Resilience Implementation in EU Foreign Policy: Results and Institutional Impact on Realization

The resilience concept has overcome a long interdisciplinary way before emerging as the main leitmotif of the 2016 EU Global Strategy. First developed in the field of ecology, this concept then spread to engineering, psychological and social sciences, preserving its core characteristic of the necessity to adapt but simultaneously obtaining new distinctive features, thus producing the variety of resilience understanding in academic works. Due to this variety of interpretations, the emergence of resilience as a new foreign policy concept of the European Union provoked a series of academic debates and publications on the theoretical characteristics of the concept itself and its possible consequences for the EU foreign policy. Nevertheless, these works did not provide a comprehensive assessment of the resilience phenomenon in the EU, focusing more on theoretical or practical aspects, but not paying due attention to the institutional features of the EU that influenced the implementation of the concept. Thus, this study was aimed at filling the existing research gap by presenting a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical, empirical and institutional features of resilience, therefore, providing clear answers to questions not only of what resilience means or how it manifests itself in practice, but also of why this concept did not lead to significant changes in EU foreign policy from the perspective of the historical neoinstitutionalism theory.