ABSTRACT
The 11 September is widely held as a point of inflection for the EU as a security actor (Howorth 2002; Haine 2008).Previous to that date the Union’s member states had tended to see security mostly from a national, rather than a European, vantage point and insecurity as stemming from sources close to their borders. The New York and Washington attacks and the ensuing changes in the international security environment would jar these views profoundly. National borders and policies were deemed increasingly insufficient to face large-scale transnational threats, and hence hopes were placed on joint approaches through the EU. Acting together by ways of the Union, also appeared to the member states as the only solution for making European voices heard in view of the US increasingly unilateralist foreign policy, and as the way to patch over the bitter intra-EU divisions which had arisen over the 2003 Iraqi invasion. In consequence, ‘a secure Europe in a better world’, as the ESS of December 2003 would have it, entailed that the Union was henceforth actively to assume its part of ‘the responsibility for global security’ and pay due attention to security challenges such as terrorism, proliferation of WMDs, regional conflict, state failure and organized crime.1 Moreover, in a defiant gesture to Washington’s unilateralist approaches, the ESS stressed that the key stone of the EU’s security actorness was to be ‘effective multilateralism.’
