European Union Conditionality

Abstract

This article examines political conditionality on trade and aid practiced by the European Union (EU). At the end of the 1980s, the concept of political conditionality joined economic conditionality as a subject of legitimate discussion and practice among the United States, Japan, Europe, and some of the international institutions in which they hold the major voice. The EU is a central focus here because conditionality is a form of foreign economic policy that falls under the competencies of the EU itself. The question I want to pose, in a rough way, is this: what explains the character of EU foreign policy in the area of conditionality? There has been relatively little theoretical discussion about the EU as a foreign policy actor, in part because of the difficulty of putting the EU in a familiar conceptual box that generates expectations about the driving forces behind foreign policy and in part because the evidence of “EU foreign policy” behavior is at present still thin. But looking more closely at EU proto foreign policy or presumptive foreign policy could have several valuable payoffs.