Security Aspects in EU External Policies

Abstract

This working paper explores issues of security integration in a number of external policies of the European Union (EU), and looks at both security policies per se and the security rationale contained in other policy contexts. Following a twin-track approach of presenting both a legal and a political assessment respectively, the contributions have been clustered around three themes: energy security and the EU’s relations with neighbouring states, the EU’s targeted sanctions policy, and security sector reform pursued by the EU in third countries. The first contribution on energy security seeks to clarify the EU’s energy dependency on Russia as a security concern and assesses the EU’s response, in particular the Energy Charter Treaty, to Russia’s strategic use of its new energy monopoly. The second paper focuses on the countries of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and analyses a number of critiques with respect to energy policy in the context of the ENP. Within the targeted sanctions theme, one contribution discusses the legal complexities with respect to their adoption and implementation in the EU’s multilevel structure, whereas the other looks more broadly at their rationale and highlights a number of problems related to their strategic use by the EU and the UN. On the last theme, the notion of Security Sector Reform (SSR), the first contribution raises the issue in the context of the Western Balkans. While acknowledging the potential importance of EU leverage through membership conditionality, it argues that – for reasons both endogenous and exogenous to the EU’s SSR approach – accession is not an automatic best case scenario for sustainable reform in these countries. The second contribution looks at the EU’s SSR strategy in the light of local ownership and the quest for a holistic approach by examining the reframing of some existing policies and the adoption of new instruments and actions under the SSR agenda.