Military Threats to and Resilience of the EU’s Future Members

This article provides a survey of the military instruments that third state actors might use against the nine EU candidate countries (CCs) of the Western Balkans (WB) and Eastern Neighbourhood (EN) in ways that could delay or derail their integration into the European Union. It proposes indicators that might be used to assess their resilience against these instruments and applies this framework to determine a composite military-security resilience index (low–medium–high) for each CC-threat combination. Additionally, it assesses the EU’s support for military-security resilience-building in the two regions through the application of its own foreign and security policy tools. Finally, in the context of the dramatic turn in Europe’s security situation driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine, it examines how aspects of both the response of the CC and the changes in the EU’s support to them in this domain might be interpreted through control and protean power theory. It concludes that while these responses can largely be understood as manifestations of control power, they have, at least in the cases of Ukraine and the EU, demonstrated some protean power which has produced substantial rewards. This might serve as inspiration for a much stronger commitment by the EU to military-security resilience building in the WB and EN.