Reconciling Pragmatism with Idealism in the European Union's Security Cooperation with ASEAN.

• Author: Di Floristella, Angela Pennisi

This article reflects on the evolution of the European Union's (EU) security approach towards the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Despite the geographical distance between Europe and Southeast Asia, ASEAN has traditionally been one of the key pillars of the EU's foreign policy in Asia, with the partnership described as being "at the heart of the efforts to build a more robust regional security order in the wider Asia-Pacific". (1) The EU's gravitation towards Southeast Asia dates back to 1972, when an informal dialogue was established between the then-European Community (EC) and ASEAN, paving the way for the creation of one of the oldest group-to-group relationships in the world. While economic and trade relations between the two regional groups have been vibrant since the outset, there is persistent scepticism about the EU's ability to play a more active role in ASEAN's security domain. (2) Furthermore, security cooperation has been hampered by the disparity in the respective security approaches of the EU and ASEAN, both normatively and functionally. For historical and cultural reasons, ASEAN adopts the so-called "ASEAN Way", which is rooted in the principles of non-interference and respect for national sovereignty, and the practice of consultation and consensus-building to guide conflict prevention and management in Southeast Asia. (3) This is in contrast with the EU's preference for formal structures, institutions and legalistic criteria of cooperation. Moreover, the EU's efforts to promote EU-like institutional structures in ASEAN and its tendency to link issues of security and stability to the promotion of liberal values, including democracy, the rule of law, human rights and fundamental freedoms, have created a discontent on the ASEAN side, given the latter's professed principle of non-interference. (4) Under these circumstances, existing scholarship has generally characterized EU-ASEAN security cooperation as inherently problematic. (5)

Yet, in recent years the EU has shown a greater interest in strengthening its security ties with ASEAN. The 2016 European Union Global Strategy and Security Policy (EUGS) called for an increased security role for the EU in Asia. In May 2018, the former High Representative (HR) for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, announced that joint work on security was the most important area of growth for the EU in terms of expanding cooperation with Asia in general and ASEAN in particular. (6) The EU has also applied for observer status at the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting-Plus Experts' Working Groups (ADMM-EWG) in order to anchor its security role and commitment to ASEAN, while also expressing its keenness to participate in major Asian security forums, including the East Asian Summit (EAS). In light of these developments, it is reasonable to ask why and how the EU is seeking to strengthen its security relations with ASEAN. This question becomes even more salient in the context of the mounting challenges currently faced by the EU, including instability in the Middle East, tensions with Russia, the tragic spiral of armed conflicts in Libya and Syria, the brutal re-exposition of terrorism, Brexit, the European economic crisis, the rise of Euroscepticism among EU members and waves of refugees trying to enter Europe. Furthermore, the 2016 EUGS clearly urges the EU to prioritize security issues within the EU itself and its surrounding regions.

This article argues that in such a complex landscape dominated by the EU's dramatic domestic and external crises, and compounded by important shifts occurring in Southeast Asia, the EU has re-founded the basis of its foreign and security policy to ASEAN along the lines of "principled pragmatism". Since the release of the EUGS, the concept of principled pragmatism has been repeatedly mentioned as one of the novel operating principles of the EU's foreign policy. This article recognizes the utility of principled pragmatism as a conceptual and operational lens to analyse the recalibration of the EU's security policy towards ASEAN, which had begun with the 2012 release of the Guidelines of the EU's Foreign and Security Policy in East Asia before substantially taking off in the wake of the EUGS. The notion of principled pragmatism sheds an entirely new light on the extant scholarship regarding the EU's relations with ASEAN, which has thus far been premised upon a clear-cut duality between the EU's interests-oriented versus values-oriented approaches. Studies on the EU's economic policies towards ASEAN have observed how the EU's desire to increase its economic access to the region has led it to pursue an opportunistic, interest-based approach, even if such actions do not align with the core values of the EU. (7) At the same time, most scholarly contributions dealing with the EU's foreign policy towards ASEAN have primarily focused on the diffusion of European institutions and policies or investigating the role of EU norms, ideas and identities in shaping ASEAN. (8) Against this backdrop, principled pragmatism attempts to transcend the rigid divide between interests and norms by balancing the EU's interests and realistic commitments with its traditional liberal aspirations. (9) As noted by Nathalie Tocci, principled pragmatism suggests that the pendulum has "to move away from the outwards looking idealism of the early 2000s, without swinging all the way to the opposite end of defensive realpolitik". (10)

Taking into account the fact that the concept of principled pragmatism has so far been underexamined in the literature on EU-ASEAN security relations (with some limited exceptions, such as Eva Pejsova's work which underlined the emergence of principled pragmatism in the EU's policy for dealing with the South China Sea dispute), (11) this article seeks to contribute to the literature on EU-ASEAN relations in the following ways. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of principled pragmatism and operationalizes the concept in the context of the EU's security policy towards ASEAN. Second, it examines why principled pragmatism arose and how it is reflected in such a policy. Finally, the article seeks to elucidate some of the implications and controversies resulting from the EU's attempt to find a middle way between a pragmatic stance and a principled foreign and security policy towards Southeast Asia.

Conceptualizing Principled Pragmatism

Since the release of the EUGS in 2016, the notion of principled pragmatism has become a popular label to frame the EU's new foreign and security policy. The EUGS states that "principled pragmatism will guide EU's external action in the years ahead". (12) The concept is presented as an attempt to narrow the gap between aspirations and reality by reconciling the EU's core values and liberal principles with a pragmatic attitude predicated on the EU's economic and geopolitical interests. (13) As such, principled pragmatism is aimed at helping the EU overcome the dichotomy between realism and idealism by proposing a middle ground that blends its material interests with the safeguarding of its core values. As Sven Biscop put it, principled pragmatism represents a form of "realpolitik with European characteristics". (14)

As the concept suggests, principled pragmatism embodies two elements that are supposedly contradictory: pragmatism, on the one hand, and principles, on the other. In the academic literature, the concept of pragmatism has been defined in different ways, but pragmatists are, generally speaking, concerned above all with practical results. Pragmatists have a "can do" attitude and are thus impatient with those of a "should do" disposition who never seem to get anything done. (15) The core principle of the pragmatist tradition is the primacy of practice. (16) In this vein, a pragmatic approach recognizes the opportunities and limits of the real world and suggests that political actions should follow what is realistically possible, rather than what is desirable per se. (17) A pragmatic attitude does not pretend to aspire to the unachievable, and seeks to avoid generating expectations that cannot be fulfilled. Pragmatism, in the sense of being realistic about the reality of power and interests, is thus meant to inject a dose of realism into the EU's foreign policy. However, in proposing principled pragmatism as the new anchor of the EU's foreign policy, the EUGS makes clear that the EU's brand of pragmatism must remain tied to its core principles--the EU must not "act in the wake of epistemological agnosticism", (18) but should instead balance between its pragmatic needs and liberal values. This obviously raises questions about how the EU can reconcile these apparently conflicting elements. For instance, what should happen when the promotion of the EU's core values clashes with its economic interests? To this question, Juncos has argued that "the EU needs to be either pragmatic or principled, it cannot have it both ways". (19) In contrast, Tocci, the main author of the EUGS, has contended that the commitments to liberal principles and a pragmatic stance are not mutually exclusive, but instead stand in parallel to each other. (20) Tocci explains that, in seeking to be both pragmatic and principled, the EU can fashion a constructive approach to navigate a complex and volatile geopolitical environment which looks "at the world as it is, and not as it would like to see it". (21) This approach, in other words, invites the EU to accept the existence of different modes and practices of cooperation, thereby casting aside the idea of the EU as a model power to be emulated. It means eschewing the thinking--which had dominated the EU's approach to ASEAN in the 1990s and early 2000s--that the EU has lessons to offer that can be transposed on everyone, including ASEAN. (22) Along these lines, the EUGS states that "we will not strive to export our model, but rather seek...