Description
In June 2018, the High Representative of the Union of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the Commission (HRVP) Federica Mogherini proposed the European Peace Facility (EPF), a new fund of initially € 10.5 billion for seven years to replace the Athena mechanism and the African Peace Facility (APF), two distinctively different instruments. Whereas the Athena mechanism was part of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and financed EU military operations, the AFP was funded through the European Development Fund, supporting the African Union and the African Regional Economic Communities in peace and security policies. It was explicitly not allowed to finance “military equipment, arms, ammunition or military training”. The new EPF moves this funding to CSDP and specifically intends to finance military equipment for partners in addition to their military operations and the EU’s own military operations. Mogherini reasons that such an instrument is necessary because “[d]evelopments in Europe’s neighbourhood and beyond are a constant reminder that our security is not free”. My paper analyzes how the EPF reimagines sovereignty and thus spaces of ‘legitimate’ intervention outside of the EU’s territory. Relying on Butler’s discussions of sovereignty and governmentality, I argue that the EPF enacts EU sovereignty abroad through externalizing security policy to others and legitimizing it through gendered and racialized narratives of who is in need of protection from whom and who is the one protecting. This is made possible by a discourse that (re)produces ideas of crisis and emergency encircling and threatening Europe.
