Who's the Other? Understanding the Limits of EU's Common Security and Defense Policy.

This paper seeks to investigate what is the main challenge for the EU to become a security actor in global affairs. Over the last three decades, the EU has developed an increasingly complex and better-funded common security and defense policy, with new institutions and capabilities for new threats and challenges, yet it seems that it continuously fails to have a 'common' approach towards the most important traditional and, to a lesser degree, nontraditional challenges of today. What explains this failure? I argue that the fundamental problem lays not in the lack of institutions or resources allocated towards achieving this aim, but in the way the European identity has been constructed by the European elites from the beginning of the project. Building on Waever (1996) and Diez (2004) assertion that the European identity has been built on a temporal dichotomy in which the Other of EU's Self is its own bloody past, I argue that the Common Security and Defense Policy cannot succeed until the European identity is reconstructed in relation to a spatial (geopolitical) and situational Other(s). Temporal Othering allows the EU to have a post-modern identity, but CSDP is a modern policy framework and requires a modern European identity, not a post-modern one.