Contested but Resilient: Accounting for the Endurance of the European Union's Foreign Policy

In recent years, it has become a commonplace view that European Union (EU) foreign policy is increasingly contested (see Johansson-Nogués et al., 2020; Petri et al., 2020), that is, subject to ‘an instance of strategic social construction that aims at undermining or displacing an accepted or emerging intersubjective meaning through the formulation of competing discursive interventions’1 (Contessi, 2010, p. 326). The literature has explored this phenomenon in a range of empirical fields, spanning from the United Nations (UN) Global Compact for Migration (Badell, 2020) and climate (Petri and Biedenkopf, 2021) to development (Hackenesch et al., 2021) and trade policy (Eliasson and Garcia-Duran, 2020). To be sure, EU foreign policy has always been plagued with disagreement. Political conflict has long been one of its key features, and research in this field has paid close attention to it and the notion that Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) should be understood as a co-operation system designed to manage differences (Maurer et al., 2023). However, the underpinning argument of the literature on contestation in EU foreign policy is that something new is going on. We approach contestation in a way that helps specify this novelty. First, we claim that it does not stand for lack of agreement but for the critique of existing consensus (or ‘emerging’ consensus, as per Contessi, 2010). The question is not whether disagreement has increased or decreased, but whether consensus on EU foreign policy is breaking down. Second, as argued by Biedenkopf et al. (2021), what makes current contestation different is not necessarily the amount of it, but the fact that it is ‘now more in line with the broader way in which political conflict is [structured] in Europe’ (p. 326). The themes addressed by current contestation are well aligned with the axes of political mobilization that organize political conflict in Western societies. The cleavage that pits cosmopolitans against nationalists (or integrationists against demarcationists) is particularly relevant in the present context. By implication, contestation of EU foreign policy can more easily resonate with ‘issues that have an appeal beyond the narrow community of its practitioners and observers’ (Biedenkopf et al., 2021, p. 327). Finally, current contestation of EU foreign policy also writes itself into a general pattern of opposition to elements of the liberal international order (LIO), as the latter has faced quite some pushback (Acharya, 2018) after its ‘high-water mark’ (Crocker, 2015, p. 10) of the early 2000s. We expect that this kind of contestation is more likely to have an effect on EU foreign policy. Addressing this hypothesis does not imply holding a negative view of contestation as such. Contestability is essential to legitimacy (Pettit, 1997, pp. 185–202). However, to some, contestation of the EU (and of its foreign policy) can also be normatively problematic. Grande and Kriesi (2015) argue that ‘from a normative perspective that promotes a “cosmopolitan Europe,” the current politicization of Europe must be interpreted as disappointing, if not frightening’ (p. 222). One can embrace contestability and be concerned about the effects of particular instances of contestation. We claim that EU foreign policy is likely to be particularly vulnerable to the effects of contestation, given the fragmentation of the foreign policy co-operation system (Stetter, 2004) and its dependence on informal commitments. The term ‘European foreign policy system’ borrows from the Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature (see Clarke and White, 1989), which refers to a co-ordinated set of actors, institutions, principles, processes and outputs. According to White (2004, p. 54), all these components are ‘interrelated and constitute a foreign policy system in action’. In the case of European foreign policy, this system includes the interactions between the national and EU foreign policy decision-making levels. In the words of Maurer and Wright (2021, p. 389), ‘CFSP is a system created to manage, mediate and regulate the differing (sometimes sharply) and competing (sometimes significantly) interests of EU member states’. Fragmentation refers here to the fact that the EU's foreign policy system remains far from unified. According to Smith (2003, p. 240), ‘(t)he member states still retain a great deal of autonomy in terms of acting internationally, and the EU itself is composed of different frameworks (“pillars”), with different decision-making rules and procedures for dealing with “the international”’. Whilst the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 formally abolished the EU's pillar structure, the EU's foreign policy system remains subject to a considerable degree of institutional fragmentation. Yet, the EU's foreign policy system has demonstrated a notable capacity for providing the Union with a common identity and for taking joint decisions even on difficult international issues (Manners, 2002; Smith, 2004). The EU's cohesion as an international actor is sustained through an informal commitment to certain common procedural norms and habits of interaction (Juncos and Pomorska, 2006), as well as consensus on the validity of certain substantive norms pertaining to respect for democracy and human rights that inform foreign policy choices (Manners, 2002; Thomas, 2009). Against this backdrop, it would be reasonable to expect the EU's foreign policy to be particularly vulnerable to contestation – after all, its endurance ultimately depends on the member states' voluntary compliance with common, sometimes unwritten, norms (Sjursen and Rosén, 2017). From a rationalist point of view, disruptive behaviour by a few states could be reciprocated by the rest, reducing the overall willingness to abide by the rules. From a sociological point of view, open challenges to the norms that organize foreign policy co-operation in the EU would signal the break-up of the community of values, undermining processes of norm internalization. This is the reason why we interrogate the effects of contestation on the resilience of the EU's foreign policy-making system. However, there are several indications that, in fact, the system is quite resilient. Drawing on notions of systems thinking, complexity and ecological resilience (e.g., Folke et al., 2010; Holling, 1973), resilience is defined here as the ability to ‘withstand, or to evolve and adapt to a constantly changing equilibrium’ (Joseph, 2018, p. 2). More generally, resilience can be understood as the capacity of an individual, community or system to ‘remain fit for purpose’ (Chandler, 2014). The EU also defines resilience along these lines: ‘resilience is about sustaining the core identity and capabilities of states, societies and communities in the face of disruptive pressures’ (European Commission and High Representative, 2017, p. 23). Following this understanding, the resilience of the EU's foreign policy system can be evidenced by its capacity to continue to provide key governance functions normally associated with it, that is, producing collective decisions and outcomes and maintaining a common sense of purpose. The collective response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a case in point, with the approval of 14 rounds of sanctions and far-reaching measures in the field of defence co-operation (Maurer et al., 2023). Resilience building is often understood as a process generated by an external crisis or a shock that might result in different outcomes: ‘bouncing back’, which refers to the maintenance of the status quo or persistence, or ‘bouncing forward’, which can imply incremental adaptation or transformation. For instance, Bourbeau (2018) defines resilience as a ‘process of patterned adjustments adopted in the face of endogenous or exogenous shocks, to maintain, to marginally modify, or to transform a referent object’. This definition is also useful because it highlights the fact that these shocks might not just be ‘out there’ (e.g., an external crisis or event) but might also be endogenous in nature. Bourbeau (2018, pp. 28–29) also argues that these disturbances could be understood as ‘interpretative moments’. Focusing on institutional resilience, Mahé and Martel (2023) also underline the socially constructed nature of ‘crises’. The discursive construction of disturbances that might be as can and This also the resilience of the EU's foreign policy system in the face of the endogenous challenges by contestation and The to this this of resilience contestation. 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