The Europeanisation of Development Policy

Maurizio Carbone, Jan Orbie, Maurizio Carbone, Jan Orbie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367889272
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351703352
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Despite the growing academic interest in the development policy of the European Union (EU) and the booming literature on Europeanisation, the impact of Europe on national development policies has largely been overlooked. By exploring Member State interactions with and through the EU level across a number of different issues, this volume looks to herald a new research agenda. The picture emerging from the empirical evidence is that of modest degrees of Europeanisation. Resistance to Europe can be attributed to different factors, some operating at the domestic level (e.g. established cultural and normative structures, different types of veto players) and others related to the existence of several groupings with alternative policy prescriptions (e.g. Nordic donors, like-minded countries, former colonial powers). Even where there are signs of convergence (or divergence) between the development policies of the various Member States, they may be due to other influences rather than pressures coming from the EU. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Politics and Society.

Europeanisation through the prism of regime complexity: the case of French aid

Gordon D. Cumming

ABSTRACT

The challenge of isolating the impact of Europeanisation is an arduous one, which explains why analysts have preferred complex rather than parsimonious explanations of this phenomenon. Given this predilection among scholars, it is surprising that the concept of regime complexity has not been meaningfully applied in the Europeanisation literature. This article lays some initial groundwork for assessing whether regime complexity has weakened or reinforced the impact of Europeanisation, with reference specifically to French aid. This article begins by highlighting the limited impact of Europeanisation on French assistance in the early decades of European integration. Next, it demonstrates how the climate became more propitious as from the late 1990s following domestic reforms, increased European Union (EU) pressures and the emergence of an aid regime complex. Drawing on elite interviews, it shows how France has become more receptive to Europeanisation, while also using regime complexity to reframe EU norms. Finally, it explains why and how France has resisted Europeanisation and explores the wider significance of the French case and of regime complexity.

Introduction

The concept of Europeanisation cuts across debates between intergovernmentalists and liberal institutionalists and between rationalists and constructivists. Yet it has given rise to its own debates. One of these, on the nature of Europeanisation, has been widely rehearsed (e.g. Harmsen & Wilson, 2000) and need not be revisited here. Another, more central to this study, revolves around the challenges of disentangling the effect of Europeanisation – that is, ‘the impact of the EU on its member states’ domestic spheres’ (Börzel & Risse, 2006, p. 485) – from that of domestic variables and internationalisation. The task of isolating the ‘net EU impact’ (Levi-Faur, 2004) is an arduous one, which helps explain why scholars have preferred complex rather than parsimonius explanations (Exadaktylos & Radaelli, 2009, p. 526). Given this predilection, it is surprising that the concept of ‘international regime complexity’ has yet to be meaningfully employed in the Europeanisation literature.¹

The regime concept is already familiar to International Relations scholars and refers to ‘implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner, 1983, p. 1). Regime theory generally emphasises the role of a single institutional point bringing states together by reducing the transaction costs of rule-creation and increasing the reputational damage of rule-breaking (Orsini et al., 2013, p. 29). However, a more recent contribution to thinking involves ‘regime complexity’, that is, ‘nested, partially overlapping, and parallel international regimes that are not hierarchically ordered’ (Alter & Meunier, 2009, p. 13).² Regime complexes are marked by more than one institutional focal point and exhibit divergence regarding the norms governing them.

This article lays some initial groundwork for assessing whether regime complexity has reinforced or weakened the impact of Europeanisation, with reference specifically to the official development assistance (ODA) structures and policies of a leading European Union (EU) member state (MS), France. In so doing, it provides an original take on regime complexity as a tool for identifying the effect of EU pressures.³ It also contributes to the debate on whether regime complexes increase or reduce pressures for norm compliance (Drezner, 2009). Finally, it brings MSs back into the study of EU development policy and sheds light on the French aid programme, which is a hard case for testing Europeanisation (Claeys, 2004), given that France was the original architect behind the common European development policy and has retained the capacity and willingness to resist EU pressures on its bilateral aid (Balleix, 2010).

In order to make this contribution, this article examines the limited Europeanisation of France’s aid polity (or structures) and policy over the early decades of European integration. Next, it identifies factors that have facilitated Europeanisation since France’s aid reforms in the late 1990s, focusing on declining French influence, enhanced EU pressures and the emerging aid regime complex. Drawing upon 18 elite interviews in Paris, London and Brussels, this study then assesses the EU’s enhanced, but still limited, impact on French ODA. It explains why and how France has resisted Europeanisation by drawing on veto players and strategic ambiguities created by regime complexity. It concludes by exploring the wider significance of the French case and of regime complexity.

Research parameters

Before proceeding, it is worth noting, first of all this analysis does not assume that Europeanisation should take place or that it is being systematically pursued by Brussels. Second, it does not enter into the debate between rationalists, who see MSs acting out of a logic of consequentiality, and constructivists, who emphasise a logic of appropriateness (March & Olsen, 1998). Instead, both perspectives are drawn on, even if greater emphasis is placed on France’s rational pursuit of the ‘national interest’. Third, while the focus here is primarily on top-down Europeanisation, it is impossible, in the case of established MSs such as France, to disregard instances of uploading (France → EU) and crossloading (e.g. France plus MS → EU). Indeed, the choice of a regime complexity perspective actually lends itself to a multi-dimensional take on Europeanisation.

Fourth, the emphasis is on the EU’s effect on France’s aid policies and polity, since these are areas where there is evidence of Europeanisation. The impact on the third ‘p’– the politics of French policy-making – is harder to demonstrate. To illustrate, while the French business lobby has adapted its lobbying to secure lucrative EU aid contracts, with 30 French businesses now having offices in Brussels, it continues to prioritise France’s export credit guarantee department as a funding source (Karpeles, 2011, p. 8). Equally, while French non-governmental organisation (NGO) platforms have benefited from EU funding, they have continued to prioritise their own development agenda and have kept up that their criticism of EU subsidies and dumping (CRID, 2003). Significantly too, ‘the level of Europeanisation of the French Parliament still appears [ … ] modest [ … ]. Outside of the small club of EU Committee members, French MPs [ … ] hardly ever deal with Community matters’ (Rozenberg, 2011, p. 16).

Finally, this research does not set out to capture the myriad of norms, forums and strategies associated with the aid regime complex. Instead, the focus is limited to the consequences of this complex: has it reinforced pressures for Europeanisation or helped France avoid EU-backed norms by drawing upon the following strategies: ‘forum shopping’ (selecting or creating an amenable alternative venue), ‘norm-stretching’ or ‘shifting’ (bending rules or reframing norms in advantageous ways) and ‘regime-shifting’ (altering the premise on which a regime is based)?

The impact of the traditional aid regime over the early post-colonial decades has been examined by scholars, such as Lumsdaine (1993), who show how this was dominated by a hegemon, the US-backed World Bank, with its influential development nostra, and supported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD)/Development Assistance Committee (DAC), with its peer reviews, and the United Nations (UN), with its aid volume targets. The European Commission assumed a norm-taker or ‘cash dispenser’ role (Petit, 2013, p. 175), while around twenty DAC state donors adhered informally to collective regime norms. The transition to a regime complex began in the mid-1990s as more diverse donors entered the fold. These included philanthropic organisations, such as the Gates Foundation (created in 1997), countless Southern and Northern civil society organisations (CSOs), multinational companies, diasporas, former aid recipients like the central and east European states, the Gulf states and other emerging powers, such as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

Early traces of Europeanisation

Space constraints do not allow for a detailed chronological account of the Europeanisation of French aid over several decades (1957–97). Instead, this section provides a thematic overview of areas where European pressures might be expected to have impacted on French aid structures and policies (specifically on ODA volumes, quality and coherence).

To begin with EU pressures on French aid structures, the emergence of a common development policy from the outset of the European project was bound to elicit an institutional response from the French government. As well as establishing a permanent representation in Brussels, France created, in 1963, a system of information exchange between the French Cooperation Ministry and the European Commission. It also centralised responsibility for ministerial dealings with Europe in the hands of the Secrétariat général du comité interministériel (SGCI), a unit based in the Prime Minister’s office (Harmsen, 1999, p. 88). These structural adaptations were, however, minor compared to France’s impact on Europe’s aid architecture. In this context, Claeys (2004, p. 113) contends that the European Commission was originally built ‘to French administrative specifications’, while Dimier (2013, p. 32) argues that the European Development Fund (EDF) – which finances Europe’s aid and trade conventions with former colonies – ‘reproduced the mechanisms of the Fund for Economic and Social Development, which France set up in 1946’ for its bilateral assistance programme. Equally, Bué (2011, p. 86) suggests that the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Development was ‘an institutional anachronism’, concentrating on France’s ex-colonies.

Turning to aid policy, here the EU’s influence is harder to discern. Thus, while the European Commission did persuade France to increase bilateral pledges to successive EDFs (Bretherton & Vogler, 2006, p. 116), it did not press meaningfully for an overall rise in French aid volumes. It follows that the ODA increases that did occur under French Presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac had less to do with the EU than with France’s geopolitical ambitions and readiness to work towards regime norms such as the UN’s development assistance target of 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI). The EU also did little to encourage France to improve its aid quality, taken here to refer to untying (the delinking of development assistance from exports) and aid concessionality (the grant-element of ODA). Once again, the fact that improvements did take place in aid quality – France untied 45.3 per cent of ODA 1988 compared to 38.5 per cent in 1974–75, while also stabilising the grant level of its ODA at around 90 per cent over this same period – should be attributed less to EU demands than to small-scale campaigns by French NGOs and peer review pressures from fellow DAC donors (Cumming, 2001).

The EU was more proactive in calling for closer coordination between the Commission and the MSs. In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty introduced guidelines on the 3Cs (coordination, complementarity and coherence) and stipulated, in Article 130x, that ‘the Community and the Member States shall coordinate their policies on development cooperation’. In response, France could point to priorities, such as Africa, infrastructure and rural development, which it shared with the Commission. In reality, however, these had been French priorities long before the EU adopted them, and there was little sign that France was about to fall into line behind the Commission in its ambition to coordinate MS aid policies (Petit, 2013, p. 175).

Overall, the limited impact of Europeanisation must be understood in terms of France’s dominant influence in Europe prior to the UK’s accession in 1973. It was after all the French who appointed every European Development Commissioner until 1984 and who had ‘instigated the entire “development cooperation” element of European policy’ (Frisch, 2013, p. 110) by making the creation of the Association a condition of its membership of the EU. France’s dominance meant that it had the institutional capacity and technical expertise not only to resist soft EU pressures and pursue a Gaullist ‘France first’ policy instead (Wong, 2006, p. 205), but also to use the EU as a platform to resist norms arising out of the World Bank-led aid regime. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, French policy-makers legitimised their ad hoc, neo-colonial aid practices in Africa by observing that Jacques Ferrandi’s pragmatic, intuitive approach to project selection, had become ‘“the doctrine” of DG VIII’ and offered ‘a way of distancing [the EU’s] action from that of other donors such as the World Bank, regarded as far too “technocratic”’ (Dimier, 2013, p. 38). In the 1980s, too, French officials used the EU’s partnership model, its support for elements of the New International Economic Order, and its reservations regarding the Bank’s structural adjustment programmes (Interview with Dieter Frisch, 2011), to bolster France’s stance against the emerging orthodoxy – the pensée unique, which rejected state-directed development in favour of the market – and justify its continued subsidisation of the Franc Zone, a protectionist currency-support mechanism, mainly for ex-French African colonies (Wilson, 1993).

The new context for Europeanisation

The late 1990s offered a more propitious climate for Europeanisation, thanks to domestic French reforms, greater EU pressures and the political space opened up by the emerging aid regime complex. On the domestic front, the French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin undertook the largest ever overhaul of French aid. By 1999, Jospin’s government had merged the Cooperation Ministry (effectively the Ministry for Francophone Africa) into the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA), transferred lead responsibility for aid to a more professional agency, the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), and drawn a line under France’s much-criticised neo-colonial aid practices, linked to FrançAfrique (Meimon, 2007). In so doing, Jospin was not so much Europeanising as normalising French ODA by aligning it to New Public Management (NPM) principles, which, though not originally European, were championed by the EU in the 1990s (Rozenberg, 2011).

These reforms pointed to a new awareness that France could no longer tackle single-handedly the challenges of Africa and that it would need to work increasingly through the EU, even if that resulted in French policies being ‘at least partially Europeanized’ (Charillon & Wong, 2011, p. 19). With French ODA under budgetary pressure from the Maastricht process, public spending reviews and the 2008 global financial crisis, there was a growing recognition that the EU, as a ‘development champion’, was a ‘rational choice’ (Bué, 2011, p. 85) for France as a declining great power. The EU offered a multiplier effect, since as one MFA official put it, ‘Where France gives 15 million euros, the EDF gives 300 million’ (Interview, 2014). It was ‘symbolically useful’ too, providing a cover for unpopular collective actions such as aid sanctions and Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs, Europe’s free trade agreements with different African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) regions), a voice in forums where France was under-represented, and a legitimising force for difficult domestic cutbacks. In th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Europeanisation of development policy
• 1 Europeanisation through the prism of regime complexity: the case of French aid
• 2 An end to Nordic exceptionalism? Europeanisation and Nordic development policies
• 3 Italy’s development policy and the domestic politics of Europeanisation: why Europe matters so little
• 4 Europeanisation should meet international constructivism: the Nordic Plus group and the internalisation of political conditionality by France and the United Kingdom
• 5 Europeanisation of aid budgets: nothing is as it seems
• 6 The Europeanisation of budget support: do government capacity and autonomy matter?
• 7 Europeanisation and the EU’s comprehensive approach to crisis management in Africa
• 8 Europeanisation in Aid for Trade: the impact of capacity and socialisation
• 9 Conclusions: Europeanisation, globalisation or (re)nationalisation? Revisiting development policy in the European Union
• Index