From the ESS to the EU Global Strategy: external policy, internal purpose

Security strategies are important sites for narrating the EU into existence as a security

actor. The unveiling of a new global strategy on foreign and security policy for the EU

immediately post-Brexit could be conceived as a pledge to remain together as a Union

for the purposes of contributing to global security in a particular way. This paper offers

a brief stock-taking of the EU's way of writing security from the European Security

Strategy (2003) to the EU Global Strategy (2016). A concise exegesis of these

documents exposes an interesting dynamic: as exercises in ordering the world, both

strategic guidelines have turned out to be major exercises in ordering the self. The

comparative snapshot shows the EU as increasingly anxious to prove its relevance for

its own citizens, yet notably less confident about its actual convincingness as an

ontological security framework for the EU's constituent members over time.