The European Union's human security discourse: where are we now?

Abstract

The language of human security has been prominent in the European Union's (EU) official discourse for a number of years. However, whilst it has been promoted as a new approach for the EU in the development of its security and defence policy, the aim of this article is to assess the extent to which it actually features in the EU's contemporary strategic discourse and practice. It seeks to uncover where and how the concept is spoken within the EU's institutional milieu, how it is understood by the relevant policy-makers in the EU and the implication of this across key areas of human security practice. It is argued in the article that human security has not been embedded as the driving strategic concept for Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) in an era of crisis and change in Europe and beyond and that the prospects for this materialising in the near future are rather thin.

Keywords:

• European Union
• human security
• Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
• strategic narrative

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was funded by the large-scale integrated FP7 project, Global Reordering: Evolution of European Networks (GR: EEN). European Commission Project Number: 266809. I would like to extend a special thanks to Nicola Harrington-Buhay from the UNDP Office in Brussels for her invaluable assistance with this research. I would also like to thank Nicola and Antonio Vigilante (UNDP Office in Brussels), for taking the time to read and provide insightful comment on the first draft of the article.

Notes on contributor

George Christou is Associate Professor in European Politics, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick.

Notes

1. Mary Martin was the Coordinator of the Human Security Study Group – with Mary Kaldor Convenor and Sabine Selchow Assistant. They are all at the Centre for Global Governance, London School of Economics.

2. An initiative led by Sweden, Poland, Italy and Spain produced a report suggesting new ways forward for the EU's security policy: ‘Towards a European global strategy: securing European influence in a changing world’ (2013).

3. Although the term human security did appear in the works of certain academics in the 1990s: see Rothschild (1995) and Suhrke (1999).

4. For a response to such a critique see Owen (2008).

5. Although obviously it is difficult to separate inside and outside in reality; it can be argued that the financial crisis inside the EU, and its implications in terms of ‘human security’, is clearly a key factor influencing the extent to which the concept has fallen off the political agenda for Member States in its projection outside.

6. Benita Ferrero-Waldner, ‘Human Security and aid effectiveness: the EU's challenges’, speech to Overseas Development Institute, London, 26 October 2006.

7. See also: http://www.intermin.fi/pelastus/cmc/home.nsf/pages/E57D63D16D771783C225795F002B38EB?opendocument.

8. Note whilst not necessarily opposing different dimensions of it in practice that they conceive as workable, such as R2P (Interview, Council of Ministers, Oct 2011).

9. See, also, for example: http://ec.europa.eu/echo/policies/resilience/resilience_en.htm

10. See Breslin (2014) on China.