Introduction
The external action of the European Union (EU) represents one of the most dynamic areas of European integration. Within the span of only a few decades, the Union’s portfolio of external activities has been considerably expanded. This has first and foremost been visible in numerous EU competence gains resulting from treaty reforms whereby member states have transferred sovereignty – including the possibility to engage in EU external action – to the Union. Such competence gains have concerned the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), including the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), but also many other domains such as trade, the environment, justice and home affairs, energy or culture. The Lisbon Treaty has given some of these domains a specific boost, while clarifying the EU’s competences (Dony 2009). Where Articles 2–6 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) list and categorize the Union’s competences, the Treaty’s policy-specific provisions regularly contain clauses inviting the EU to establish external activities in those domains. To give but two examples, in environmental matters – a field of shared competence – Article 191 TFEU stipulates that the Union shall promote ‘measures at international level to deal with regional or worldwide environmental problems’; and even in culture – a policy area in which the EU’s competence is only supplementary – Article 167(3) TFEU states that ‘[t]he Union and the Member States shall foster cooperation with third countries and the competent international organisations in the sphere of culture’.1 In addition to the changing treaty provisions, the dynamism of EU external action is also visible in informal practices, with the Union taking on external activities in areas that were traditionally either member-state prerogatives and/or simply internal policies.
This book provides an original and innovative look at the phenomenon of an expanding EU external action portfolio. It does so by focusing not on ‘classical’ foreign policy, which in the EU context is mainly embodied in the CFSP, and also not on the EU’s external action in the equally ‘classical’ areas of international development and trade. Instead, it analyzes a selection of increasingly important fields that are less in the limelight, namely those originally internal policies in which the EU has gradually developed – and is still developing – external action. These areas generally include asylum and migration, competition, culture, economic and monetary affairs, employment and social affairs, energy, environment, gender, health, higher education, internal security, research, sports and transport. A simple glance at this list already indicates that these are predominantly areas in which the EU had very limited competences (with the exception of competition) under the Treaty of Rome. Ever since, however, EU action in general, and gradually also external engagement, in these sectoral or cross-cutting policies has been proliferating.
Evidence for the proliferation of activities in these areas is first provided by the exponential growth of external sectoral policy strategies, as illustrated by three recent examples: the 2014 European Energy Security Strategy contains strong language about EU external action complementing its internal energy-related activities (European Commission 2014), as does the 2015 European Agenda on Migration regarding mobility (European Commission 2015), whereas a 2016 Joint Communication sketches the contours of an EU cultural diplomacy (European Commission and High Representative 2016). Second, if one considers the organizational charts and agendas of key EU institutions, there is nowadays hardly a Directorate-General working on sectoral policies in the European Commission that does not feature a Directorate dedicated to international affairs, and even the Union’s agencies – such as Frontex or the European Research Council – undertake activities involving external engagement with non-EU actors. Third, the agendas of relevant European Parliament committees and sectoral Council configurations abound with items relating to the external aspects of internal policies. Altogether, such strategies and institutional developments are matched by expanding EU practice in these policy areas, involving numerous Commission officials operating in the sectoral policy fields, but increasingly also staff from the European External Action Service (EEAS), including the EU Delegations in third countries and to international organizations.
It is therefore not a surprise that these developments have also been highlighted in the framework of the recent debate about the EU’s Global Strategy and the Union’s determination to become a more ‘joined-up’ global actor. The June 2015 Strategic Review, published by the EEAS, noted for instance:
A joined-up approach is needed today, not only in external conflicts and crises, but in virtually every aspect of the EU’s presence in the world. This puts a premium on the various actors and instruments of EU external action working in synergy…. Today, on top of diplomatic instruments and regional strategies within the remit of CFSP, specific EU policy areas and departments (environment, trade, development, energy, justice and home affairs, transport, culture, science and research) are all developing their own strands of diplomacy. While welcome, this enhances the need for coordination among member states, between EU actors, and within the CFSP framework proper.
(EEAS 2015: 18, emphasis added)
The Global Strategy itself, issued a year later, re-iterated the importance of such new forms of diplomacy by remarking that ‘[n]ew fields of our joined-up external action including energy diplomacy, cultural diplomacy and economic diplomacy’, needed to be accommodated, and that the EU ‘must become more joined-up across internal and external policies’ (EEAS 2016: 31). What this means is illustrated with regard to migration, on which the Strategy calls for making ‘different external policies and instruments migration-sensitive – from diplomacy and CSDP to development and climate – and ensur[ing] their coherence with internal ones regarding border management, homeland security, asylum, employment, culture and education’ (ibid.).
These quotes from the most recent and central EU foreign policy documents underscore the importance of the organic growth of policy areas in which the Union originally had limited external ambitions. These areas are now increasingly and deliberately developed from not just a sectoral perspective, but – especially since the creation of the post of the High Representative and the EEAS – a foreign policy perspective. These documents equally indicate that this trend has meant that the borders between internal and external EU policies are increasingly in flux as new external activities are added to the Union’s portfolio. As a result, many policies can no longer be considered as either clearly internal or clearly external. Rather, there are important external dimensions to virtually all of the EU’s policies. By consequence, these latter must become more joined-up if the Union is to achieve the objectives set out in its Global Strategy.
The book starts from this prima facie observation that EU external engagement, especially in areas other than the CFSP, development and trade, is profoundly changing. This observation of increased levels of activity is paralleled by quite a limited number of studies on what – in one of the few textbooks in which the subject is treated – is referred to as the ‘external dimensions of internal policies’ (Keukeleire and Delreux 2014: 12–13, 222–241). In a single chapter, this book touches upon the areas of energy; environment; freedom, security and justice; health and demography. Arguably, the first three of these are also – individually – the most widely covered subjects in the EU studies literature when it comes to originally internal policy domains in which external activities have developed, as further discussed below. Many other areas, including EU external action concerning culture, higher education, research or gender, remain however largely understudied. With the exception of the literature interested in the external impact of EU rules, comprehensive studies that compare these areas and attempt to understand and explain the rationale for their expansion have been scarce. This literature, while asking different questions related to the mechanisms underpinning the Union’s effectivness, does provide some insights on EU external engagement that will be taken up later in this volume (see, for instance, Falkner and Müller 2014; Lavenex 2014).
Despite the relative lack of academic reflection on these developments, the manifold ways in which EU internal and external policies are linked, and in which a more joined-up EU engages externally based on originally internal policies, do certainly merit greater scholarly attention. This book addresses these issues by pursuing two main objectives. Its first research objective is to provide a better understanding of these developments by analyzing a select number of areas in which EU external action has emerged over time. To this end, the book investigates, on the one hand, the Union’s capacity to act in these domains by scrutinizing the degree of EU ‘actorness’ in the studied policy fields (Bretherton and Vogler 2006). Actorness is considered a key analytical concept to reflect on novel areas of EU external engagement, and this volume operationalizes and further develops this concept. On the other hand, the book documents and categorizes the forms and extent that EU external engagement has taken in the studied policy fields. EU external engagement is here understood as any form of interaction – whether through deliberate action or not – between the European Union, that is, EU institutions and bodies or EU member states acting on behalf of the EU, and the outside world, typically third countries or international organizations and regimes, but also non-state actors. To study EU external engagement, the conceptual framework developed in Chapter 2 introduces a typology of forms that range from the mere radiation of the Union’s ‘presence’ to the development of EU ‘sectoral diplomacies’.
The second research objective pursued within this book is to explain the emergence, forms and extent of the EU’s external engagement. It concentrates on why the EU has engaged externally in a policy field at all and why it has done so in the way it has. In so doing, the book places particular emphasis on explaining trends of expanding EU action, which is to some extent indicative of deepening EU integration, at a time of nationalist challenges across the EU, best embodied in the ‘Brexit’ negotiations.
In a nutshell, the book examines how and why EU external engagement has expanded in scope, and how and why this has affected the relations between its internal and external policies.
While the list of domains in which originally internal EU policies have gradually developed external dimensions is, as argued above, rather long, the book concentrates on a subset of particularly important and dynamic policies. The selection made in this book distinguishes between three sets of policies. First, it focuses on several cases of policy domains in which the EU has comparatively early on started to develop external activities, which have since been consolidated and become subject to, at times extensive, scholarly analysis. One longer chapter provides an overview of these fields, covering the external dimensions of the Union’s internal market as well as EU external engagement on competition and the environment. Its external engagement regarding gender equality, as a long-standing and cross-cutting issue, is also discussed in this context. Second, the book examines several cases of policy areas in which the external dimensions of internal policies have most recently undergone considerable changes as a result of internal and external challenges: the EU’s external economic and monetary policies in the wake of the euro-area crisis, its most recent plans of bolstering its external energy policy in the framework of the Energy Union, and its attempts at reinforcing its external asylum, migration and border management policies, especially in the context of the 2014–2015 ‘refugee crisis’. A third set of cases comprises policy domains in which the emergence of EU external engagement is most recent or has lately been considerably stepped up. This trend can primarily be observed in what one might consider ‘soft power’ domains such as science and research, culture, higher education, and sports, each of which is covered by a chapter. Together, these cases provide for a revealing panorama of EU external action beyond CFSP, development and trade. Cases of EU external engagement in originally internal policy domains were selected in order to treat policies that are in different stages of development regarding their external dimensions, thus allowing for coverage of a sizeable and representative sample of the types of policies in which the book is interested.
This pragmatic, problem-rather than theory-driven case selection logic is in line with the overarching rationale of this edited volume, which starts from an empirical rather than a theoretical puzzle, namely the observed proliferation of EU external activities in fields with originally EU internal policies. The approach chosen here has been designed to tackle the related cognitive interests of better understanding and explaining these policy developments. To design a suitable research strategy, we find it most useful to take inspiration from pragmatist thinking about social sciences research, embodied in the notion of ‘analytical eclecticism’ (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009; Katzenstein and Sil 2010). Analytical eclecticism represents ‘a problem-driven approach featuring the extraction, adaptation, and integration … of discrete concepts, mechanisms, logical principles and interpretive moves normally embedded in … research traditions’ (Sil 2009: 649). Rather than imposing the limitations that formal theory-testing brings or relying solely on an in...
