The EU Security Continuum

Blurring Internal and External Security

Alistair J.K. Shepherd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317388968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book examines how internal and external security are blurring at the EU level, and the implications this has for EU security governance and the EU as a security actor.

The EU claims that 'internal and external security are inseparable' and requires a more integrated approach. This book critically assesses this claim in relation to the threats facing the EU, its responses to them, and the practical and normative implications for EU security governance and actorness. It sets out a novel conceptual framework – the EU security continuum - to examine the ways and extent to which internal and external security are blurring along three axes: geographic, bureaucratic, and functional. This is done through an analysis of four key security issues, regional conflict, terrorism, organised crime, and cybersecurity. The book demonstrates that, to varying degrees, these security threats and/or responses do transcend boundaries. However, institutional turf wars and capability silos hamper the EU's integrated approach and, therefore, its management of transboundary security threats. Yet, the EU's pursuit of an integrated approach is reframing its claimed normative distinctiveness toward a more practical one, based on a transnational and multidimensional approach. Such a rearticulation, if implemented, would make the EU a genuinely transboundary security actor, properly structured and equipped to tackle the 21st century's internal-external security continuum.

This book will be of much interest to students of European Security, EU politics, and international relations.

1 Conceptualising EU security

Towards a security continuum

DOI: 10.4324/9781315677705-2

Introduction

The concept of security has been keenly debated by politicians, policymakers, and academics across Europe, especially since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a concept with significant political and normative meaning and influence, utilised to justify and criticise the policies and actions of states, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, communities, and individuals. Within Western Europe, the conceptualisation of security remained, except for a few notable exceptions, largely unchallenged during the Cold War, focusing primarily on military threats to the state (Booth 2007). However, since the end of the Cold War, Europe has been fertile ground for reimagining security. Most of the conceptual developments have been driven by changes (real or perceived) in the security challenges facing Europe, but they have also been driven by shifting normative and institutional understandings of security, notably within the EU. As the concept of security has evolved, so the linkages between internal and external security have become more frequently invoked, and new frameworks, concepts, and theories have been developed to better grasp this (re)emerging phenomenon.

This chapter analyses some of these changing conceptualisations of security within the academic literature and draws on those that problematise the internal-external divide to develop a conceptual framework, the European Security Continuum (ESC). This framework is then used in later chapters to assess the nature and extent of the linkages between internal and external security threats facing the EU. First, the chapter introduces briefly the evolving and contested nature of security, with a particular focus on three more critical approaches that emerged towards the end of the Cold War and flourished in its aftermath: the so-called Copenhagen, Aberystwyth, and Paris Schools of security studies. These are chosen as they have been important in shaping key debates in European (and EU) security studies. They were also at the forefront of building on and/or critiquing the more traditional and dominant approaches to security that drew on Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. While the more traditional approaches generally keep a clearer distinction between internal and external security, each, implicitly or explicitly, acknowledges their interconnections. However, the three more critical post–Cold War approaches open up in a much more explicit way the conceptual space within which the connections between internal and external security can be made more apparent. Second, the chapter focuses specifically on the EU security studies literature, setting out the conceptual landscape within which the internal-external security divide has been debated. It does so through an analysis of the key sub-fields of the externalisation of JHA, European security governance, the internal-external security nexus, and the still limited work on the CSDP and the internal-external nexus. Drawing on these fields, the chapter analyses how scholars from a diverse range of perspectives have shaped conceptual understandings of security within the EU and illustrates the ways the internal-external security divide has been problematised.

While some claim the divide has dissolved (Lutterbeck 2005) and others argue for the continuing distinction (Weiss and Dalferth 2009), a third group stress the need to avoid sweeping claims and instead ‘analyse the gaps and linkages across the domains of external and internal security’ and explore the ‘ “nexus” ’, or critical connections’ between them (Eriksson and Rhinard 2009). It is this third approach, identifying and analysing the gaps and linkages between internal and external security, that underpins the third part of the chapter, which sets out the ESC framework. This framework allows for the analysis and assessment of whether, to what extent, and in what ways the internal-external divide is being eroded, rather than assuming it has dissolved or seeking to ensure they remain distinct, across the four major security challenges analysed in this volume. The section builds on the most relevant conceptual themes explored earlier in the chapter. The ESC framework sets out a security continuum, within which different security challenges (explored in subsequent chapters) can be positioned according to the extent and ways in which they challenge the internal-external security divide, geographically, bureaucratically, and functionally. As demonstrated in Chapter 2, the way the EU discursively frames its security environment often problematises geographic, bureaucratic, and functional boundaries by undermining simple internal or external classifications. However, as Chapter 2 illustrates, not all security challenges will blur these boundaries to the same degree or in the same ways. The framework developed in this chapter will allow for a more systematic analysis of the nature and extent of the internal-external linkages in key security threats and challenges identified by the EU, which will, in turn, facilitate an assessment of the implications of these linkages for EU security governance and for the EU as a security actor.

Security studies and the internal-external divide

Smith and others labelled security as one of Gallie’s ‘essentially contested concepts’, meaning not just that agreement cannot be reached on an accepted definition but that the concept is ‘inherently a matter of dispute because no neutral definition is possible’ (Smith 2005: 27). This was occasionally evident during the Cold War, for example when Ullman (1983: 129) argued that ‘defining national security merely (or even primarily) in military terms is profoundly a false image of reality’. However, the fear of Europe being the battlefield for yet another (this time possibly a nuclear) world war was so pervasive that such assertions were rare, with this view confined to a relatively small number of academic scholars and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Indeed, the dominance of the view of security as concerned with state centric military threats was such that McSweeney (1999) and Booth (2007) argued that security was then not actually an essentially contested concept and that serious (re)-thinking of the concept of security only really began in the 1990s. Hence, it was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the associated seismic shifts in international politics that drove the rapid growth in the number of scholars, NGOs and policymakers reassessing the concept of security. These debates focused on who and/or what was to be secured (referent objects), how they were to be secured (means) and from what (threats). These post–Cold War discussions also increasingly, and more obviously, moved into national (state) and international (IOs) policymaking, leading to redefinitions and reprioritisations of security threats, interests, and instruments.

After fall of the Berlin Wall and then the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War focus (within governments, public opinion, and large parts of academia) on military threats to state security gave way to a widening and deepening of the concept of security. While the seeds of the debate on widening (expanding the range of issues that could be classified as security) and deepening (broadening the range of possible referent objects to be secured) the concept of security had been sown during the Cold War (see Buzan 1983; Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982; Ullman 1983), it flourished and intensified with its sudden end in 1989. The field of security studies widened beyond military threats to include economic, environmental, societal, and political matters (Buzan 1991: 53) and deepened to include sub-state and supra-state referent objects: the individual, communities, societies, regions, international organisations, the planet, or humankind itself. Hence, the early 1990s saw a ‘cottage industry’ emerge in redefining security (Baldwin 1997: 5). This industry grew to encompass a kaleidoscope of approaches from Constructivism and the ‘Copenhagen School’ to Third World Security and from Critical Security Studies to Feminism and Post-Structuralism (Smith 1999). Within these literatures and approaches the complex nature of security became increasingly apparent, leading to the problematisation of the internal-external divide (see Eriksson and Rhinard 2009). For example, Mathews (1989: 162) argued, ‘[T]he once sharp dividing line between foreign and domestic policy is blurred, forcing governments to grapple in international forums with issues that were contentious enough in the domestic arena’. While few approaches to security deal explicitly with the internal-external security relationship, three examples from three distinct post–Cold War theoretical understandings of security illustrate the problematisation of the divide between internal and external security and provide the conceptual openings to develop the ESC framework.

First, Buzan and the Copenhagen School’s five sectors of security (military, economic, environmental, societal, and political) raise questions about the internal-external divide, as some threats seem to straddle this divide (economic, environmental, and societal), while others remained largely external (military) or internal (political). Buzan, still operating principally from a traditional state-centred perspective, seems to acknowledge this, arguing that the

permeability of states to both ideas and peoples associated with other states blurs the boundary between domestic and international security. Where this happens, neat distinctions between citizens and foreigners, state and government, and domestic and international policy, begins to break down and the meaning of national security becomes even more ambiguous.

(Buzan 1991: 32)

Even while he continued to distinguish between internal and external security, he concluded that ‘the lesson to be taken from this interplay among the different levels and sectors of the security problem is that the concept of security is a naturally integrative idea’ (Ibid.: 368). This framing of security as integrative resonates with the EU’s integrative rationale and ethos, as well as its ambition to develop a more holistic and integrated approach to security. Finally, Buzan and Waever’s notion of a security complex, where internal domestic developments and events in one state can cross borders and impact on neighbouring states, creating regional constellations of states whose security is highly interdependent (Buzan and Waever 2004), also problematises the sharp distinction between internal and external security and is reflected in the EU’s framing of security explored in Chapter 2.

Second, from a very different perspective, Booth argues for emancipation to be given precedence in thinking about security: ‘[S]ince “my freedom depends on your freedom”, the process of emancipation implies the further breaking down of the barriers we perpetuate between foreign and domestic’ (Booth 1991: 322). Therefore, he argues that ‘we need to better attend to the linkages between “domestic” and “foreign” politics. Frontiers these days do not hold back either “internal” or “external” affairs’ (Ibid.). In arguing for emancipation and the individual to be the referent object for security studies, Booth asserts that the ‘continuing sharp distinction between what is “domestic” and what is “foreign” is one manifestation of the way the study of international politics has been bedevilled by unhelpful dichotomies’ (Ibid.). Instead, these can be integrated as security is ‘conceived as a process of emancipation’ (Ibid.). The idea of security as an integrative idea (as mentioned by Buzan from a very different perspective) and the argument that the distinction between domestic and foreign is an unhelpful dichotomy provide further conceptual building blocks for the development of the ESC framework.

Third, Bigo, focusing specifically on Europe (and the EU in particular), argues, ‘[T]he transnational is blurring the distinction between the internal and external, and destabilising related concepts: sovereignty, territoriality, security’ (Bigo 2000: 171). This transnationalisation of security ‘creates a ‘Möbius ribbon, a situation where one never knows whether one is inside or outside’ (Bigo 2000: 171, 2001). He argues that this leads to internal and external security ‘constituting the one and same security field’ (Bigo 2000: 186). His assertion in 2000 that ‘internal and external security are merging and de-differentiating after a period of strong differentiation where the two worlds of policing and war had little in common’ (Ibid.: 171) is assessed using the three dimensions of the ESC across the four major security threats examined in this volume. The connections between police and military highlighted by Bigo, and the rise of Gendemeries (Lutterbeck 2004), constitute a key part of the functional dimensions of the security continuum outlined later. Further, Bigo’s claims that ‘external security agencies … are looking inside the borders in search of an enemy from outside’ and that ‘internal security agencies … are looking to find their internal enemies beyond the borders’ (Bigo 2000: 171) are particularly relevant to the EU’s responses to the threats and challenges identified in its numerous security strategies, as will be demonstrated and examined in subsequent chapters. Finally, and importantly, Bigo argues that the convergence of internal and external security is not only driven by changing threats and threat perceptions, by the de-differentiation of the worlds of crime, law and police, and war and the military, but also by ‘structural evolutions of the different institutions dealing with security and their relations with the political professionals’ (Bigo 2006: 390). In other words, various security actors, agents, and institutions are reconstructing understandings of security in a way that seek to erase the distinction between foreign and domestic, national, and international and make institutions the referent object to be secured. While Bigo believes that these moves may be well intentioned, he is highly critical of the drivers and the implications of this merging (Ibid.: 386), in particular for notions of liberty, legitimacy, and accountability. These issues will be examined in Chapter 7.

The fundamental point to take from these three diverse approaches to security is that, across the theoretical spectrum, the artificial separation of internal/external, national/international, and domestic/foreign is seen as problematic and is being challenged, albeit in very different ways, with significant implications for wider understandings of security. It also calls into question why the EU, as a transnational and partly supranational organ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualising EU security: towards a security continuum
• 2 Framing EU security: the internal-external continuum
• 3 Conflict and crises: external stability for internal security
• 4 Terrorism and counterterrorism: internal, international, and intermestic
• 5 Tackling organised crime: from Sarajevo to the Sahel
• 6 Cybersecurity: networks, crime, defence, and diplomacy
• 7 Governing the security continuum: institutions, accountability, and secrecy
• 8 The security continuum and the EU as a security actor
• Conclusion
• Index