The Rise and Fall of Feminist Foreign Policy in Europe

In October 2022, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the newly elected centre-right Swedish coalition government announced that FFP no longer served the country’s interests. Prior to that, the Social Democrats, though being the instigator of FFP, had initiated the silencing of FFP in favour of militarisation and increased defence spending. Similarly, the German government has recently demonstrated reluctance to retain a commitment to its FFP, vaguely articulating that it will still provide some impetus for its international aid commitments. Similarly, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have silenced their FFPs. In this paper we carefully unpack the reasoning behind such silencing, comparing and contrasting a range of European states, all members of both NATO and the EU. In so doing we zoom in on four distinct factors which facilitated the abandonment of FFP: a) the heightened sense of crisis and militarism in Europe, b) the lack of thorough knowledge of FFP amongst electorates and c) the lack of feminist commitment within the EU and NATO, impacting on their members feminist credentials, and, d) the rise of far-right forms of politics across the continent. In conducting the study we employ a strategic narrative approach, also, drawing on feminist narrative techniques.