Competing visions for the EU’s southern strategy: Restraint, preventative engagement, and selective intervention

ABSTRACT

The most powerful European Union (EU) member states have suffered devastating terrorist attacks in the past decades and identify Islamist terrorism as one of the most pressing threats to their national security. They recognize that instability in the southern neighbourhood has exacerbated the threat Islamist terrorism poses to their national security. Adopting an intergovernmental approach, I argue that member states’ southern strategies are a product of threat perceptions and policy response preferences. This article creates a typology of security strategies through using content analysis to categorize EU member states’ threat perceptions and policy response preferences as indicated in national security strategies produced in 2009–2018 period. Based on my analysis of member states’ threat perceptions and policy response preferences to threats emanating in the southern neighbourhood, I conceptualize three southern security strategies: restraint, preventative engagement, and selective intervention. Based on this typology, I identify the EU member states’ southern security strategy. Focusing particularly on the most powerful EU member states, namely the EU-5 , I then apply this typology to make some tentative predictions on the shifts in the EU’s southern strategy post-Brexit. I expect the EU’s southern security strategy to shift towards one of selective intervention in the post-Brexit period.

KEYWORDS:

• Common foreign and security policy
• Brexit
• southern neighbourhood
• intergovernmentalism
• EU as a security actor

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. I commonly refer to these policies throughout the paper as the EU’s southern strategic posture or southern strategy.

2. Given that the threat of a dyadic state conflict between an EU and non-EU state in the Mediterranean is limited, this paper is a limited study that focuses only on the national security threat that MENA-originating Islamist terrorism poses to EU member states.

3. Actorness refers to the ‘capacity to act’ (Jupille & Caporaso, 1998, p. 214) or to act ‘deliberately in relation to other actors in the international system’ (Sjöstedt, 1977, p. 16).

4. Some scholars contend that EU member states have demonstrated impressive unity on the issue of the EU imposed sanctions on Russia in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty (Sjursen & Rosen, 2017), yet Silva and Selden (2020) show that support for EU sanctions imposed on Russia has been far from universal among EU member states and is a hotly contested issue in the European Parliament, a proxy they use for the private debates in the Council.

5. This argument does not preclude the possibility that institutional approaches may better explain the EU’s foreign policy for less salient issues.

6. Terrorism was not the only concern driving the creation of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. EU member states possessed concerns about potential instability in the region that could lead to migratory pressures and the concomitant economic concerns. Terrorism was just one of the several factors that would fall under the EU’s conceptualization of security broader than just political-military issues of traditional conceptualizations of security.

7. The association agreement signed between the EU and Palestine was signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for the benefit of the Palestinian Authority.

8. See the 2003 European Security Strategy and 2008 Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy for examples of the EU’s nominal references to democracy promotion.

9. If a national security strategy was not published in the last five years, I used the most recent defence white paper or foreign policy planning document in its stead. Luxembourg and Malta are excluded from the analysis because these two states’ strategic documents fail to substantially discuss Islamist terrorism, thus necessitating their exclusion from this article. Relatedly, their limited bases of power suggest their influence in CFSP negotiations is limited.

10. The security threat most often associated with the MENA region in the examined national security strategies is Islamist terrorism. Consequently, this study focuses on the national security threat EU member states perceived from Islamist terrorism. In the context of this article, Islamist terrorism can be understood as synonymous with jihadi terrorism, as is consistent with the literature’s understanding (Hiro, 2003; Nesser, 2016).

11. See the appendix for more information on the coding procedures as it pertains to identifying threat perceptions and preferred policy responses.

12. While some have argued EU-MENA economic cooperation has contributed to clientelism and corruption (Del Sarto, 2016) in the MENA region, the EU’s pursuit of upgraded trade agreements with states in the MENA region have sought to reduce poverty and sluggish economic growth in the region. This goal is largely consistent with the UN’s counter-terrorism strategies, which identify poverty-reduction and sustained economic growth as methods to combat terrorism (Li & Schaub, 2004; United Nations, 2006).

13. Despite limited evidence of migration posing an objective threat to national security through facilitating Islamist terrorist entry into an EU member state (Bandopadhyay & Sandler, 2014), EU member states have responded to the threat of Islamist terrorism through restricting migration. Because migration has become securitized (Huysmans, 2006) and associated with recent terrorist attacks (Avdan, 2014), citizens associate Islamist terrorist attacks as having been caused by migration. This perception creates electoral incentives (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2004) for EU member state executives to restrict migration from the MENA region (Bove et al., 2020).

14. While the UK has been active militarily in the MENA region, it has frequently done so outside of the EU framework. Importantly, it has opposed the use of military force within an EU framework. Consequently, the UK is classified as possessing a strategy of Preventative Engagement (Muhlberger & Muller, 2016, p. 59; Marchi Balossi-Restelli, 2014).

15. A potential qualification for my argument is that member states, having anticipated the UK’s preferences, might strategically embellish their threat perceptions and alter their policy preferences in their national security documents to achieve more favourable bargaining outcomes. This could mean member states’ stated threat perceptions and concomitant policy preferences could change in a post Brexit context, given that member states would not need to exaggerate or underplay certain threat perceptions and policy responses in anticipation of the UK’s position. Yet, given that Germany and France have suffered several hundred casualties from Islamist terrorist attacks in the past 7 years of this writing and that all of the EU-4 perceive high or very high threat from Islamist terrorism, it is unlikely that the EU-4 will change their southern strategic posture preferences in the post-Brexit context.

16. My results also remain robust if we look at different groupings of the most powerful EU member states. See the resulting shifts for these groupings in the Appendix C.

17. Figures 11 and 12 examine the shift in the EU’s southern strategic posture following the exit of the UK using the Big 4 – the UK, France, Germany, and Italy – as the sample.

18. Figures C3 and C4 examine the shift in the EU’s southern strategic posture following the exit of the UK using the Big 2 – the UK and France – as the sample.