Conceptualizing the EU Model of Governance In World Politics (original) (raw)
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JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2009
Officials who toil for the European Union (EU), looking outwards from their base in Brussels, would be justified in feeling a little like Harry Potter: 'No one understands me'. Of course, the EU has now been the subject of sustained, serious academic attention, commensurate with its role in European political and economic life, for more than 30 years (in English, and longer than that in French and German). The EU studies community has shed considerable, even impressive light on how this 'unidentified political object', in the words of Jacques Delors, works in practice. Yet, turnout in the European Parliament election fell again in 2009. Eurosceptic parties, again, made gains. Every once in a while, someone in the quality press makes a game attempt to explain why the EU exists and what it does. 1 Yet, le grand public in Europe seems not to know or care. Ordinary citizens beyond Europe even less: there has never been an opinion poll, to this reviewer's knowledge, that has ever shown that a majority of Americans has even heard of the European Union. These three books, each in different ways, try to satisfy our 'primordial need to get a handle on the EU' in such a way that might enlighten curious non-specialists but also add to our acquis académique. 2 Two of these volumes-by Hix and Menonseek to reach audiences beyond the EU studies community. The other-edited by * I am grateful to Elizabeth Bomberg, Christopher Hill, Susan Orr and Helen Wallace for comments on earlier drafts. I am, of course, alone responsible for the final product. 1 The EU's 50th anniversary in 2007 prompted a number of such analyses. See '50 reasons to love the European Union', The Independent,
EURASIA, 2019
The EU’s governance of its international relations sets a very interesting challenge, based on two unique elements: The first, refers to the position of the EU as a global actor in international affairs, which allows it to set standards of governance, suitable for any society, in order to meet the needs of the 21st century, based on the concepts of cooperation and coordination of actions, within the framework of EU policies and thus highlighting the EU’s nature as a system of multilateral governance. The second element, is the sui generis nature of the EU as an legal entity, in the international reality: The EU lacks the statehood status of other actors, such as the USA, China or Russia, as it does not have a number of essential structural features of a state (no fixed territory, no clearly defined centre of authority, no coherent demos, etc) and this particularity is exemplified to the field of the European Common Foreign and Security Policy, as the EU Member States are allowed to act outside the EU framework (as they do very often), either formally or informally. The institutional and legal framework set by the Lisbon Treaty has introduced major changes in the organisation of the external relations of the Union. Thus, before examining any proposed variations in the governance scheme of the EU international relations, it is necessary to attempt a more careful approach of this scheme, taking into account the structural and operational elements of the EU as set by the Lisbon Treaty, and their performance vis-à-vis the challenges posed by the constantly changing and demanding international environment.
Introduction: The EU as a Global Actor and the Role of Interregionalism
Journal of European Integration, Vol 23, No 3, 2005
This article introduces the topic of this special issue, namely the study of the EU as a global actor and the role of interregionalism. It starts with mapping out the general theme and the key questions that guide the issue, such as: to what extent are regions becoming actors' of world politics; what is the strength of interregionalism in the EU's foreign policies towards regions and across sectors; why is interregionalism being pursued and who are the actors driving such policy; and what are the implications for world order and global governance? Regiontoregion interactions are no novelty, as such, but they have only recently started to emerge on a more comprehensive scale. Interregionalism is related to changes in world order and needs therefore to be historically situated. The authors suggest that interregionalism needs to be related both to globalisation and to the restructuring of the nationstate, but above all to the regionalist movement'. In the second section, the emergence of interregionalism is presented from an historical perspective and the concept of interregionalism is discussed. The article ends with a brief overview of the structure and content of the special issue as a whole.
Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci., 2005
■ Abstract The study of the European Union (EU) has been transformed during the past decade, and three distinct theoretical approaches have emerged. The first approach, which seeks to explain the process of European integration, has largely abandoned the long-standing neofunctionalist-intergovernmentalist debate in favor of a rationalistconstructivist debate reflecting broader developments in international relations theory. A second approach, however, has rejected the application of international relations theory in favor of comparative politics approaches which analyze the EU using offthe-shelf models of legislative, executive, and judicial politics in domestic politics. A third and final approach sees the EU as an emerging system of multi-level governance in which national governments are losing influence in favor of supranational and subnational actors, raising important normative questions about the future of democracy within the EU.
The European Union: What Kind of International Actor?
Political Perspective, 2011
The contested nature of the EU‟s role, status and impact as an international actor is clearly demonstrated in the literature. From this three broad categories of analysis emerge: realist, civilian power and normative power.This article offers an analysis of each of these, rejecting the realist critique as too narrow and state-centric, and arguing that an approach based purely on an examination of the EU‟s capabilities is insufficient when seeking to explain its international actorness. Instead, it contends that the most appropriate basis for analysis is through a framework that draws on both the civilian and normative power approaches. These encapsulate both wherepower exists within the EU in terms of policy-making and policy instruments,and how it sets out to exercise this power in practice. To illustrate this, thearticle examines two important but contrasting areas of foreign policyactivity: economics, with a focus on regulatory and competition policy, andsecurity. These demonstrate that the EU has much greater scope to act,and a clearer international identity, in those policy areas where internalintegration is more advanced, but that even where not, the EU is stillcapable of significant if smaller-scale international interventions. It therefore argues that new, alternative approaches to analysis of the EU's international actorness are necessary that move beyond the state-centric paradigms that currently predominate.
The European Union and International Governance: Still on the Path to a Global Power?
Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy Journal, 2014
The European Union represents an artificial construct built on the same pattern of formation of the nation states, being defined as „the imaginary political community of Europe (McNamara, 2011). The dynamic evolution of the European Union from an economic entity to a supranational political entity continues to draw a series of critics due to the fact that it represents „an unusual entity, whose principles and constitutional status are ambiguous and incomplete (Ericksen and Fossum, 2004, p.436). This article investigates: on the one hand, the way in which the process of globalisation and the emergence of the European project have changed the relationship between the nation-state and its citizens; and, on the other hand, the EU’s relationship with it’s most important stakeholders and supporters: young Europeans. This article seeks to offer, from the perspective of young Romanians, a complex approach concerning the EU’s role in global governance on an economic, social, political and se...
This chapter starts from the assumption that the predominant theoretical perspectives used so far to study the power of the European Union (EU) are not sufficient to grasp the full extent to which the EU's external power constitutes a complex and multi-faceted process that encompasses structural dimensions. In particular, it assumes that the literature on the EU's external power lacks analyses that account for both the relational and the structural level on which (the EU's) power is exerted, and the interplay between the two levels (Bossuyt 2010, 2013). By fixating on narrow, micro-level factors, the extant literature risks overlooking less obvious aspects of the EU's power, including structural aspects, and thus underestimating the EU's external leverage.
The study of the EU as an international actor - Bringing the outside back in
2015
Concerns on EU-centrism in EU foreign policy analysis have become more frequent in recent years. In contrast to the mature debate in International Relations, however, a systematic toolbox for diagnosing and remedying this problem is still lacking. This article’s contribution is twofold. First, it proposes a new typology of five approaches to foreign policy analysis, giving conceptual body and nuance to the debate on EU-centrism. It draws on publications on EU-China relations to further illustrate the proposed categories. This typology can be used for scrutinizing existing analyses, as well as for shaping new research projects. The second part of the article applies this typology in a meta-analysis of post-Lisbon EU foreign policy scholarship. To this end, it analyses a built-for-purpose dataset of 482 articles, which covers all work on EU foreign policy published in 2010-2014 in seven key journals. It finds, first, that academic work on EU foreign policy is indeed rife with EU-centr...
The EU and Contested Statehood in its Near Abroad: Europeanisation, Actorness and State-building
Geopolitics, 2019
The main purpose of this Special Issue is to interrogate the role of the European Union (EU) as a state-builder in its Near Abroad. 1 It aims to make a threefold contribution to the existing literature. Firstly, it provides working definitions on contested statehood and state-building, paying particular attention to how their properties map onto the EU's own policy tools and the (diverse) nature of the conflicts with which it seeks to engage. Secondly, it engages with three sets of distinct conceptual literatures that are not often cross-fertilised: (i) the international relations scholarship on contested statehood and state-building; (ii) conceptualisations of EU 'actorness' in international affairs; and (iii) the literature on the external dimension of Europeanisation and the use of conditionality as a tool of projecting EU power to partner countries. Thirdly, it borrows from the literature on political geography in order to build an interdisciplinary perspective on EU geopolitical imaginations and the geographical dimensions of the EU's border expansion and crisis management. In this context, we aim to open a dialogue with political geographers whose valuable insights in this field are often overlooked by political scientists (Agnew 2013; Murphy et al. 2004; O'Loughlin 2000; Clark and Jones 2011). Thus, the central aim of this collection is to explore how the hybrid setup and the unique set of institutional, ideational and policy attributes of the EU affect processes of statebuilding in its near abroad. This introductory article acts as a scene setter for the key theoretical and empirical themes addressed in this Special Issue. It maps the range of EU state-building instruments, the factors that constrain/facilitate the role of the EU as state-builder as well as issues that affect the temporality and spatiality of EU action. In addition, we seek to delineate the analytical boundaries of contested statehood, peace-and state-building before moving into the debate on EU actorness, and Europeanisation. We conclude with an overview of the contributing articles and their intellectual complementarity in addressing the key themes set out in this issue.