The EU and Sub-Saharan Africa: Developing the Strategic Culture of the Union's Foreign, Security and Defence Policy

Reference:

Whitman, R., 2010. The EU and Sub-Saharan Africa: Developing the Strategic Culture of the Union's Foreign, Security and Defence Policy. In: UACES Annual Conference: 40th Anniversary Conference, 2010-09-06 - 2010-09-08, Bruges.

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Abstract

The EU's engagement with Sub-Saharan Africa through the panoply of instruments of its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) have been a characteristic of the development of the Union's foreign, security and defence policies since the 1990s. The EU's policies pursued through the CFSP/ESDP towards Sub-Saharan Africa have played a key role in developing both the form of the EU's foreign policy infrastructure and its instruments and, crucially, in the forms of military intervention that the EU has undertaken outside of Europe. This paper uses these developments to advance the argument that Sub-Saharan Africa has provided a crucial component in the evolution of an embryonic strategic culture for the EU. The paper proceeds by examining how the EU has used Sub-Saharan Africa to refine its definition of what constitute security threats, how these threats are seen to be particularly acute on the African continent, and how the EU has used its foreign, security and defence policy interventions on the continent to test and refine its policy instruments. The paper concludes by examining the implications for our understanding of the notion of an EU strategic culture generated by the case study under examination.

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