Bringing “the political” back into European security: challenges to the EU’s ordering of the Eastern Partnership

ABSTRACT

The Eastern Partnership is one of the tools of the European Union (EU) contributing to the reordering of European security. This article addresses the formative processes of the current European security order, focusing on the forms of capital being mobilised by the EU and Russia in the field of European security. Using post-structuralist perspectives in international politics, it argues that the EU’s promotion of depoliticised forms of politics aims at maintaining a hegemonic and hierarchical order, rather than partnerships and emancipatory forms of security. This is problematic, due to the subjectivities it creates and the lack of objective security provision.

KEYWORDS:

• European security
• Eastern Partnership
• politicisation
• post-structuralism
• governmentality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Licínia Simão is an Assistant Professor in International Relations and Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. She is currently the Coordinator for the Master Program in International Relations: Peace, Security and Development Studies at the same university. Her research interests include foreign policy analysis, security studies, and EU relations with the former-Soviet space. She is the national coordinator of the CASPIAN Marie Curie ITN. Relevant publications include the edited volume with Remi Piet, Security in Shared Neighbourhoods – Foreign Policy of Russia Turkey, and the EU (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), the special issue of East European Politics with E. Korosteleva and M. Natorski “The European Neighbourhood Policy in the Eastern Region: The practices perspective”, and several academic articles in leading peer review journals, and book chapters.

Notes

1. Bourdieu perceived the social world as being composed of a variety of distinct “fields” of practice, each with its own set of rules, knowledge, and forms of capital. Fields can overlap but they remain relatively autonomous and have specific positions of power and practices, which are constantly contested by new players looking for dominance.

2. Bourdieu defined three major forms of capital, which could be mobilised: economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital.

Depending on the field in which it functions, and at the cost of the more or less expensive transformations which are the precondition for its efficacy in the field in question, capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (“connections”), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility. (Bourdieu 1986)

3. Symbolic power is defined as being composed of “ideological systems that specialists produce in and for the struggle over the monopoly of legitimate ideological production” (Bourdieu 1991, 168).

4. For further discussion, see the introduction to this volume.

5. See discussion of “normalisation” in the introduction to the volume.

6. Flockhart (2016) has argued in favour of the concept of “multi-order system”, suggesting significant differences among clusters of states forming distinct orders. Her research builds on the English School concepts of primary and secondary institutions and, although highly relevant for the debate on the way European powers relate to others and the norms they support, we maintain here the concept of multipolarity. In our view, multipolarity refers to the emergence of distinct forms of contestation to the norms and institutions supported by liberal western powers, as well as the establishment of alternative models of ordering international relations. Whether these can be clustered as specific orders in itself or not is not directly relevant for our argument.

Additional information

Funding

The author acknowledges funding for research from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN-ETN) of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement “CASPIAN – Around the Caspian: a Doctoral Training for Future Experts in Development and Cooperation with Focus on the Caspian Region” and Research Executive Agency [642709 – CASPIAN – H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014].