Abstract
This article reflects on how European Union (EU) narratives of the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO) have reshaped its resilience approach and its foreign and security policy more broadly. Drawing on qualitative textual analysis, we trace the evolution of the EU's resilience approach over time and the way it has been shaped by crisis narratives. While the idea of resilience was introduced in EU foreign policy to foster the resilience of crisis-affected societies from the bottom up, the perception of an increasingly contested world first led to a reinterpretation of resilience in pragmatic ways, with values and interests combined selectively to protect the rules-based international order. More recently, on the grounds of a worsening crisis of the LIO, resilience has taken a defensive turn, adopting a more geopolitical stance to strengthen the EU's own resilience and that of the LIO. We argue that EU crisis narratives about the LIO thus serve to sustain and to rescue it. Furthermore, we conclude that the defensive reinterpretation of resilience is eroding the normative character of EU foreign and security policy. It also challenges the persistence of the LIO in the long term.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2281-2299 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | International Affairs |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This article is part of the special section in the November 2023 issue of International Affairs on ‘Liberal order, the EU and global political justice’, guest-edited by Helene Sjursen. We thank the reviewers for the constructive critiques and the editors for the very useful guidance. We also thank Helene Sjursen and the other colleagues in the special section for insightful comments and for the conversation. Also, thanks to Eva Michaels and Filippo Dionigi for their invaluable feedback on previous versions of the article. This article has received partial funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 959143, but it reflects only the view of the authors.