Abstract
How to understand and conceptualise the EU regional and global role and its international political identity is a highly controversial research issue. Far from being the result of renouncing a serious political science approach, to identify the EU as an ‘unprecedented’ power may pave the way to a conceptual innovation in international relations, linking political economy with an updated analysis of the new stakes of world politics. What is needed is to go beyond the international literature which has accompanied the transatlantic rift of 2002–7 regarding the Iraqi war. The realist perspective focuses on the EU as a fragile and powerless entity unfit to cope responsibly with new threats and responsibilities (Venus-EU versus Mars-US), whereas the idealist one emphasises the emerging ‘EU superpower’ or civilising power within global governance.1 At least as a starting point for an innovative research agenda, the notion of EU as an ‘unprecedented power’2 still appears to be more open and penetrating than the two above, in the process of conceptualising the longue durée evolution of a regional entity, which is also an international actor capable of changing the other’s behaviour.
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Notes and References
For the first approach see among others, see R. Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, London: Atlantic Books, 2003.
For the second one, see R. G. Whitman, From Civilian Power to Superpower? The International Identity of the European Union, London: Macmillan, 1998
U. Beck, Das kosmopolitische Europa, Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 2004
J. McCormick, The European Superpower, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
and, in journalistic format, M. Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21stCentury, London, Fourth Estate, 2005.
Among others, M. Telò, Europe: a Civilian Power?, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005
and J. Howorth, Defence Policy in the European Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
T. Padoa-Schioppa, Europe as a Civil Power, London: Federal Trust, 2004
and Z. Laidi, Norms over Force: The Enigma of European Power, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
J. Manners and S. Lucarelli, Values and Principles in European Foreign Policy, London: Routledge, 2007
and also J. Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe: a Contradiction in Terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40 (2), 2002, 235–58.
From an average of US$45bn between 1983 and 1988 to one of US$20-25bn between 1991 and 1999 (statistics from SIPRI). Inter-state conflict decreased from 39 (1979) to 29 (2001); nuclear warheads from 65,000 to 20,000. The military budget decreased from US$1.3bn in 1987 to US$750 million in 1997 (and has since gone back up to US$1.3bn in 2007 mainly due to the US defence budget growth in 2002–7).
F. Bergsten, ‘Globalizing Free Trade’, Foreign Affairs, 3, 1996, 105–20.
See also the observations on the socio-political contradictions of globalisation in the 1990s in P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalization in Question, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996
S. Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money, New York: New Press, 1998
Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998
I. Clark Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997
and R. Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the Twenty-first Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Francis Fukuyama (who largely contributed to this American ideology in the 1990s with his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs and the book The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press, 1992), admitted after September 11 in Le Monde and elsewhere that such an historic event necessitated a new periodisation.
James Rosenau, the clearest interpreter of this concept, increasingly insists on the notion of a ‘bifurcated system’ comprising two worlds of global governance and world politics. See E. O. Czempiel and J. Rosenau (eds), Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992
and ‘Governance in a New Global Order’, in D. Held and A. G. McGrew (eds), Governing Globalization. Power, Authority and Global Governance, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, 70–86.
A. Gamble, ‘Regional Blocs, World Order and New Medievalism’, in M. Tel ed.), The European Union and New Regionalism: Regional Actors and Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era, Farnham: Ashgate, 2007, 21–35.
K. Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, London: HarperCollins, 1995.
See also W. Reinicke, Global Public Policy. Governing without Government?, Washington DC: Brookings Institute, 1989.
The theoretical reference is to H. Bull, The Anarchical Society, London: Macmillan, 1977
and A. Tanaka, A New Medievalism, Tokyo: Nihon Keirai, 1996.
For example, international conferences and the exponential increase in the number of NGOs — estimated to be approximately 30,000 at the turn of the century — and their influence on governments.
R. Gilpin, ‘A Realist Perspective on International Governance’, in Held and McGrew (eds), Governing Globalization, op. cit., 237–49.
For example, the last-minute pressures to reach an inter-regional substitute, namely a free-trade agreement with Latin America and MERCOSUR in 2004, failed as well. It was realistically too late, despite the decline of the two main competing US inter-regional and bipartisan projects, APEC and FTAA, which started in the 1990s and came to a deadlock in the first decade of the new century.
The first application of system theory to IR, by Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Relations, is from 1957.
I. Kant, Théorie et pratique, Paris: Librairie philosophique Vrin, 1972.
European Union, Treaty of European Union (revision by the Amsterdam Treaty, 1997), art. 11 and 17.
J. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002
and J. Nye, Soft Power. TheMeans to Success in World Politics, New York: PublicAffairs, 2005.
A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Torino: Einaudi, 1975; he has inspired the Canadian school of International relations, namely Robert W. Cox, Stephen Gill and others.
G. T Allison focuses on the crucial weight of internal negotiation among pluralist institutional actors (The Essence of Decision, 1971); Th. Löwy classifies external policy decisions of a state along three main degrees of fragmentation/ polyarchy/concentration, according to more or less sensitive issues and policy fields (in World Politics, 2, 1964). J. Rosenau (New Directions of the Study of Foreign Policy, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987)
R. O. Keohane, and H. V. Milner (Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) combine foreign policy analysis, system-theory and socio-political research regarding public opinion, internal interests, decisionmaking procedures, institutional divisions, and other domestic factors shaping the state’s external relations.
C. Hill and K. Smith, International Relations and the European Union, London: Routledge, 2006. See Dedaration nl3 of the IGC 2007 regarding the CFSP, which should not ‘affect the current responsibilities of MS for the formulation and conduct of their foreign policy and … their national representation in third countries and international organizations’, notably the UN Security Council. And Declaration nl4 which claims that the ‘CFSP will not affect the existing legal basis, responsibilities and powers of each MS in relation to its own foreign policy’.
Maria Francesca Vencato, The Development Policy of the CEECs: The EU Political Rationale between the Fight Against Poverty and the Near Abroad, PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2007.
Gabineite do Premeiro Ministro, Presidency of the EU 2007, ‘Developing the External Action of the EU. New Instruments and Global Players’, including expert papers, proceedings of meetings with Chinese, Russian, Indian and Brazilian partners, joint official statements and the final paper, ‘Declaration on Globalization’, Lisbon, 2008.
V. A. Schmidt, ‘Comparative Institutional Analysis’, in T. Landmann and N. Robinson (eds), Handbook of Comparative Politics, London: Sage, 2008.
K. Nicolaydis and R. Howse, ‘This is my Utopia’, in J. H. H. Weiler, I. Begg and J. Peterson (eds), Integration in an Expanding European Union. Reassessing the Fundamentals, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 341–65. See also the excellent paper by Robert Keohane, ‘Realist and Institutionalist Theory After 9.11’, for the Advisory Group in Social Science and Humanities for the European Research Area, EU Commission DG Research, December 2004.
Transnational research networks are necessary to cope with such a complex analytical and theoretical challenge, a key issue for the development of a European vision of international relations and world politics. For example, the two following networks are financed by the 6th FP of the EU Commission (2005 to 2010): ‘Garnet (Global Governance, Globalization and Regulation. The Role of the EU)’, an NoE among 41 Universities (www.garnet-eu.org); and ‘Nesca’, a network between five European universities and five East Asian higher education institutions focusing on regional cooperation and inter-regional relations.
Thomas Diez, ‘Constructing the Self and Changing Others: Reconsidering “Normative Power Europe”’, Millennium, 33 (3), 2005, 613. Some concrete argument in favour of this thesis is provided by ‘Reform Treaty’ provisions stressing the commitment to the progressive improvement of military capabilities and committing civilian and military capabilities of all member states. See A. Duff, Opinion of the Committee of Foreign Affairs for the Committee on Constitutional Affairs on the Reform Treaty, 22 January 2008.
Multilateralism is an ‘institutionalized collective action by an inclusively determined set of independent states’; it is also defined as ‘persistent sets of rules that constrain activity, shape expectations and prescribe roles’ (Keohane, ‘Realist and Institutionalist Theory After 9.11’, op. cit.). ‘Multilateralism is an institutional form that coordinates relations among three or more states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct’ Q. G. Ruggie, Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 11). By European ‘multilateralism’ we understand a deeper form of collective transnational action and co-operation amongst states. It implies generalised principles of conduct and diffused reciprocity, and, in its European understanding, includes several degrees — regional, transnational and global — and various types of institutionalisation, from arrangements and regimes to international organizations.
R. O. Keohane, ‘The Ironies of Sovereignty’, in J. H. H. Weiler, I. Begg and J. Peterson (eds), Integration in an Expanding European Union: Reassessing the Fundamentals, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
This is why a large international literature has emerged over the past 15 years comparing’ EU with ASEAN, MERCOSUR and other regional groupings of neighbouring states; Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell, Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995
Edward D. Mansfield and Helen V. Milner, The Political Economy of Regionalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997
Bjorn Hettne, National Perspectives on the New Regionalism in the South (with Andras Inotai and Osvaldo Sunkel), New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000
and Global Politics of Regionalism: Theory and Practice (with Mary Fanell and Luk Langenhove), London: Pluto Press, 2004; R. Higgott, Démocratisation, Governance and Regionalism in East and Southeast Asia, London: Routledge, 2006
F. Laursen, Comparative Regional Integration: Theoretical Perspectives, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004; M. Telò, The European Union and New Regionalism, op. cit.
Why do we propose the concept of ‘new multilateralism’? Compared with the multilateral legacy of the UK-centred multilateral system, and with the US-centred system of Bretton Woods, the new multilateral tendencies are more binding and able to cope with a demanding transnational public opinion, focusing on fair trade, the fight against poverty, the environment, and human-rights protection. However, contrary to post-modern expectations, states still matter, even if they cannot be seen as the sole actors of multilevel global governance, which increasingly includes regional entities, private actors, civil society, and international organizations.
See the chapters by R. Higgott, A. Gamble and others in Telò, The European Union and New Regionalism, op. cit.
See the ACP-Cotonou Convention of 2000.
By’ strategic regionalism’, we mean an incipient civilian power, consciously and consistently playing as international catalyst of a better regulated and more legitimate globalisation and a less unstable world politics. See M.Telò, ‘Global Challenges and the Political Dimension of the EU External Action: the Key Issues’, paper for the Lisbon Agenda Group, Gulbenkian Foundation Lisbon, in the framework of the Portuguese Presidency, 2007.
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© 2009 Mario Telò
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Telò, M. (2009). The European Union: Divisions and Unity in European External Policies. In: Gamble, A., Lane, D. (eds) The European Union and World Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246188_3
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