As a team of advisers craft the EU’s new foreign and security policy — known as the EU Global Strategy — on behalf of EU High Representative Federica Mogherini, one has to wonder what shape this important new strategy will take and whether it will pay anything more than lip service to the underlying causes of instability and discontent in the world today.
As current global challenges — such as migration, climate change, terrorism and slow economic growth — gain in importance, will the EU lose sight of the causes in its efforts to tackle the symptoms?
At the root of many of these challenges are human rights violations, which manifest themselves in poverty and inequality, but also in insecurity. That is when the world starts sitting up and taking notice. As former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wisely said, “We will not enjoy security without development, we will not enjoy development without security, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.”