A new business as usual? The impact of the ‘resilience turn’ on the EU’s foreign policy and approach towards the eastern neighbourhood

ABSTRACT

The last decade has seen the concept of resilience gradually positioned at the centre of the way the European Union (EU) seeks to deal with endogenous and exogenous challenges, threats or risks. Originating primarily from natural sciences, resilience has provided an elegant and attractive option for the EU to revise its agenda. The so-called ‘resilience turn’ has come to permeate almost every aspect of the EU’s discourse. In this context, the article aims to analyse the nature of the policy change underlined by the way the concept of resilience has permeated the approach developed by the EU towards the eastern neighbourhood and foreign policy more broadly. Change evaluated by focusing on two key aspects that underpin the EU’s foreign policy: the scope of the EU’s foreign policy, EU’s understanding of the world order, with a particular focus on the role of geopolitics. The main finding of the article is the emphasis on resilience has induced only limited transformations in the EU’s practice and ideas, leading to the transition to a new business as usual.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• resilience
• eastern neighbourhood
• geopolitics
• policy change

Introduction

The last decade has seen the concept of resilience gradually positioned at the centre of the way the European Union (EU) seeks to deal with endogenous and exogenous challenges, threats or risks. Originating primarily from natural sciences, resilience has provided an elegant and attractive option for the EU to revise its agenda (Lee, Vargo, and Seville 2013; Corry 2014; Cafruny 2015). The so-called ‘resilience turn’ has come to permeate almost every aspect of the EU’s discourse. While the concept of resilience had been applied in a limited and technical way to various areas of EU policy, it is the range of crisis that the EU has experienced during the last decade that have elevated resilience as a key driver in the EU’s discourse (Cadier, Capasso, and Eickhoff 2020). The Ukraine crisis (starting with 2014) particularly challenged the Union’s understanding of its role in the world order, the nature of world politics, and the range of risks and challenges originating from the eastern neighbourhood. The events of the Ukraine crisis, thus, plunged the EU’s foreign policy in a deep process of transformation and reflection, with the resilience turn a key result. In this context, the article aims to analyse¹ the nature of the policy change underlined by the way the concept of resilience has permeated the approach developed by the EU towards the eastern neighbourhood and foreign policy more broadly.

We evaluate change by focusing on two key aspects that underpin the EU’s foreign policy. First, we focus on the scope of the EU, and the way it has been affected by the resilience turn. Up until the Ukraine crisis, the EU developed a rather ambitious scope in its foreign policy and relations with its neighbourhood, which was dominated by the ideal to promote its norms and values and transform the other. Following the resilience turn, the EU’s discourse has become increasingly pragmatic and focused on preserving the self in the face of the realisation of the existence of a multitude of external challenges and risks. Secondly, the article analyses the impact of resilience on the EU’s understanding of the world order, with a particular focus on the role of geopolitics. This focus is justified by the fact that a major shift in the way the EU aims to behave in the world order was announced by the current president of European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen at the beginning of her tenure in 2019 (Bayer 2019). This has caused a large sense of surprise within policy and academic circles, as for much of its existence, the EU has practically ignored the salience of geopolitics in the world order. Prior to the resilience turn, the very existence and peaceful development of the EU was presented as evidence that the negative effects of geopolitics (e.g. the way in which it constrains states to act aggressively) were mitigated or even made a remnant of the past by the expansion and deepening of European integration (Boedeltje and Henk 2011).

The main finding of the article is that even though the adoption of resilience as the key rationale in the EU’s foreign policy might be akin to what the scholarship frames as paradigmatic adaptation (a substantial or even radical change in mainstream practices, ideas and discourse), in reality, the emphasis on resilience has induced only limited transformations in the EU’s practice and ideas, leading to the transition to a new business as usual. The main characteristics of business as usual refer to the existence of limited transformations of policy ideas and practices, efforts to reframe discourse, as well as adjusting current or previous initiatives to the context, constraints and opportunities offered by crises – i.e. processes of reflexive renewal (Paul and Roos 2019). The article proceeds by reviewing the way the literature has tried to make sense of the growing importance of the concept of resilience for the EU. The following sections then discuss the relationship between crises and change. The final sections focus on the nature of the transformation brought about by the resilience turn in the EU’s approach towards the eastern neighbourhood and foreign policy

The resilience turn

The concept of resilience has gradually become a key leitmotif in academic, political and public discourse and ‘contaminated’ the EU’s agenda. Initially, resilience emerged as a keyword in various strategic documents concerning the EU’s agenda in the early 2000s. This was seen to serve as a useful analytical tool for understanding and addressing development disparities within its member states. Subsequently, the concept morphed into a particularly attractive buzzword in the literature (Martin and Sunley 2015; Hallegatte, Vogt-Schilb, and Bangalore 2016). A resilience-based approach made its way for the first time in EU official documents in the Joint Declaration of Riga, focusing primarily on the eastern neighbourhood. The text of the declaration frames societal resilience as the main objective in ‘strengthening the resilience of Eastern European partners faced with new challenges’ (Council of the European Union 2015). Nevertheless, the endorsement of resilience as a key concept within the external dimension of EU policies occurred following the launch the Global Strategy (EUGS) in 2016 (European External Action Service 2016).

Defined as ‘the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crises’ (European External Action Service 2016), resilience stands out as a multidimensional and multifaceted concept, which entails a broad range of referent objects, spanning across a variety of policy areas and processes (European Commission 2013, 2015b, 2017a, 2017b, 2020b). By syncing its external actions to its internal goals, the EU prioritises its own resilience and partly abandons its external transformative ambitions, thus shifting towards a more practical or pragmatic approach. This move is legitimised by the resilience turn, with the concept placing increased salience on existential concerns rather than on outward-oriented goals linked to enhancing the EU’s influence in the international arena. For example, in the neighbourhood, the European Commission has recently issued a new policy guide aimed at the post-Soviet states that emphasises the transformation of foreign policy along the lines of a consolidated resilience infused approach (European Commission 2020b). The document highlights a shift in the EU’s rhetoric from democracy promotion to stability, which is meant to provide the Union increased room for manoeuvre and brings about an additional focus on differentiation, ownership, visibility and flexibility for EU’s immediate neighbours. Subsequently, from the perspective of the European Commission, the resilience turn provides the neighbours with a flexible choice to decide the depth of their relations with the EU, making the Union more resilient (European Commission 2020a). To that extent, for the Commission, resilience represents a systemic approach and process designed to attain the system’s ‘development goals, to achieve security, to build inclusive societies or to recover from shocks’ (European Commission 2017a).

The article contends that developments in the eastern neighbourhood were the primary factors that led the EU to adopt resilience as a central piece of its strategy in international relations, underpinned by the realisation that geopolitics plays an important role in the region and globally (Youngs 2017). This perception has evolved gradually following the Russian-Georgian war of 2008, but the Ukraine crisis, starting with 2014, provided a critical juncture where the EU was unbale to react efficiently and with urgency (in a short-time frame) to the geopolitical challenge created by Russia: namely its annexation of Crimea or involvement in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Thus, the EU’s inability to prevent or manage the risks and challenges pertaining from the eastern neighbourhood elevated the need to increase resilience to the main driving factor in EU foreign policy (Nilsson and Silander 2016). The broader context should also be considered here, as the EU had been increasingly aware with the Arab Spring of the fact that the world order was not as benign as it thought around the time of the Big Bang enlargement of 2004/2007 (Morgherini 2015). Moreover, the relative ineffectiveness of its ambitious normative agenda in the region, translated in the failure to produce sustainable democratic change and reforms in the eastern neighbours, increasingly throughout the last decade, has made the EU seek to have a more disinvested and inward approach. Its engagement with the region has always been rather inward oriented and premised on transforming other countries in the EU’s image, but throughout the 1990s and 2000s invested considerable resources in promoting its normative agenda (Moga 2017). The pragmatic shift that occurred entailed lower costs or normative commitments on the part of the EU and more leeway and agency for the eastern neighbours (Morgherini 2016). These aspects form the backbone of a narrative that frames a slimmer and more streamlined EU engagement in the region as a key proxy for achieving its resilience to challenges originating from the eastern neighbours, whilst also making them more resilient (European Commission 2017c).

In reality, Tocci (2020, 176) argues that resilience is yet to produce significant quantifiable outcomes, even though it has had a long lasting effect on the European policy debate. One of the reasons for the absence of clear outcomes is the rather contrasting nature with which different scholarly and policy communities interpret the concept of resilience: the most important interpretations referring either to resilience as increasing security, or resilience as providing increased bottom-up agency through a humanitarian perspective (European Commission 2021c, 2016; Morgherini 2016). The EU seems to have taken somewhat of an ambiguous middle ground interpretation where resilience aims to foster stability and order (e.g. of the European project, or regional and global orders), whilst also sustaining the humanitarian and norms-based agenda that underpins the normative power paradigm. Tonra (2020), on the other hand, argues that it is the open and ambiguous understanding of resilience that provides the potential for the concept to enable broad transformations in EU foreign policy, even though he does not clearly specify what these might entail. Within the institutional structure of the EU, resilience has also provided a common language and set of benchmarks that actors can systematically employ, and thus go beyond the EU’s seemingly impermeable policy silos (Tocci 2020, 183). Nevertheless, other studies emphasise that the impact of the resilience turn on the practices of the member states has been rather limited (Bressan and Bergmaier 2021; Bargués-Pedreny 2020). A key aspect that has made evaluating outcomes in EU foreign policy cumbersome is the EU’s goal of applying an understanding of resilience that frames it not always a linear process, but rather as a complex evolutive process (European Commission 2016).

Recent studies have also touched on the nature of the changes underpinned by the concept of resilience in the EU’s approach towards the eastern neighbourhood and broader foreign policy agenda. For example, Korosteleva (2020b) argues that even though resilience became the centre piece of the EU’s approach to foreign policy following the publication of the EUSG in 2016, the more important question is whether the new resilience thinking and practice can be sustainable in the long term. For the resilience turn to be effective and sustainable (as well as marking a paradigmatic shift), she argues that the EU must also reconsider its neoliberal agenda. The analysis of recent EU strategic documents conducted by Rabinovych and Novakova (2019) highlights that new changes are intertwined with previous mainstream policy ideas and practices. According to Bendiek, the decision to place resilience at the centre of EU strategy marks a return to old debates about achieving autonomy in the world order. In the current context, where the EU has been dealing with the fallout from multiple crises, ‘resilience therefore aims to enable the EU both to maintain its existing values and norms and to pursue its own interests’ (Bendiek 2017, 6). Juncos’s (2017) analysis finds that resilience seems to point on the surface to deep transformations, but in reality emphasises a contradiction between a pragmatic and a principled approach to foreign policy. In this background, this article complements existing research and finds that resilience underpinned or accelerated transformations that were in the course of being designed or implemented. The next section draws on the literature on crises and policy change in order to tease out a broad framework that can be employed in the case of the growing role of resilience in the EU’s foreign policy.

Crises and change

Crises are generally defined in the literature as fluid moments that allow policymakers to reflect on mainstream policies and approaches. According to Nohrstedt and Weible (2010, 3), crises ‘denote periods of disorder in the seemingly normal development of human affairs, along with widespread questioning or discrediting of established policies, practices, and institutions’. One can contend that crises expose contradictions in various systems, and their resolution depends on managing these contradictions, while also testing prevailing paradigms that prescribe the way actors should behave. A common feature of crises is the high level of uncertainty they create, both in terms of the structure of systems, as well as in the perceptions and behaviour of actors (Kamkhaji and Radaelli 2017). However, several studies have also contrasted between the mutually constraining and enabling effects of crises on policymaking (Boin and Paul ‘T 2003; Widmaier, Blyth, and Seabrooke 2007; Heinrich 2015). In fact, constraining and enabling effects can be present simultaneously as actors can find new ways of enhancing their agency whilst also having it limited by the appearance of unforeseen exogenous factors. For example, Davis Cross and Karolewski (2017) show how the Ukraine crisis unexpectedly enabled the EU to develop an united approach towards Russia (especially in relation to the common sanction regime towards Russia).

Crises have been widely associated in the literature with policy change (Kamkhaji and Radaelli 2017; Nohrstedt and Weible 2010; Hall 1993; Cross and Karolewski 2017). Even though it is rather difficult to clearly evaluate the impact of crises on the behaviour of actors, there is a broad agreement that crises in themselves are both a symptom and a driver for policy change. Some scholars have also pointed to the indeterminate effects that crises have on change, which limits the utility of studying policy shifts by looking at external shocks or critical moments such as crises (Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse 2008; Gundel 2005). According to these studies, policy changes induced by crises rarely develop new policy solutions or problems, rather they magnify current issues and allow actors to advance their own problems and solutions. However, in this article we assume that crises do affect the behaviour of policy makers. Crises pressure policymakers to act, which may, in turn, lead to policy change. This occurs because crises enhance or limit the agency of actors, which gives them space to devise and implement policies at a much quicker pace and with less scrutiny. In this sense, the article explores the nature of the challenges and opportunities posed by developments in the eastern neighbourhood (such as the Ukraine crisis). It argues that much of the changes that have occurred have referred mostly to discourse and have been already on the EU’s agenda. Moreover, the literature on the EU’s foreign policy highlights gradual continuity and progression of ideas and practices in its development (Thomas 2012). Hence, the primary mechanism through the EU manages and adapts to external developments is reframing and repackaging old practices or emerging trends and ideas. Exogenous developments can be seen as a catalyst for cosmetic change in EU foreign policy, or a business as usual situation that allows the EU to rebrand itself whilst not having to uproot and overhaul its practices or core ideas.

The literature presents various typologies for understanding the effects of crises on policy change (Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse 2008; Rabinovych and Novakova 2019; Kamkhaji and Radaelli 2017). In this paper we focus on two particular types of change that are diametrically opposed: namely paradigmatic adaptation and business as usual. Paradigmatic adaptation involves questioning key assumptions that underline policy practices and ideas. It generally leads to wide-ranging strategic debates and transformations that influence the adoption of a new mainstream paradigm. According to Hall (1993), this type of change involves radical reconsideration of mainstream ideas, practices, discourse and paradigms. The more policymakers are open to new ideas, the higher the potential for paradigmatic adaption to occur. For Paul and Roos, paradigmatic adaptation is equal to ontological overhaul that would ‘imply wholesale changes to the EU’s underlying ontological assumptions about the social world around it and, in turn, far-reaching policy and institutional innovations in crisis response strategies, potentially even involving a re-interpretation of the EU’s own role and sovereign control ambitions’ (Paul and Roos 2019, 396).

Business as usual highlights situations in which policy changes are minimal and do not imply the acknowledgement of failure or the need for revision. We conceptualise business as usual in this article along three dimensions. First, we focus on the way the EU has embraced and implemented new policy ideas and practices² in its approach towards the eastern neighbourhood and foreign policy more generally. Second, we analyse the way ideas and policies have been discursively framed by the EU. This dimension focuses on the way the EU is framing through narratives its foreign policy, while the former considers mechanisms, tools, resources, regulations, and policy practices that underpin the EU’s external relations and its engagement with the eastern neighbourhood. Third, we explore the way crises have been used by the EU in order to legitimise initiatives that were already in the pipeline, understood as processes of reflexive renewal. In order to identify business as usual change we expect to find limited to inexistent transformation in terms of policy ideas and practice, deliberate attempts by the EU to reframe its discourse, and instances of reflexive renewal.

The article explores the change brought about by the resilience turn in relation two key characteristics of the EU’s approach towards the neighbourhood and its foreign policy more generally: namely scope and perception of the nature of the world order. While scholars have indicated other salient aspects such as relations among actors within the EU, the EU’s capabilities or its ‘unique’ ontology, we argue that these aspects either feed into or are largely constructed by questions of scope and the way the EU perceives the world order. On the one hand, we understand scope as delineating the aims, strategies, processes, and tools that underpin the foreign policy. On the other hand, the EU’s perception of the world mainly refers to the way it frames questions, of power, cooperation, conflict, or territoriality in international relations. The concept of geopolitics presents here a timely and parsimonious way of capturing these aspects whilst also understanding the way the EU frames the world order (Auer 2015).

The EU’s new business as usual

Scope

Up until the Ukraine crisis, the EU’s scope in foreign policy was dominated by the ambition to develop an enhanced presence in the international arena (Youngs 2017). Guided by this ambition, around 20 years ago the EU developed a loose strategy in external relations – i.e. the Security Strategy of 2003 (Council of the European Union 2003) – which hailed the fact that the Union was surrounded by a ring of friends, all of which were open and eager to accept the positive influence of the EU. The Strategy presented an outward oriented approach towards foreign policy, which sought to embrace the prospect of achieving an enhanced presence in the world order. However, this rhetoric can be seen merely as window dressing, as it served primarily an inward-oriented agenda and was epiphenomenal to European integration (Bickerton 2011). The main rationale for the Security Strategy was underlined by the need to understand the challenges and opportunities in foreign policy offered by the Big Bang enlargement of 2004/2007 (Council of the European Union 2003). In practice, the scope and ambitions of EU foreign policy and its engagement with the neighbourhood led to the development of what is known in the literature as the normative power approach, which highlights the way the EU seeks to promote its norms and values in the world order in a bid to shape conceptions of normal behaviour (Forsberg 2011). From the perspective of the normative power rhetoric, by promoting the range of universal values that make up its foundation, the EU helps other states develop in the way it did throughout its existence.

Following the resilience turn, we see rather superficial changes in the EU’s inward concerns, which have arguably always dominated its agenda, and have now been formalised, with limited (but still present in some regard) indication that the Union seeks to maintain its previous and outward normative discourse and agenda. The EU’s approach prior to the resilience turn was translated into a rhetoric that hailed the prospect of influencing the world order and was untimely outward oriented. However, the EU’s own internal concerns dominated its foreign policy agenda. The business as usual type of change emphasises more clarity in framing the EU’s inward approach, together with a greater role for securing the EU’s existence. Moreover, in spite of the resilience turn shifting the focus towards the promotion of the EU’s interests rather than values, the normative power rhetoric still permeates the way the EU positions itself in external relations, but with increased awareness of the structural pressures pertaining to the world order:

‘Some are turning towards authoritarian regimes, some are buying their global influence and creating dependencies by investing in ports and roads. And others are turning towards protectionism. None of these options are for us. We want multilateralism, we want fair trade, we defend the rules-based order because we know it is better for all of us. We have to do it the European way (von der Leyen 2019).’

The move to embrace resilience as a miracle medicine has allowed the EU to reframe its discourse and shift the blame on the outside world for the failure and shortcomings of the normative power approach. By offering a series of tools and templates for states in the neighbourhood to deal with geopolitical risks and challenges (and hence to enhance thief resilience) the EU is externalising its failure, without really developing or implementing new policy ideas and practices. The inability of the post-Soviet states to enhance their own resilience (in relation to, for example, the actions of Russia) is not framed anymore as a failure of EU foreign policy, but rather as the EU itself being successful in achieving resilience in relation to the inability of its neighbours to become resilient (European Commission 2017c). The EU is continuing to aim to promote its seemingly universal values, but it claims to be designing this strategy in a more inclusive manner that fully engages with the interests and needs of third-party states (European Commission 2021a). The burden of failure is placed now on other states rather than the EU, as their unwillingness to engage with the lessons offered by the EU is framed as the main reason for the inability of the Union to promote its values. Coupled with the move to place interests before values, this signals that the EU has engaged in reflexive renewal. It has embraced the inward oriented and pragmatic approach which arguably played a substantial role pre-resilience turn, in the way it sets out its goals and expectations, as well as in the way it evaluates their level of success (Wagner and Anholt 2016).

With the advent of the resilience turn, the EU has focused to a larger extent on objectives that were already on its agenda, but can also be readily equated to resilience, pointing to processes of reflexive renewal. Some of these include: support for civil society, safeguarding critical and energy infrastructure, the protection of minorities, enhancing local ownership, justice system reform, the fight against corruption or sustainable development (European Commission 2017c). Bargués and Morillas (2021) argue that the resilience infused objectives of the EU in relation to its neighbours focus on three priorities: effective governance through fair, inclusive and transparent institutions; social and inclusive dialogue; and the legitimacy of governance actors. This means that in relation to the neighbourhood, resilience has been largely framed as ‘a domestic process with external actors supporting or spoiling the process of resilience-building’(Kakachia, Legucka, and Lebanidze 2021). Much as the literature on Europeanisation and external governance has long emphasised, the EU’s insistence on applying a series of more less clearly articulated recipes for achieving reforms can have negative unintended outcomes and lead to populist and corrupt leaders to take hold on power, as adoption costs increase (Korosteleva 2020a). Korosteleva and Flockhart (2020) argue that merely discursively framing resilience as oriented towards local actors is not enough as the EU should reflect on what resilience means and whether it is universally a good thing. Hence, they advocate that the EU should go beyond mere processes of reflexive renewal and develop an inclusive approach of resilience that focuses on the needs of local actors.

The resilience turn has seen the EU reframe its scope and ambition in its approach towards the eastern neighbourhood and foreign policy more generally. The most important shift refers to abandoning the normative power rhetoric in favour of a more restrained rhetoric that puts interests and pragmatism at the forefront. Moreover, the focus on the need to prioritise the EU’s interests points to the EU discursively acknowledging the inward oriented nature of its foreign policy. In the context of the realisation of the limitations of the normative power approach, particularly in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, the resilience turn legitimises (but is also spurred by) the need to downgrade the EU’s ambitions in foreign policy and focus on its own development and existential concerns. The EU’s slimmed down scope in foreign policy, however, has not been translated in significant transformations in terms of its policy ideas and practices. Rather we see the focus on values, norms and principled behaviour that form the backbone of the normative approach still prevalent in the ideational construction of the EU’s foreign policy more generally. The seemingly ‘new’ rhetorical focus on interests is also misleading, as the literature points to the fact that interests have always played a key role in shaping the EU’s engagement with neighbours or other international actors (Nitoiu and Sus 2019). Existing policy practices have also merely been repacked discursively to suit the new lexicon of the resilience turn. Nevertheless, due to the relatively recent nature of the resilience turn, the potential for change to occur in the middle to long term in terms of the underpinning policy practices of the EU in its approach towards the neighbourhood and foreign policy more generally should not be discounted.

Limiting the EU’s scope in its relations to the neighbourhood allowed the EU to focus on priorities that were already on its agenda, even though they did not feature prominently. These focus primarily on providing increased agency and ownership to the eastern neighbours, while also engaging to larger extent with the ‘local’. The resilience turn is thus an instance of reflexive renewal as it allowed the EU, in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, to push forward these initiatives, while also decreasing the scope of its engagement with the eastern neighbourhood. The EU now places the burden on the neighbours to become resilient, as it provides them with all the necessary tools to become resilient and increase their agency. Failure is thus externalised, the EU becoming itself resilient in this way to risks and challenges originating from the eastern neighbourhood. More generally, reflexive renewal is also seen in relation to the way the EU has prioritised its interests, with policy and academic debates gradually pointing to the timeliness of this strategy, even in the period that followed the Big Bang enlargement of 2004/2007 (Auer 2015; Smith 2011).

Perceiving the world order (Geopolitics)

Up until the shock caused by the Ukraine crisis, the EU operated based on the assumption that the nature of the world order was benign and would not pose significant constraints (European Commission 2015c). In this logic, geopolitics was framed as a remnant of Europe’s past ravaged by conflict that led to the two world wars of the twentieth century (Auer 2015). In opposition to understanding geopolitics as the main driver of the world order, the EU claimed that it aims to promote a distinct way of acting in international relations, which emphasises principled behaviour and the promotion of the range of universal norms that reside at its foundation: such as democracy, human rights, freedom or equality (Council of the European Union 2003). The EU’s model of global governance was presented to offer the promise of fostering peace and prosperity for peoples throughout the world. The very creation and persistence of the EU stands testimony to the fact that geopolitical forces can be overcome (if not ignored) in order to promote close and strong cooperation between states on the European continent (Casier 2016). Nevertheless, the concept of geopolitics was employed in a rather ambiguous and trivial manner, with no discernible effort to untangle it. One might argue that geopolitics became a sort of a mantra that helped distinguish a distinct and elevated international identity. Unlike states prone to aggressive behaviour like Russia or China, the EU presented itself to not be driven by the quest for enhancing its power at the expense of other actors or gaining hegemony in various geographical spaces (Ferrero-Waldner 2005).

The resilience turn sees the current European Commission embracing a shift in relation to the way it imagines the EU’s relationship with the concept of geopolitics both globally and in the eastern neighbourhood. Framing itself as geopolitical, the Commission seems to have started to address (at least in rhetoric) the need to accommodate the salient of role of geopolitics in the world order. This can be understood as incremental change, but also as a response to the way the EU is perceiving recent changes in the world order. Trump’s presidential term in the United States (US) especially brought about a high degree of uncertainty, which made the EU doubt the depth of the Transatlantic partnership. This also magnified the assessment that first surfaced during the Ukraine crisis that geopolitics dominates the international arena and that the EU has to develop tools and strategies in order to adapt to geopolitical constraints (Kyiv Post 2015; European Commission 2015a). Nevertheless, the concept of geopolitics has been used by the Commission in a very indeterminate way, and it is currently not clear how the EU understands it (Zwolski 2020; Nitoiu and Sus 2019). An ambiguous focus on power and increased clarity when it comes to the interests of the EU in foreign affairs seems to be an important feature of the Commission’s geopolitical approach. However, questions of power and interests have arguably always shaped the EU’s agenda, even though not in a direct way. Scholars had been claiming following the end of the Cold War that, in order to attain greater presence in the international arena, the EU needs to adapt to geopolitics and prioritise its interests (Smith 2011; Hyde-Price 2008). This, in turn, points to an instance of reflexive renewal, where existing debates, even though not at the forefront of EU’s agenda, in the context of the Ukraine crisis, were given more weight and became one of the key rationales for ushering in the resilience turn.

The emergence of resilience as a centrepiece of EU strategy in external relations can be seen as both a consequence and cause of the realisation that geopolitics plays a key role in the world order. Following the Ukraine crisis, the two concepts have been simultaneously woven into the development of EU foreign policy. Even though they are mutually interdependent, significantly more effort was devoted to specifying what resilience means for the EU and the ways it can be enhanced. Conversely, geopolitics has been employed in a rather flexible manner, more akin to a slogan rather than a coherent concept that can inform policymaking. The growing interdependent salience of resilience and geopolitics can be interpreted on the surface as a major shift in EU strategy. Nevertheless, some of the current aspects of the debates surrounding the two concepts have been recurring throughout the existence of the EU, pointing to processes of reflexive renewal on the part of the EU. These concerns broadly verge around the need to ensure the EU’s existence in the face of the changing nature of the world order (e.g. the end of the Cold War or the War on Terror). Resilience, as a broad measure for securing one’s existence, has been continuously on the agenda of the EU. It is rather the nature of challenges and risks that has driven towards more clarity in the EU’s approach towards resilience in the background of multiple crises. These crises (with an emphasis on the Ukraine crisis) have underlined primarily the impact that the structure of power in the world order and the uncertainty it brings can have on the EU (even if the EU chooses not to engage it directly). Uncertainty has forced the EU to prioritise its own existence in favour of expanding its global influence (European Commission 2021b). Recent literature has emphasised that the EU’s approach has always contained a geopolitical element as it aimed to extend its influence in other geographical spaces: e.g. the promotion of European integration and enlargement or its approach towards its neighbourhood (Auer 2015; Nitoiu and Sus 2019; Nitoiu and Pasatoiu 2020).

In the eastern neighbourhood, the resilience turn has not really engaged with the frozen conflicts that affect the region (or its geopolitical structure). Kakachia, Legucka, and Lebanidze (2021) also find that the choice of the EU to focus on local resilience has overlooked in the case Georgia and Moldova the role of geopolitics factors associated with frozen conflicts, which in the end has undermined the EU’s effectiveness. Rather, the EU’s discourse now frames the burden on the neighbourhood states, as the EU claims to provide them with the proper tools to become resilient and work towards solving frozen conflicts or managing geopolitical constraints (Morgherini 2018). The ambition to promote EU values and its model of integration is still present, but has stopped being framed as a precondition for achieving a greater presence in the international arena (Borrell 2020). Rather the focus is more inward, with the EU’s integration model, if embraced by the neighbourhood, offering the prospect of enhancing the Union’s own resilience. This was of course one of the arguments that was included in the 2003 Security Strategy, but was also overshadowed by the more ambitious prospect of enhancing the EU’s global influence in the aftermath of the Big Bang enlargement of 2004/2007.

The announcement by Commissioner von der Leyden regarding leading a geopolitical commission is likely to build on the range of policy ideas that had been already developed during the drafting of the Global Strategy. The emergence of geopolitics can thus be seen as a result of reflexive renewal, with the groundwork already laid out and the ideas had been developed; but a new commission was needed to carry them forward and implemented them. Nevertheless, the definition employed by the Commission of geopolitics is sufficiently general and broad as to not pin it down to a specific understanding of the concept and insulate it from the prospect of failure. At the time of the writing of this paper, there is no evidence that the claim of geopolitical commission has moved in any significant way beyond rhetorical framing and influenced the EU’s policy practices or ideas. It is true that the EU lacks the hard power capabilities that would allow it to act successfully in the world order from the perspective of classical geopolitical which tends to reflect more realist perspectives on international relations. Nevertheless, the growing emphasis on the need to adapt to geopolitical constraints is both a cause but also a proxy for the resilience turn, where the realisation that geopolitics plays a key role legitimised the need to enhance resilience, while pursuing geopolitical strategies allows the EU to build resilience. One might even argue that clearly acknowledging the salience of geopolitics points to the fact that EU has all but abandoned its ambition to develop a strong presence in the international arena, as it does not have the range of capabilities (or the willingness and ability to develop them) that would be suitable for pursuing a geopolitical agenda (Zwolski 2020).

The resilience turn registered a radical discursive shift in relation to the EU’s engagement with the concept of geopolitics, which virtually blossomed from a forbidden concept in the EU’s lexicon into a key aspect that has legitimised the need to embrace resilience. The role of external events, primarily the Ukraine crisis, have indeed been crucial in making the EU realise the salience of geopolitics in structuring the eastern neighbourhood, and more broadly in the world order. Nevertheless, the goal of developing a geopolitical Commission or the EU acting in a geopolitical way has not translated into concrete policy ideas and practices. One of the main reasons for this can be attributed to the ambiguous and broad way in which the EU has defined geopolitics. Moreover, the absence of capabilities that are normally associated with engaging with geopolitics (namely developing autonomous military capabilities) have hindered the development of new practices. Geopolitics as a proxy for achieving resilience, but also a key rationale for embracing resilience has at most affected debates at EU level, particularly, around the need to achieve strategic autonomy. Such ideas coupled with the potential of developing an EU army had been circulating for decades. Moreover, recent studies have also emphasised that even though the EU might not have directly acknowledged in the past the importance of geopolitics, its engagement with the outside world, and especially the neighbourhood was shaped by its understanding of power and geography and territoriality (the very basic aspects that underpin the concept of geopolitics). Similarly, to the discussion about scope, we can identify reflexive renewal as the EU seems to have prioritised in the context of external crises (particularly the Ukraine crisis) old debates that had been side-lined in the past regarding geopolitics and its role in shaping the role order. The resilience turn has offered a simple and attractive way to package the EU’s need to come to terms of its new understanding of the world order where geopolitics plays a key role.

Conclusion

The resilience turn has underscored considerable reframing of the EU’s discourse in relations to the neighbourhood and foreign policy more generally. The analysis of the EU’s scope and understanding of the world order highlights that these discursive transformations have been accompanied by limited to inexistent changes in the EU’s policy ideas and practices. Rather we have observed instances of reflexive renewal where the crises experienced by the EU during the last decade (particularly the Ukraine crisis) have triggered the prioritisation of ideas practices and initiatives that were already on the agenda of the EU (even though not at always at the forefront). What this shows is that rather than experiencing radical ontological change (as prescribed by the notion of paradigmatic adaptation), the EU has transitioned into a state of business as usual, where resilience is plays a key role in the EU’s lexicon and allows legitimising the pursuit policy ideas and practices that were already on the agenda.

Looking in retrospect, the emergence of deep existential threats made the resilience turn an obvious choice and possibly the only viable option that would draw on previous mainstream ideas and usher in a new state of business as usual, without leading to a substantial policy shift in EU foreign policy. Resilience provided an elegant solution for the EU to acknowledge the salience of structural geopolitical pressures derived from the world order and clearly articulate the fact that its foreign policy is primarily influenced by inward-oriented concerns. The effects of crises led the EU to limit its scope and focus to a larger extent on its own existence rather than on expanding its presence in the international arena. Resilience served as a rallying cry for the member states to develop a more coordinated approach in foreign policy, while also allowing the EU to shed the appearance of an outward approach represented by the normative power discourse. Moreover, resilience turn emphasises a discursive shift in the way the EU perceives the magnitude of threats and challenges originating from the world order. It also signals that the EU’s foreign policy and particularly its approach towards the eastern neighbourhood is increasingly influenced by existential concerns rather than achieving greater influence in the international arena.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The data for the analysis was collected from official documents, speeches and media sources, as well as background information from interviews and discussions with practitioners from the European Commission and the European External Action Service, conducted between 2015 and 2020. As the literature primarily analyses the way resilience features in official documents and is conceptualised by the EU, our analysis aims to identify the key frames that are present in the EU’s discourse and evaluate the type of change they represent. Framing represents a discursive practice through which themes are presented by actors in an intentional manner, most times as a way of advancing their agenda (Daviter 2007). The emphasis is on the discourse promoted by the European Commission and the EEAS, as these actors have provided considerable drive to the resilience turn. In order to evaluate the policy outcomes of the EU’s resilience turn in eastern neighbourhood we rely primarily on the limited but emerging literature.

2. There are, however, a series of difficulties associated with evaluating policy practices, as the EU’s definition of resilience is rather broad and flexible allowing for metrics to be continuously revised. Moreover, one of the EU’s strategies has been to reframe as success or evidence of resilience instances where its ambitious policies are not matched by outcomes (Korosteleva 2020b). There is an important caveat here: the resilience turn can be considered still in its infancy, and more time may be needed for policy outcomes to come to fruition.