Political Discourse on Security–Development Nexus in the European Union

The European Union has embarked on a course of comprehensive reassessment of internal and external policies, their goals, priorities, and prospects. Even the fundamental principles and mechanisms of the European integration and the EU relations with the outside world have come under scrutiny. These developments have naturally altered the official discourse of the European Union and the content of the European strategies and programmes aimed at ensuring security and development. The latter are increasingly being regarded as intrinsically linked, which is expressed in the emergence and rapid proliferation of the concept of ‘security–development nexus’ in the EU official discourse. The first section of this paper examines conceptual aspects of the EU approaches to address challenges of state fragility in the spirit of the security– development nexus. The author demonstrates that the EU response to the challenges emanating from fragile states is characterized by a desire to develop a comprehensive, holistic approach based on conflict prevention, early warning, mediation, and inter-agency cooperation. However, contraction of financial resources, a lack of coordination on the part of the EU member states and some other challenges hinder the progress. The second section focuses on the attempts of the EU leaders to increase effectiveness of the security-development policies by introduction and implementation of complementarity principle and adoption of new approaches to security sector reform in fragile states, based on the concept of human security. The final section examines another important aspect of the official EU discourse on security–development nexus — the linkages between internal and external dimensions of the European security. The author comes to the conclusion that, regardless of existing challenges in the implementation of programmes and strategies conceived within the ‘security–development nexus’ paradigm, the EU has made visible progress, and this paradigm will continue to play a crucial role in the EU official discourse