Against the background of a sense of crisis in the European Union and in international politics, European Union Member States have since 2016 increased their cooperation within the Common Security and Defence Policy, for example, establishing the European Defence Fund. Scholars have long pointed out that the European Union lacks the necessary ‘hard’ military power to influence international politics, subscribing to and constituting an image of the European Union as not masculine enough. We are critical of these accounts and develop a different argument. First, building on insights from feminist security and critical military studies, we argue that the European Union is a military power constituted by multiple masculinities. We consider the European Union to be a masculine military power, not only because it uses and aims to develop military instruments, but also because of how militarism and military masculinities permeate discourses, practices and policies within Common Security and Defence Policy and the European Union more broadly. We argue, second, that the crisis narrative allows the European Union to strengthen Common Security and Defence Policy and exhibit more aggressive military masculinities based on combat, which exist alongside entrepreneurial and protector masculinities. These developments do not indicate a clear militarisation of Common Security and Defence Policy, but, rather, an advancement and normalisation of militarism and the militarised masculinities associated with it.

Introduction In her foreword to the 2016 Global Strategy for the European Union, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission (HRVSP), Federica Mogherini, proclaimed that the European Union’s (EU) ‘wider region has become more unstable and more insecure’ (EU, 2016: 3). Developments in and around Europe, such as US President Donald Trump’s critique of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the so-called migration crisis at Europe’s Southern borders, a supposedly resurgent Russia in the East, and questions about the EU’s military capabilities after Brexit, have all created a sense of crisis that seems to challenge the EU’s role as an international actor. At the same time, these ‘times of crisis’ have prompted a variety of new policy instruments in EU security and defence, among them the establishment of a European Defence Fund (EDF) (European Commission, 2019) and the launch of the process of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) (European External Action Service (EEAS), 2018a). European leaders have also expressed increased support for a more assertive EU Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron calling for a ‘real’ EU army. Some scholars have been quick to emphasise that these developments will not change the intergovernmental approach of CSDP (cf. Heisbourg, 2016). Others consider them evidence of a significant relaunch of the EU’s security and defence project (cf. Howorth, 2017). Many EU studies scholars have welcomed the EU’s latest efforts in defence, as these suggest that the EU is stepping up its role in international affairs at last. For example, in his foreword to a paper on PESCO, former Director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) Antonio Missiroli (2017: 5) pointed out that: the speed and determination with which the EU and its member states have (re)engaged on defence cooperation – well beyond the Common Security and Defence Policy proper – prove that Europeans are now becoming well aware of what it at stake in a rapidly mutating security environment. Missiroli writes that ‘for someone who has been in this business for 20 years [. . .], all this is no minor source of relief – even rejoicing’. Sven Biscop (2016: 431) stresses that against the background of mounting security challenges, the EU Global Strategy ‘does not come a moment too soon’. Similarly, Hylke Dijkstra (2016: 369) finds that ‘encircled by security crises, it is difficult to think of something more important than collective action with the aim of weathering the storm’. The Global Strategy ‘gets the diagnosis right’ (Dijkstra, 2016: 371). As Christopher Bickerton (2010: 214) points out, the study of CSDP has been characterised by a prescriptive concern with the EU’s ability to act in the world. Underpinning much of CSDP research is the question of why the EU fails to realise its potential in international affairs and how it can become a more effective or ‘serious’ (meaning, military) actor (cf. Allen and Smith, 1990; Hill, 1993). This prescriptive concern has influenced well-known debates in EU studies about the EU’s ability to act in the absence of common military capabilities. As part of these debates, some scholars have openly critiqued, or even ridiculed, the EU’s lack of ‘hard’ military power and its ability to influence international politics (Kagan, 2002), whereas others have emphasised the specific character of the EU as an international actor, and put forward that even without an army the EU makes a difference by means of its market power (Damro, 2012), its normative ability to ‘lead by example’ (Manners, 2002; Sjursen, 2006), or a combination of both (Holland, 1995). Indeed, those scholars who have insisted on a presumably distinct ‘civilian’ (Duchêne, 1972) or ‘normative’ (Manners, 2002) identity of the EU have argued that the absence of military capabilities should be seen as a virtue rather than as a sign of weakness. Within research on CSDP and the EU’s role in international security more broadly, most authors then concur that the EU lacks effective military means and that it is a small military power at best, thereby either constituting an image of the EU as impotent and not masculine enough or subscribing to the idea that the EU is a different kind of power that, even if it deploys military force, is less defined by its military capacity. What has been absent from the literature, with the exception of the work of Annica Kronsell (2016a, 2016b), is an explicit engagement with how the EU exhibits military masculinities and is constituted as a masculine military power. To address this gap in the literature, our article asks how militarism and military masculinities are inscribed in CSDP, particularly in the aftermath of the recent so-called times of crisis. We focus on CSDP because, while military masculinities increasingly circulate in EU policies beyond CSDP, this is where they are found most explicitly. Our argument is twofold. First, building on insights from feminist security and critical military studies on the relationship between war, militarism, and gender, we argue that the EU as an international security actor is constituted by multiple military masculinities. We draw on feminist work that has foregrounded the notion of ‘militarism’, defined by Stavrianakis and Selby (2012: 3) as ‘the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organised political violence’. This allows us to move beyond an understanding of military power as related to the (in)ability to engage in military conduct or the military capabilities international actors have or have not, towards an analysis of how military power and military masculinities are inscribed in CSDP discourse and practices. In so doing, we consider the EU to be a masculine military power, not only because it uses and aims to develop ‘hard’ military instruments, but also because of the ways in which militarism permeates political and social relations, discourses and practices – all of them also highly gendered – at the EU. We argue, second, that while the current crisis narrative allows the EU to strengthen CSDP and exhibit more aggressive combat masculinities, such developments suggest continuity rather than abrupt change. What we see today is not a clear militarisation of CSDP – as if it was not already shaped by military discourses, strategies and technologies – but rather an advancement and normalisation of militarism and the militarised masculinities associated with it. We find that within CSDP more aggressive combat masculinities have come to exist alongside entrepreneurial and protector masculinity (Kronsell, 2016a, 2016b). To study the specific form that EU militarism and military masculinities take in the context of crisis, we conduct a feminist discursive analysis of policy initiatives linked to CSDP (from the launch of the 2016 Global Strategy onwards), including the Battlegroups, PESCO, EDF, military operation Sophia and the European Peace Facility (EPF). We use official documents, speeches, reports, secondary sources, webpages, images and EU promotional material to study the production and legitimation of militarism and military masculinities within CSDP. While webpages, images and promotional material generally articulate militarism and binary constructions around masculine and feminine identities ‘more clearly than official documents’ (Kronsell, 2016b: 314), we contend that the ways in which these articulations are incorporated into formal and technical reports are just as important. Our argument proceeds in three steps. We first analyse academic debates on EU security and defence and call for a focus on militarism and military masculinities. Next, we draw on feminist scholarship in International Relations (IR) to introduce the concepts of military/hegemonic masculinity and their relevance for analysing CSDP. Third, we conduct a discourse analysis of key reports, policy documents and speeches on CSDP since 2016 to study how these sources invoke a particular sense of crisis and normalise military masculinities.

Conclusion We began our discussion by developing two related points regarding EU security and defence. First, empirically, we found that against the background of a widespread sense of crisis in the EU and in international politics, the EU’s Heads of States have increased their cooperation in security and defence. Second, theoretically and analytically, we took issue with the way in which the academic literature on CSDP has often taken a prescriptive stance, which combines the shared analysis that the EU lacks military actorness with the normative statement that the EU should develop military capabilities. Drawing on feminist security and critical military studies, we have argued that the EU should be considered as a masculine military actor, constituted and shaped by protector masculinity, and, also, increasingly, entrepreneurial and combat masculinity. While the presence of militarism within CSDP and European politics more broadly is not a new development, the crisis discourse that we have analysed allows for the further advancement of militarism and the militarised masculinities associated with it, and for the normalisation of the use and/or funding of military equipment and employment in other policy areas, such as migration or development. This normalisation of military power and military masculinities beyond the military domain proper and its consequences for people’s (in)securities requires further attention within academia and beyond.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Natalie Welfens, Anna van der Vleuten, Toni Haastrup, Henri Myrttinen, two anonymous reviewers and the organisers and participants of the GLOBUS workshop on Gender and EU foreign policy at University College Dublin for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), grant number 016.Veni.195.381 ORCID iD

Marijn Hoijtink https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8816-3351