Particularly 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 (High Representative, 2016). As an idea, however, resilience was new neither in academia nor in policy practice (Joseph, 2018). But the last three years have undoubtedly witnessed a mushrooming of academic literature, as well as policy initiatives on and surrounding the notion of resilience as it relates to EU and its role in the world (Biscop, 2016; Juncos, 2017; Ülgen, 2016; Wagner & Anholt, 2016).
As a Special Advisor to the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission (HRVP), Federica Mogherini, I drafted the EU Global Strategy in 2016 and followed its implementation for three years. In this article, I recount the origins of the concept of resilience in the context of European foreign policy, and in particular the political and institutional reasons that drove policy makers from member states and EU institutions to coalesce around the concept of resilience proposed to them by the HRVP and her team. I take stock of the limitations, critiques, and evolution of resilience since the adoption of the EUGS, focusing on the reasons why resilience, while implemented in practice, has also faced resistance in its implementation. Finally, I turn to the future, by discussing the potential and prospects of resilience in the EU’s global role, discussing how the zooming in of resilience within the EU as well as the zooming outwards of resilience in the multilateral system are instilling new life into the policy concept.
The analysis and reflections in this article are based on my personal experiences within the EU institutional system since 2014. Often claims are therefore made without the referencing typical of academic works simply because official evidence backing certain claims does not exist. It is up to the reader, therefore, to take what is contained in this article as my perspective, with all the limits and value that this entails.
Resilience as a concept
Resilience was not a new term for the EU academic and practice communities in 2016. The European Commission (2012) published its first communication on the subject matter: “The EU Approach to Resilience: Learning from Food Security and Crises.” This was followed by Council Conclusions on the EU’s approach to Resilience (Council of the European Union, 2013) and a further “Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis Prone Countries” (European Commission, 2013). Back then, the notion of resilience was rather narrowly applied to the humanitarian realm, with a special focus on food security. But a more general definition of resilience in EU policy started making headway already in those years. Resting upon the etymology of the word itself–from the Latin resilere: jumping/springing back–resilience was understood as the ability of states and societies, communities and individuals to manage, withstand, adapt, and recover from shocks and crises (European Commission, 2012).
The EU Global Strategy, published in 2016, elevated resilience to one of the five priorities for the EU’s role in the world (High Representative, 2016). Above all, it gave resilience a far more comprehensive interpretation, not limited to humanitarian action, but rather spanning across a wide variety of policy areas. Why did resilience become one of the key priorities guiding the EU in the wider world? What was the rationale for and the appeal of focusing on resilience amongst the foreign policy community across EU member states and institutions, at both official and unofficial levels?
Resilience and the joined-up approach
The concept of resilience was selected for three sets of reasons (Tocci, 2017). First and foremost, resilience was believed to fit well and substantiate one of the key rationales for having the EU Global Strategy in the first place: the imperative of a joined-up EU role in the world between member states and across EU institutions and polices. In fact, the HRVP’s decision to call the EUGS a “global” rather than a “security” strategy had less to do with the fact that the Strategy was meant to be geographically global in reach–although that was certainly true–and more with the fact that the Strategy was aimed at bringing together all the actors, institutions, policies, and instruments at the EU’s disposal in its role in the world (Tocci, 2016). In other words, the EUGS was intended to be thematically global, spanning from the traditional domains of foreign policy–diplomacy, defense, and development–to the external dimension of literally all internal policies, from research and infrastructure, to energy, climate, and trade.
In this endeavor, while working on the EUGS, resilience was deemed as particularly useful. Resilience had the beauty of being a concept already used by different policy communities, and in fact in different academic disciplines too, from development to security, from psychology to ecology (Joseph, 2018). It was interpreted and applied very differently in different policy spheres and strands of academia, but it was broadly defined by all policy sectors and academic disciplines as the capacity to adapt, respond, react, and bounce back in the aftermath of shocks and crises.
The concept of resilience and its broadly shared definition provided a common lexicon across policy communities. This would help with the ambition to break, or at least bend, policy silos, and to render more porous and permeable the often non-communicating European policy worlds. More specifically, resilience resonated with the security and development and humanitarian communities which the EUGS sought to bring together and which for years had struggled to work together. Yet resilience, while conceptually shared as a notion, was interpreted empirically in different ways by these two sets of policy communities. Amongst the security and defense communities, as well as those member states that had a special penchant for a security-heavy EUGS (such as France), resilience was used interchangeably with notion of “resistance” (résistence). The focus was thus on the ability of states to confront security threats, ranging from Russian hybrid warfare to terrorism, cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns, and to assaults on critical infrastructure. The security community therefore considered the concept of resilience as resisting such threats by striving to prevent them, by responding to them when they occurred, and by recovering promptly from the damage incurred. This interpretation was far removed from the one more commonly found amongst the development, humanitarian, and human rights communities. Here, the focus was more on societal rather than state resilience, emphasizing the political, social, economic, and governance resources of societies to prevent shocks, as well as to cope with them, not by passively absorbing them, but rather by actively strengthening themselves (Colombo, Dessì, & Ntsousas, 2018).
These differences in interpretation were not insignificant. So much so that some observers understandably questioned the usefulness of the concept, which at times risked ringing hollow precisely because of its different interpretations. To this question this article will turn to below. For the time being, the point to be emphasized is that back in 2015–2016 when the EUGS was being developed, resilience appeared to be a concept that different policy communities, normally compartmentalized and locked into their specific institutional logics, loyalties and lines of action, could co-own and mirror themselves in. This facilitated the task of bringing these policy worlds together, offering the scope for common ground, based upon a (seemingly) shared language.
Resilience and principled pragmatism
The second reason for choosing resilience as a priority relates to the overall philosophy of the EUGS: principled pragmatism (Biscop, 2016; Tocci, 2017; Snyder & Vinjamuri, 2012). By 2016, EU actors involved in the development of the EUGS increasingly felt the draw of pragmatism. In some cases, they were tempted by the sirens not simply of classical realism (Morgenthau, 1951), but of rather crude realpolitik. With Russian aggression in Ukraine, the mounting threat of terrorism notably connected to developments in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as China’s increasing assertiveness in its region and on the world scene, many in Europe talked about a return of geopolitics (Youngs, 2017). Some European officials insisted on a Union (literally) armed to take on the geopolitical game, fighting with, or in, opposition to other global players. While this “gung-hoistic” understanding of the way ahead was deeply contested within the institutions themselves, few disputed the need for greater pragmatism in European foreign policy. In other words, while a “realpolitik” turn to European foreign policy was opposed, a more “realistic” policy, in which the Union removed its rose-tinted spectacles to view the world, was embraced by most policy-makers. To paraphrase Morgenthau (1951, p. 34), discussing American foreign policy, many officials increasingly felt that the choice was not one between moral principles and the European interest, devoid of moral dignity, but between one set of principles divorced from political reality and another set of principles derived from political reality.
A realistic and pragmatic strategy meant that the EU could no longer stick its head in the sand but had to wake up to the rough realities in its neighboring regions. A realistic understanding of the neighborhood was considered to be a highly differentiated and sober one. For over two decades, the EU had equated its foreign policy with an integration logic. The recipe then was Europeanization (Checkel, 2005; Christiansen, Jorgensen, & Wiener, 1999). By radiating its norms and values outwards, the EU would promote peaceful and well governed countries beyond borders. It would do so through the enlargement policy (Grabbe, 2005; Schimmelfennig, 2008), the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) (Pace, 2007), and external governance approaches more generally. Even when it came to countries such as Russia, the name of the game was Europeanization (Haukkala, 2010; Makarychev, 2008). Yet the EU neighbors are not a homogenous group of countries that roughly share the same will and ability to emulate, cooperate with and integrate into the EU (Tocci, 2014). Some neighboring countries wanted indeed to see greater cooperation with and integration into the EU (Verdun & Chiar, 2011). This is true both for some Eastern Partnership countries like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, as well as some southern countries, notably Tunisia. The EUGS acknowledges this fact and recommits to these countries, which have often felt abandoned by the EU. But beyond these countries, most neighbors were not pleading to become more like the EU, or simply were mired in such fragility, violence, and instability making an integration-lite policy woefully inadequate (Del Sarto, 2015). The EU had to pragmatically face this reality, developing veritable foreign policies–and not simply enlargement-lite ones–tailored to the actual situation on the ground, with inbuilt mechanisms to help such states and societies confront the shocks and crises they were exposed to.
At the same time, the EU could not simply abandon its normative agenda in favor of a crude transactional one, in which even the most egregious violations of rights and law by states beyond the EU’s borders would be ignored by the Union (Bicchi&Martin, 2008). Resilience sought to capture a middle way. As put by Wagner and Anholt (2016), resilience provides “a middle ground between over-ambitious liberal peacebuilding and under-ambitious stability” (p. 415). In other words, resilience as a goal was never meant to replace the normative agenda: supporting peace, democracy, rights, and development remained core goals of the Union in its surrounding regions. But precisely to achieve such goals, the EU also had to pursue a resilience agenda given the inevitability of crises and shocks along the path of political, economic, societal, and institutional transformation. Developing the ability of preventing, responding and recovering – i.e., resilience – was considered critical to achieve the principled goals of peace, rights, and development. Thus, focusing not simply on state resilience, but also on the resilience of societies through innovation, coping, and learning was considered crucial.
Resilience and the complexity of change
The third and related reason explaining the emphasis placed on resilience is the inherently dynamic nature of the concept, capturing the complexity of reality. The world, of course, has always been complex. Through the concept of resilience, the EU made a first conceptual step toward recognizing it more as such. In other words, the EU acknowledged the need to build risk and uncertainty into its policies: The fact that developments in our surrounding regions (and beyond) are not simply beyond our full comprehension, but also and above all beyond our control. This notion of change was emphasized by the 2017 Joint Communication “A Strategic Approach to Resilience in the EU’s External Action” (European Commission & High Representative, 2017) that developed further the concept of resilience as outlined in the EUGS. In the 2017 Joint Communication, in fact, heavy emphasis was placed on the notion of change: the adaptability of states, societies, communities, and individuals to political, economic, environmental, demographic, or societal pressures; the capacities of states to build, maintain, or restore core functions and cohesion; and the ability of societies, communities, and individuals to manage risk and opportunities in peaceful and sustainable ways.
In other words, resilience did not imply adapting and bouncing back to the previous state in the aftermath of a shock. Astate and society will and should be inherently differe...
