Abstract
ABSTRACT To prevent violent conflict and governance breakdown abroad, the European Union (EU) needs anticipatory analysis and preventive action at the EU and member state level that follow a coherent approach. The EU’s resilience agenda can complement early warning risk analysis for prevention, but it is unclear to what extent it has been operationalized. We compare the role that resilience plays in crisis early warning in diplomatic services at the EU and member state level in France and Germany. Drawing on the literature on Europeanization and diffusion, we seek to explain different levels of convergence regarding a resilience approach in early warning at the levels of strategy, analysis and action. We find that the diffusion item’s specificity, the number of sources and particular institutional contexts impact the resulting level of convergence. Member states see value in complementing risk analysis with a resilience perspective, but the EU has failed to provide a sufficiently clear source model. Our results contribute to the literature on EU foreign policy diffusion and coherence and show that the EU has not exhausted its potential to promote resilience as a tool for more coherent and effective conflict prevention.
Highlights
After failures to prevent mass violence in places like Rwanda and Srebrenica, the international community, including organizations like the UN and national governments, has engaged in extensive soul searching.[1]
The Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) developed its resilience definition resilience based on a range of sources and each working unit dealing with the concept operationalizes it to its own needs (Interviews #3, #6). In both France and Germany, resilience has been used in the context of humanitarian and development policy, including disaster risk reduction and natural hazards, with reference to European Union (EU) humanitarian and development policy documents such as the 2012 Supporting Horn of Africa Resilience (SHARE) drought recovery strategy, before it appeared in the EUGS, other EU foreign policy documents and the conflict prevention discourse (Interviews #2, #3, #4, #6).[61]
The focus of our research on early warning (EW) units in diplomatic services means that our evidence is strongest for the level of analysis, while it is limited regarding the levels of strategy and action, in which other parts of diplomatic services not interviewed for this article play a role
Summary
After failures to prevent mass violence in places like Rwanda and Srebrenica, the international community, including organizations like the UN and national governments, has engaged in extensive soul searching.[1]. To shed light on whether the EU has succeeded in operationalizing its resilience agenda and ensuring coherent engagement in the area of conflict and crisis EW and prevention, we analyse to which extent capacities for EW in foreign policy at the EU and member state level are tailored towards resilience building. Our analysis contributes to the literature in three ways First and foremost, it shows how resilience as a foreign policy concept diffuses between the EU and MS and what determines convergence. As a consequence, it helps understand the requirements for more coherence in EU foreign policy as a prerequisite for the effective fostering of resilience abroad. We discuss the implications of our findings in the light of this special issue
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