A diagram of European ‘grand strategy’

A diagram of European ‘grand strategy’:

By James Rogers

Please click on the diagram to enlarge it

This diagram maps out the character of a vision of ‘grand strategy’, which is currently being offered for the European Union in the early years of the twenty-first century. Emerging out of the dislocations suffered by Europeans in the 1990s during the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession (and particularly the genocidal intentions of Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic), this ‘grand strategy’ promises to make the European Union a more robust, capable and credible world power. It can be better conceptualised if it is parsed through two social logics – these being ‘geopolitical securitisation’ and ‘Europeanisation’.

‘Geopolitical securitisation’ (framed in orange) accounts for the emergence of a ‘securitisation regime’ at the European level – which is currently operating throughout the institutions of European government in Brussels, think tanks, policy institutes and academic departments – to identify, position and classify (or construct) the threats and challenges to European security. Leading to a European Union ‘security culture’, ‘geopolitical securitisation’ produces a ‘social antagonism’ between the European Union and everything outside of it as it re-configures both the character of the world outside of the European Union, as well as the European Union itself.

‘Europeanisation’ accounts for two components: firstly, it includes an ‘expansive strategisation’ programme (framed in blue) – in other words, the articulation of a specific European-level ‘strategic culture’ – which is constructed around a global, extroverted and comprehensive approach that seeks to utilise all forms of European power to combat the threats and challenges to European security, as identified by the ‘securitising regime’; secondly, ‘Europeanisation’ accounts for the attempt to integrate and ‘maximise’ the power of the Member States’ through their integration at the European level (marked in green), leading to a political community with some 500 million people and a quarter of the world’s wealth.

As I am arguing in my Ph.D., what is important about these social logics is the way they have reconfigured the identity of the European Union as an international actor. In short, since the late 1990s, the European Union has moved away from being a ‘civilian power’ (or ‘normative power’) with an internal focus and has started to become a ‘global power’, as the aforenamed social logics have sought to incarnate – that is, hegemonise – the European Union itself. How far this project will go is still uncertain; but one thing is for sure: the extent to which it will continue will depend very much on the future events, as well as the actions taken by people like Catherine Ashton over the next five to ten years.