Book review: Diplomacy and Security Community-Building: EU Crisis Management in the Western Mediterranean
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836716671760 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Irene Fernandez-Molina |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836716671760
Cooperation and Conflict
2017, Vol. 52(2) 287 –290
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836716671760
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Book reviews
Niklas Bremberg, Diplomacy and Security Community-Building: EU Crisis Management in the Western
Mediterranean, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016; ISBN 9781138925731.
Twenty years ago, constructivist International Relations (IR) scholars fell in love with
the brand-new Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), fascinated by this initiative’s
Promethean and arguably ‘constructivist’ ambition to invent a somewhat counter-
intuitive region merging together the two shores of the Mediterranean Sea. One of their
central arguments was that the EMP was meant to be a bold experiment of security
community-building beyond the European Union (EU)’s borders (Adler et al., 2006) –
expanding the EU’s distinctive home-grown security community, so as to blur the lines
between insiders and outsiders, and make war unimaginable also with the latter. Was this
a far-fetched illusion? Niklas Bremberg’s book aims to give a fresh answer to an aca-
demically and politically ever-pressing question of ‘whether the EU can promote secu-
rity beyond its borders and in its neighbourhood’ (pp. 1–2) by looking first and foremost
at the ‘how’. Interestingly, besides being in tune with the practice turn in social sciences
and constructivist IR, the analytical focus on ‘what practitioners actually do’ provides a
little more room for optimism than approaches focusing exclusively on collective identi-
ties, which often assume that some commonality of values is a necessary condition for a
security community to emerge. Bremberg’s contention is that this is not always the case
and is backed by an array of empirical evidence which demonstrates the development
and consolidation of cooperative security practices between insider Spain and outsider
Morocco, irrespective of identity and value discrepancies, as well as the essential role
played by the EU’s multilateral umbrella in enabling such security community-building
process over the last three decades.
Diplomacy and Security Community-Building makes a similarly valuable contribu-
tion to the literature at both theoretical and empirical levels. As regards theory, it builds
on a fine-tuned understanding of the praxeological foundations of security community-
building which advances this cutting-edge research agenda in various subfields – from
security studies to EU foreign policy. These theoretical foundations are discussed in a
very instructive fashion and operationalised in an analytical framework that distin-
guishes between three practical mechanisms of security community-building, that is,
institutionalisation of multilateral venues, expansion of transgovernmental networks
and cooperation in crisis management. At the empirical level, Bremberg goes for a
‘tough case’ (p. 21). From all the troubled couples of neighbours straddling the EU’s
borders – involving an EU and a non-EU state – the one formed by Spain and Morocco
671760CAC0010.1177/0010836716671760Cooperation and ConflictBook reviews
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Book reviews
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