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Democracy promotion / Working Paper

Fusing Security and Development: just another euro-platitude?

14/09/2007 By Richard Youngs

This Working Paper reveals that the EU has made some modest progress towards according concrete substance to the security-development link.

In particular, an increased focus on supporting governance reforms acts as a potential link between security and development objectives within several layers of European policies. However, what the link means in practice is still contested.

Few in the EU would doubt that security and development go together; but differences abound over what this implies for the allocation of finite resources and the nature of diplomatic engagements.

The EU still has no clearly thought out vision of the balance or direction of causality between these two policy goals, but rather an ad-hoc approach based on the rather easy assumption that ‘all good things go together’.

Indeed, some basic differences have emerged over where the boundary now lies between ‘development’ and ‘security’ policies. The evidence from European policies suggests that development and security can be both complimentary and oppositional.

A precarious balance, and some tension, exists between the notion of security-informed development, on the one hand, and development-mediated security, on the other hand.

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Keywords

Development EU Foreign Policy European Union Security

Bio author: Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is Senior Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Democratisation programme at FRIDE. He also lectures at the University of Warwick in the UK. He studied at Cambridge (BA Hons) and Warwick (MA, PhD) universities.