ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen the emergence and consolidation of Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) together with its wide range of crisis management tools. The EU has thus shifted towards an active international role in crisis management. Crucially however, the success of CSDP has relied to a great extent on the expansion of its civilian aspect, initially encompassing police reform and rule of law with the inclusion over time of security sector reform. This has driven the development of the policy despite a more controversial, and initially hardly expanded, military dimension and provided sufficient impetus while the military and civilian-military projects were far from operational (Kurowska 2008). Simultaneously, we have witnessed a robust externalization of the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) wherein border management issues and readmission agreements constitute an important way of shaping systemic reform in the EU’s neighbourhood. These represent an instance of EU’s statebuilding practices with statebuilding understood as the externally-assisted construction and reconstruction of the institutional infrastructure. Highly invasive forms of external regulation, they are regarded as a legitimate way of assisting disadvantaged communities if they are sought or requested. With the example of the EU, we see however that policies of statebuilding have become an important crisis management, or better put crisis prevention, strategy.
