The dominant debate in EU foreign and security policy treats the EU’s action on the global stage as binary: it either speaks with one voice or it fragments into competing national positions. This framing obscures the ever more visible reality that unity and consensus are not synonymous, nor are they the only enablers of EU external action. This paper introduces a theoretical framework that positions EU unity not as the absence of internal conflict, but as the product of how such conflict is managed. The central insight here is that successful cooperation does not require MS to converge on preferences or achieve formal consensus. Instead, what varies across combinations of external pressures for and internal costs to act collectively is the mode and intensity of conflict management, which produces different patterns of complementarity.

Complementarity - understood here as the degree to which the actions of EU supranational institutions and Member States reinforce rather than contradict each other politically, strategically and operationally - is not uniformity. It allows the EU to escape consensus paralysis by permitting differentiated action, managing rather than resolving internal conflict through flexible coordination, and preserving strategic and operational convergence even when political agreement is incomplete. This bestows on the EU the capacity to assume different forms as a global actor, from scattered to unitary through pluralist.

The paper then traces how complementarity emerged in the EU’s initial response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, where the Union demonstrated remarkable unity despite lacking full consensus on military support. It examines how the combination of external demand for a united front and internal costs of disjointed action created incentives for Member States and institutions to develop flexible arrangements that preserved functional collective action without requiring unanimous agreement on all actions. This case contributes to understanding current developments in European security by revealing that EU action and actorness in crisis response depend less on achieving formal and unanimous agreement than on managing conflict through complementary pluralism.

This research aims to analyse EU’s actorness by elaborating and revealing the limits of collective securitization of the EU regarding 2015 refugee crisis and Libyan crisis (2011 – 2020) in testing EU’s actorness on the naval operations in the Mediterranean namely Operations Sophia & Operation Irini. Analysing the dominant discourse and speech acts of the member states which contributes the operations and their alignment with the discourse of the relevant EU institutions, this research, attempts to define the depth of collective securitizations depicting the relations between member states and EU institutions in time of crisis upon the cases of refugee crisis (2015) and Libyan crisis. Particularly, the Libyan crisis and operation Irini which was launched in 2020, 9 years after the fall of Kaddafi regime and long-lasting civil wars shows a unique securitization process which was getting collectivized in years and legitimized with UN security council decision while Operation Sophia did not have any UNSC mandate and was a case of externalization of borders due to ship wreck tragedies in Mediterranean. This comparative work on two significant crises in the Mediterranean reveal diverse internal actor dynamics in the securitization process. However, in order to better understand the EU’s actorness in action, this research focuses on two naval operations which would be regarded as concrete end results of collective securitization processes. At this phase of the research, the author embraces Bretherton and Vogler’s conceptualization of actorness which enables the researcher to evaluate not only presence and opportunity, but also the capability of the EU as a collective security actor in the Mediterranean. As a result, this research does not only present a new theoretical conceptualization employing the actorness approach to securitization studies, but it also employs this novel theoretical framework to empirical cases of two EUNAVFOR MED Operations which provided an insight to readers to question the EU’s actorness in a wider empirical perspective.

The paper presents interim findings from an ongoing two-year research project and examines the role of discursive reframing in the European Union's response to the deterioration of the European security environment post-2022, focusing on the European Commission's role as a central player in building the legitimacy of EU action in the field of security and defense. The analysis starts from the hypothesis that the Russian-Ukrainian war did not generate a new EU commitment in the sector, but rather accelerated processes of re-legitimization of European intervention already underway within an institutional architecture that, as the panel synopsis emphasizes, was designed for peacetime conditions.

Through a qualitative approach based on process tracing and discourse analysis of strategic documents and institutional communications, the paper reconstructs how the conflict allowed the Commission to reframe security as an area of European political responsibility, strengthening certain aspects of EU actorness at the symbolic and discursive levels (this paper will focus on internal aspects of actorness, such as authority, autonomy, cohesion, and credibility). However, this acceleration also highlighted structural tensions between strategic ambition, available policy tools, and the coordination capacity of European security governance.

The paper shows how reframing the legitimacy of European action on security has enabled the Commission to rapidly expand the scope of EU intervention, legitimizing new initiatives and policy instruments in the context of the conflict. At the same time, the analysis highlights how this discursive expansion has anticipated – and in some cases exceeded – the coordination and implementation capacities of existing governance, exposing tensions between institutional narratives, available tools, and consensus among Member States. The paper suggests that these gaps represent a key element in assessing the sustainability of the current European security adaptation.

The term “hour of Europe” was used by Glaurdić (2011) to describe the optimism and ambition of the European Community to resolve the crises of the 1990s independently, within its own continent. The wars in the former Yugoslavia represented a critical test for the Maastricht Treaty (Stuart and Mountcastle, 1994) and for the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Today, thirty years later, the CFSP is once again being tested by the war in Ukraine (Genini, 2025). This new crisis revives long-standing questions about whether Europe’s “time” has finally come and whether the EU is capable of addressing security challenges on its own continent. From the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 to the Strategic Compass in 2022, the EU has sought to respond to these challenges by defining and strengthening the CFSP.

While existing research has primarily focused on crises and EU documents to analyse whether they have advanced CFSP or exposed its limitations (Wessels and Klein, 2013; Biscop, 2022), or has addressed the legal challenges of their implementation in relation to member states, NATO, and the UN (Blockmans and Koutrakos, 2018), this study shifts the focus to how the epistemic community (political, professional and other actors who influenced the formation of policies) understands and defines the CFSP and the Common Security and Defence policy (CSDP) (as an integral part of the CFSP). Although research on epistemic communities and the CFSP/CSDP exists (Howorth, 2004; Cross, 2013a), comparative and diachronic approaches remain underrepresented (Cross, 2013b).

This paper adopts a comparative diachronic approach to analyse the epistemic community’s perceptions of the CFSP during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and during the war in Ukraine. The Maastricht Treaty and the Strategic Compass serve as two key analytical milestones. Empirical material will present institutional records, private archives of prominent actors, and oral histories of EU officials involved in the CFSP from the Historical Archives of the European Union at the European University Institute. In addition, analysis of secondary sources (official EU documents, academic journals, and professional publications) together with ten semi-structured interviews with the epistemic community, will provide insight into how knowledge-based experts with policy-relevant knowledge (Haas, 1992) define the CFSP.

The paper is guided by two research questions: (1) how does the epistemic community define the CFSP during the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the war in Ukraine?; and (2) which factors influenced these definitions across the selected periods?