step back and address the construction of the criteria by which interventions are assessed – in particular, the way intervening actors construct and define ‘success and failure’.

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European Union discourses and practices on the Iranian nuclear programme

Abstract: This article aims at analysing different, partly overlapping and partly competing European security discourses that have emerged on the Iranian nuclear issue since 2003. Three main discursive themes have been singled out exemplifying the main identity representations of Iran and Europe, the main stances towards Iran and the representations of the nature of European foreign policy. Over the years, the coercive-securitisation discourse has become hegemonic over democracy promotion and cultural diplomacy-inspired discourses and European policies have consistently followed suit. In terms of security governance, the European Union (EU) has created a format for negotiations, which has undergone subsequent enlargements, consistent with its securitised but multilateral discourses. While the nature of the collegial security governance espoused has brought positive effects in terms of reinforcing the EU’s own identity as an international actor both inside and outside, the resilience of the first discursive theme throughout the process despite other international actors’ dissonance signals that a more comprehensive and inclusive discourse towards the Iranian nuclear issue has failed to emerge.

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Europe and the Israel – Palestinian peace process: the urgency of now

Abstract: The resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has long occupied a prominent place on the foreign agenda of the European Union (EU). Over the past 40 years, the member states of the EU have defined with increasingly coherence their approach to the resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: a commitment to Israel’s right to live in peace and security and support of the Palestinians to national self-determination. At the same time, European discourse on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has shifted as its own internal needs and strategic concerns have changed. This changing narrative has impacted critically on the policy instruments and approach adopted by the EU to the conflict. Through an analysis of European statements and speeches, this article argues that European discourse in the 1980s and 1990s was underscored by a normative, justice-based framing. The collapse of peace process in 2000 has led to a noticeable securitization of European discourse on the conflict, one now marked by a growing sense of ‘risk, danger, and urgency’ and a fear that the conflict has begun to impact negatively on its domestic stability.

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Understanding Israeli EU Relations: A Matter of Perceptions and Images

Excerpt: Europe is Israel’s economic, cultural and, in many respects, political hinterland. Israel enjoys a unique status in its relations with the European Union (EU), a status that grants it extensive rights in many areas such as research and development and economics. Indeed, recent years have witnessed a changing attitude within Israeli policy-making circles and civil society have toward the EU. Yet, over the years, Europe has not always been central to Israeli strategy and has rarely been seen in a positive light. These negative images and perceptions have led Israel to behave as if it were an island in the Atlantic Ocean rather than a Mediterranean country neighboring the European continent.

The European Union, security and the southern dimension

Abstract: With the coming into force of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the European Union (EU) annunciated what one could term an ‘inclusionist approach’ to security whereby this policy framework was based on supposedly joint commitments by all parties concerned to ‘cooperative security’. However, EU actions on the ground in the south have shown that, despite good intentions, such cooperative security endeavours have, thus far, hardly materialised. The result instead is an ‘exclusionist’ policy, where the reduction of illegal migration from the south takes top priority in EU security discourse. Post-9/11, in the policy area of ‘counter-terrorism’ measures, the EU likewise demarcates ‘liberal zones of civilisation’ from ‘illiberal’ ones, leaving the dirty work of counter terrorism to countries such as Egypt and Morocco. In terms of governmentality, this may be described as a ‘surveillance and control’ approach to security: therefore, it is argued here that the EU, through its governance model, is actually enabling further in-security and in-stability in the south.

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