The EU Global Strategy and Resilience: Five Years On

This policy brief takes stock of the EU’s resilience-building strategy since the publication of the European Union Global Strategy in 2016. The analysis shows that the operationalisation of resilience at the strategic level and on the ground has faced significant challenges derived from the fuzzy nature of this concept (and the EU’s understanding of it) and the EU’s complex and fragmented set-up. Challenges of implementation have been particularly evident on the ground, where an increasing gap between the EU’s rhetoric and practice has emerged, with the EU falling back on previous policy paradigms. Securitisation processes and the impact of recent crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, have turned the notion of resilience into a more inward-looking, security-driven concept, in the process, limiting the transformative potential of resilience-thinking at the EU level.