From “partnership” to “principled pragmatism”: tracing the discursive practices of the High Representatives in the EU’s relations with the Southern Mediterranean

ABSTRACT

The EU’s relations with countries in the Southern Mediterranean have a long history as the region is of great strategic importance for the Union and its member states. The High Representatives of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy have been highly involved in shaping these relations, and this role has been officially strengthened with institutional changes brought about with the Lisbon Treaty. This article analyses the role of the HR/VPs in shaping the EU's foreign and security policy towards the region with an analytical focus on discursive practice. Drawing on insights from practice theory in IR and EU studies, the analysis traces continuity and change in how the Southern Mediterranean is described in the drafting of key strategic documents. The main finding is that EU foreign and security policy towards the Southern Mediterranean shows a high degree of continuity despite several crises and institutional changes, although the discursive practices have evolved. The article ends by highlighting a conundrum that the EU can be said to implicitly acknowledge: if authoritarian states in the Southern Mediterranean are inherently unstable, yet stable enough to quench the democratic aspirations of their people, then what should be the basis for EU actions?

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• EU
• High Representative
• Mediterranean
• practice
• security

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of the special issue and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical yet constructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Niklas Bremberg is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI). He is also Associate Senior Researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). His research interests include international practice theory, security communities, climate security governance and EU foreign and security policy, especially towards the Southern Mediterranean. He has been visiting researcher at University of Toronto, University of Liverpool, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and European Policy Centre (Brussels). His recent publications include articles in Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of International Relations and Development, Journal of European Integration, WIRE: Climate Change and European Security.

Notes

1 It can be argued that no unified theory of practice exists in social science but rather a bundle of theoretical approaches brought together by the shared assumption that practices are best understood as socially meaningful patterns of action (Schatzki et al. 2001, Nicolini 2013). However, this article keeps the notion of “practice theory” for the sake of brevity.

2 Foucault suggests a similar understanding when he discussed the need not to deduce concrete phenomena from universals but rather “start with […] concrete practices [and pass] universals through the grid of these practices” (Foucault 2008, p. 3).

3 On the launch of the ENP, see e.g. Kelley (2006).

4 However, EU member states failed to keep a united front at the UN when resolution 1973 was adopted a few days later, as Germany abstained. The resolution paved the way for the NATO-led intervention that eventually facilitated the collapse of the Qaddafi regime (on the preceding diplomatic negotiations at the UN and EU, see Adler-Nissen and Pouliot 2014).

5 Interestingly, the Barcelona Declaration also stipulated as its overarching objective the creation of “a common area of peace and stability [and] an area of shared prosperity” in the Mediterranean, which the PDSP partly seems to echo.