ABSTRACT In this article I look at the 1970s debates between the member states of the European Communities and the European Commission regarding the criteria to be used to select European Development Fund (EDF) projects and the use of political conditionality in the first EEC development aid framework, specifically, the Lomé Convention. These debates are interesting for what they reveal in terms of EEC legitimacy and way of functioning as a new actor in the field of development aid and foreign policy. They demonstrate that the legitimacy of the European Commission – and of the EEC/EU as an external actor – remained linked to personal and client-based relationships with African heads of state. The effect of this was that instead of being able to impose its own norms and criteria (whether economic or political), the EEC was forced to compromise with and adapt to the norms and criteria of its African clients.
International democratic theory suggests that democratic states should act according to certain principles, values and rules. Even if such an approach often depends on circumstances, it should remain their objective, including in international conflicts. Recent literature on parliamentary diplomacy has also illustrated this situation with empirical examples, including in the case of French parliamentary diplomacy. Yet, in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts, existing literature shows numerous examples which contravene these accepted standards. In fact, they support anti–democratic regimes instead. In addition, many an academic writing on the subject appears to celebrate such a behaviour. This article will therefore unpack this French puzzle. Its aim is not to criticize the concept or practice of parliamentary diplomacy. Its objective is to highlight why there might exist a “dark side” to French parliamentary diplomacy. A cause for serious concern that has been largely ignored by academics and practitioners to date.
Tucker’s main argument is that it is possible to prevent future waves of illiberal democracies and that the continuation of current liberal democratic trends has an expiration date due to their self-destructive reliance on politics of passions expressed through populism. This book provides a cyclical view of illiberalism as a wave that recedes and returns, in this line of thought history rhymes with itself. Overall, the book contributes to the conversation by problematizing conceptualizations of populism as a movement of the poor, a pairing of liberalism with democracy and opens a conversation about the role of elites in the construction of illiberal democracies. The reader will find themselves reconsidering old notions and reassured that illiberal populist regimes are too unstable to last, and that liberal democracy will inevitably return. Further, the authors' recommendations constitute a toolkit for the minimization or avoidance of the next illiberal wave.
ABSTRACT This article contributes to the debate on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations. It does so by examining some of the ways in which the central ideational foundation of the Transatlantic area, namely “the West”, has become increasingly contested in a highly polarized US domestic discourse. By drawing on, and contributing to, the constructivist scholarship on Transatlantic relations, which argues for the importance of collective identities for long-term foreign policy orientation, the article examines how the notion of “the West” became increasingly politicized under Trump’s presidency. The article then examines the Democrats’ understanding of the US place in the world and shows that the US commitment to Europe is premised and contingent upon a joint commitment to democracy, rather than an imagined ethnonationalist bounded community. As an identity-conferring concept between the US and Europe the paper shows, “the West” no longer fulfils a unifying function in US mainstream public discourse.
ABSTRACT This article searches for the existence of emotion norms in the enlargement process of the EU. It argues that there is an appropriate emotion that needs to be expressed through the coordination and communication discourses of the European Commission and of the (European) Council. The article displays these norms through a critical discourse analysis of the enlargement strategy papers of the European Commission and the European Council conclusions in the 1997–2002 round of enlargement towards the Central and Eastern European countries. This analysis identifies the topoi that collectively form these emotion norms of enlargement. Afterwards the article analyses the same type of documents on the Western Balkans between 2014 and 2020 through periods of stalling and reinvigoration to demonstrate the resonance between these institutional discourses. It concludes that progress in the enlargement process takes place if both types of discourses conform to the emotion norms of enlargement.
This article investigates the involvement of the European Parliament (EP) in the preparations of the new EU external action financing instrument (2018–2021). From an explorative perspective, we analyse how the EP contributed to the changes in EU development policy discourse that prepared this fundamental reform, and to the reform itself by promoting its priorities and preferences during the negotiations. We propose three potential research directions on the EP's role in European development policy and the changing function of this field within external policies. The analysis of the negotiation process describes how the EP used its co-legislative role to introduce changes to its other two development policy roles: budgetary control and supervision. The complex nature of the new instrument and the perspectives of the co-legislators create uncertainty on how these changes will affect the EP's influence on the EU's development policy, and how the instrument will reform established development policy approaches.
ABSTRACT This Special Issue examines the nexus between emotions and norms in EUropean foreign policy. Theoretically, building on the existing IR-literature on emotions, the Special Issue distinguishes between “emotion norms” (which refer to the appropriate emotional expressions) and “emotional norms” (which refer to the norms that trigger emotional responses). Empirically, the Issue illustrates the different ways in which emotion(al) norms are used at different levels of EUropean foreign policy, i.e. EU, state and subnational levels. The collection of articles aspires to study the ways in which emotions shape the EU’s external relations focusing on the actors (who mobilize emotions, who are constrained or contested by emotion(al) norms), processes (through which various feelings are produced internally or transmitted externally) and the content of norms linked to emotions. Methodologically, this Special Issue illustrates how emotion(al) norms can be studied through the use of different discourse methods.
ABSTRACT This article examines President Donald Trump's South Asia Strategy, which places Afghanistan in a broader regional context. During Bush and Obama’s administrations, the regional policy was Afghanistan–Pakistan (Af-Pak) centric, and while under Trump’s regime (2017–2021), Afghanistan, Pakistan and India seemed to be given more weight. The United States (US), a leading proponent of regional security in Afghanistan, has found itself in a difficult situation while making a balancing choice between regional adversaries such as the Sino-Pak Axis and India, whose conflicting interests in Afghanistan have always created a Gordian Knot-like problem. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, some competing views emerged with regard to the practicability of Trump’s policy. Against this backdrop, this article attempts to examine the following question: Would Trump have been able to cut the Gordian knot if he had achieved his strategic objective of peace and regional security in Afghanistan?
ABSTRACT The first two decades of EU counterterrorism policy are emblematic of the emergence of an internal-external security nexus. This has occurred through the EU’s collective securitization of terrorism as a transboundary threat that blurs the traditional divide between internal and external security requiring multidimensional and transboundary EU counterterrorism policies and practises. The EU’s status quo discourse of terrorism as primarily a national and internal security threat to be dealt with by domestic security agencies has transformed into strategic discourses, policies and practices that frame terrorism as a transnational threat to the EU requiring a transnational response that integrates internal and external policies, institutions, and capabilities. While institutional silos, turf wars, and differing institutional cultures continue to hamper the routinization of a transboundary response, this collective securitization of terrorism as a transboundary threat, within a wider internal-external security nexus, is reshaping the nature of the EU as a security actor.
Efforts to disrupt, deter and dismantle terrorist financing networks have become the key elements of the EU's post-9/11 counterterrorism policy. This reflects the prevailing wisdom which suggests that successfully executed counterterrorist financing (CTF) measures mitigate the first-mover advantage terrorists otherwise hold. Using EU’s own goals from its action plans and counterterrorism strategies as the baseline criteria, this article examines how successful the EU has been in implementing the relevant aspects of various UN Security Council resolutions, the special recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, and its own CTF measures since 9/11. Reflecting the constant evolution of sources and methods of terrorist financing, the importance of cooperation with private financial institutions, and using publicly available data, the article also examines the impact of the EU CTF measures on terrorist financing in and beyond Europe.
This article argues that the European Union (EU) can make a difference in multilateral negotiations, yet its external impact is likely to be more significant not when it has a high internal capability, and the systemic context is favourable, but rather when a policy entrepreneur (be it the European Commission alone or in concert with some member states) acts purposefully to push the EU's common position forward. To reach this conclusion, it traces the trajectory of the aid effectiveness norm through a series of high-level forums held in the 2000s and early 2010s. The illusion that the EU could shape global discourse and affect decisions in international settings did not last long, as its attempts to enhance the quality of aid were replaced in the mid-2010s by a stronger emphasis on the promotion of its economic and political interest.
EU development policy conforms reliably to a stable and predictable policy-cycle between 1957 until the early 2000s. After that, we see a shift towards more explicitly frame-based outputs utilising the mechanism of policy nexuses. This article, drawing on a range of primary policy documents and key case studies, illustrates the difference between the first era by which EU development retains a stable process within the boundaries of the policy cycle and the subsequent shift to the use of ‘framing' to bind a series of separate activities to the core of development policy via the use of ‘policy nexuses'. The article concludes with reflections on the resulting seminal changes to the EU’s overall approach to development, and its implications for the EU as a development actor.
The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by the United States has initiated debates about its reverberations on regional and global security. While it could have been a rational policy by the United States on the national level, this action has carried along innovative features defining what is a legally acceptable self-defence that international law would also accommodate. Namely, if the United States can unilaterally and retroactively interpret the meaning of international law in such a way, there are other powers like Russia or China who may wish to take advantage of such a tactic and expand the formerly relatively stable meaning of law unilaterally in line with their own national interests. Russia has previously given high importance in following the Western path and precedencies, so even when the current thesis is hypothetical and with high odds in upcoming years, it is worthy of consideration and probability analysis.
The 2016 decision of the UK electorate to withdraw from the European Union drew to a halt a decades-long process of shared Irish/UK Europeanisation. Brexit also posed near existential challenges to the Irish state across the public policy spectrum, initiating something of a debate on Ireland's strategic position vis á vis the UK and EU26 and the future of the Irish peace process. This paper seeks to assess the emotional content of these debates surrounding the impact of the Brexit crisis on bilateral British–Irish relations and the mediating role of Ireland's EU membership in the Union's subsequent negotiations with the UK. The article will argue that Brexit shattered newly developed and instantiated emotion norms, resulting in some reversion to earlier historical emotional patterns but then also a reversal in emotional stereotypes which had long define the bilateral relationship.
ABSTRACT This paper studies how emotional expressions of enmity and their meanings conveyed by negative emotions against migrants are used by right-wing populists to provide the emotional pattern that makes their potential electorates unite around them. It takes Germany and its Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as its case study and focuses on the AfD’s emotional expressions of enmity towards migrants/refugees -like labelling all of them as “terrorists” and “criminals”- in its party campaign visuals including catchy slogans along with disturbing visuals. The paper argues that these visuals are used to reinforce and complement the emotion norms of amity like solidarity and unity between “pure Germans” and the AfD as their claimed representative against the “others”. The analysis conducted here suggests that the AfD instrumentalizes migrants both in domestic politics as perpetrators of economic, societal, and security-related threats and in relations with non-EU countries as objects of fear and terror.
The European Union's external relations have long embraced development policy, which has affected the advancement of cooperation with countries and regions in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, Asia, and Latin America. While foreign aid has been one of its main tools, the notion of development has been changing, requiring the EU to adjust or, otherwise, risk further endangering its image, reputation, and effectiveness as an international actor. Nevertheless, development remains a crucial concern, at least until 2030, in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. This context comes with a new set of requirements for the EU, namely, moving towards the pursuit of international partnerships and international cooperation to tackle global and regional challenges. Hence, the central question for this volume is to what extent and how the EU's development policy and external relations have adapted to meet the changing requirements of global development.
The joint visit by European Council President Michel and Commission President von der Leyen to Turkey in April 2021 sparked a heated discussion on the EU's diplomatic protocol rules. The reason: the seating arrangements provided when the two met with Turkish President Erdoğan. Michel and Erdoğan sat on chairs, while von der Leyen was given a sofa, implying a lower rank. This triggered a diplomatic incident between the EU and Turkey and increased intra-institutional tensions in Brussels. This article analyses EU protocol rules and explains the order of precedence of its leaders in foreign policy. It argues that EU protocol rules lay out a clearer hierarchy for its leaders than what was implied in the aftermath of the incident. However, the rank that the Commission President holds when he/she is representing the EU externally together with the European Council President requires clarification since their respective foreign policy competencies are different.
The discourse on international criminal law enforcement took an interesting turn when, in 2016, three African states announced their withdrawal from the ICC, punctuated by rhetoric, both from within the AU and a selection of African Heads of States, on the need for an alternative African-wide criminal court. Researchers, over the years, have examined the strained relationship between the ICC and AU. However, very little, if any, research has examined the discourse from the perspective of regionalism, and whether a regional criminal court, which would be the first of its kind, is in line with recent regional strides within Africa. This article seeks to make an important contribution to the literature by examining past developments between the AU and ICC. It argues that, its feasibility notwithstanding, there is a strong case for viewing Africa's move for a regional court from an alternative lens of regional governance and control.
Recent voices have challenged the Eurocentric gaze in IR . Western hegemony over the discipline has been accounted due to structural, disciplinary, language, institutional reasons, and the monopoly over knowledge production by the West. The big bangs of IR, 1919 and 1648, have played a role in the construction of a Eurocentric IR discipline which is still presumed to be a ‘White man's burden' which needs to theorize the non-West. Conversations within the IR academe to recalibrate IR are incestuous, and the ‘dialogue' is going on within the ‘conclaves' of the various national schools, rather than across the various ‘silos' within the IR community. A more appropriate ‘lens’ to make the study of IR ' Global' would be to adopt an eclectic model and to strengthen perspectives like postcolonialism, Contrapuntal reading, and Marxist perspectives to bridge the gap between the core and the periphery and reign in the silenced narratives.
ABSTRACT Drawing upon Judith Butler’s conceptualization of vulnerability, precariousness and precarity, this paper sheds light on the ontological foundation of the vulnerable human condition during the outbreak of the pandemic. While inspiring examples of cooperation among nations during the pandemic bring to the fore a transnational ethics of respect for differences, the pandemic turns out to be the unfortunate breeding ground for confrontation among some nations, highlighting an abdication of ethical responses that the vulnerability of proximate others demands. In this paper we look at the case of Palestine, examining how the solidarity of the Palestinian people to respond to the pandemic is imperiled by the Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation, we contend, disavows vulnerability and the ethical response it entails, where the crisis of the pandemic serves as a revealing context for oppression of the Palestinians who exist under the threat of displacement and the annexation of the West Bank.
