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.
