The European Union as a Global Actor

Charlotte Bretherton, John Vogler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415282444
• eBook ISBN: 9781134458813
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive, up to date and theoretically informed text examines the full range of the European Union's external relations including the Common Foreign and Security Policy. It look at the increasingly important part the EU plays in global politics. The authors argue that the EU's significance cannot be grasped by making comparisons with traditional states. Issues covered include:
· the status, coherence, consistency and roles of the EU as an actor, and what being an actor means in practice.
· how the field of trade relations forms the basis of the EUs activities
· the EU in global environmental diplomacy, North-South relations and in relation to the Mediterranean and East/Central Europe
· the EUs controversial relationship to the Common Foreign and Security Policy and defence.

1 Conceptualizing actors and actorness

It is because foreign policy is widely associated with nation states that the EU is overlooked as an international political actor by many who study international relations.

(Ginsberg 2001: 12)

It is true that, in the International Relations (IR) literature, there has been both a neglect and an underestimation of the EU’s role in world politics. This reflects two factors. First, the considerable influence of traditional state-centric approaches to IR, which has served to direct research and shape the perceptions of researchers. Second, a related tendency to focus attention upon a limited range of external activities considered to comprise the ‘high politics’ of traditional foreign policy – encompassing, primarily, the activities of foreign ministries, diplomats and militaries. A state-centric worldview, combined with a focus upon those policy areas where the EU might be considered least effective, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that the EU is not (or not yet) an actor. And, over the years, many commentators have so concluded (Bull 1983; Hill 1993; Zielonka 1998).

Recently, however, a number of authors have explicitly rejected the state-centric approach and narrow focus of traditional IR, with its concentration on the formal institutions and policy outcomes of the CFSP process. Hazel Smith, for example, highlights the ‘staggering effect’ of state-centric approaches, which succeed in excluding all that is significant and distinctive in the EU’s external activity (Smith 2002: 9). Similarly, Karen Smith focuses upon ‘what the EU actually does in international relations’ – which she identifies as promotion of regional cooperation, human rights, and democracy/good governance; conflict prevention and the fight against international crime (Smith 2003: 2 and passim). Roy Ginsberg, too, in his evaluation of ‘the extent of the EU’s international political influence’, departs significantly from traditional IR approaches (Ginsberg 2001: 15). The empirical findings of Ginsberg’s extensive research accord with our own initial hypothesis concerning the cumulative impact of the EU. Ginsberg found the EU’s external political influence to be substantial, leading him to the conclusion that conventional depictions of the EU, by IR scholars, as ‘economic giant – political pygmy’ are invalid (Ginsberg 2001: 277–9).

These important studies provide a relatively comprehensive overview of the scope and impact of EU external activity. Nevertheless, significant omissions remain. In particular they retain an approach to external policy which is ‘primarily political and security-related (as opposed, for example, to international environmental protection or the promotion of sustainable development)’ (Smith 2003: 13). Given the extensive discussion of notions of environmental security in recent years, this exclusion of environmental issue areas from the domain of politics/security is still redolent of the traditional foreign policy agenda.¹ Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter 4, it is in the field of environmental diplomacy that particularly strong claims are made for the importance and effectiveness of EU action. Hence, our concern to assess the cumulative impact of the EU’s external activities, demands that we examine all of the policy areas in which the Union is involved.

Our central concern, however, is not to analyse the scope and influence of EU external activity, important and demanding as these tasks are, but to consider the extent to which the Union has become an actor in global politics. Since the EU is a unique, non-traditional and relatively new contender for this status, conceptualizing its international roles, or ‘actorness’, presents many challenges. We develop an approach to actors and actorness that enables us to treat the EU as unique, in terms of its character and its identity, and also as part of an evolving multi-actor global system. In particular, given the relative novelty and rapid development of the EU’s external activity, we are concerned with processes of change. Key questions thus become – which internal and external factors have permitted, promoted or constrained the development of the EU’s roles in global politics; how and to what extent is the EU perceived as an actor by its various ‘audiences’?

In attempting to answer these questions we have found particularly useful a social constructivist approach that conceptualizes global politics in terms of the processes of social interaction in which actors engage. These formal and informal processes shape the evolution of actors’ identities and provide contexts within which action is constrained or enabled.² Before elaborating upon this approach, however, we locate our arguments within the wider, historical debates in International Relations – which have in turn contributed to the construction of understandings about the roles and identity of the EU.

Our discussion begins with a brief examination of the relatively formal approach to actorness in International Law. Subsequently, treatments of actorness in the IR literature are reviewed, and an assessment made of behavioural (agency focused) and structural approaches to analysis. We then consider the contribution of social constructivist explanations focusing upon the co-constitution of structure and agency in a process of structuration (Giddens 1984). Finally, drawing upon constructivist approaches, we outline our approach to analysis of EU actorness based upon the interrelated concepts of opportunity, presence and capability.

Actorness in International Law

A formal answer to the question ‘how do we recognize an actor?’ is provided by Public International Law. This, by definition, focuses upon the inter-state system, and has developed its own formal concept of actorness in terms of the notion of legal personality. As Coplin (1965: 146) argued, International Law has too often been treated exclusively as a system of restraints upon state activity, rather than as a quasi-authoritative system of communicating the assumptions of the state system to policy-makers’. Foremost amongst these assumptions, since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 formally inaugurated the modern state system, has been the notion of the sovereign territorial state as the subject of International Law, and associated recognition doctrines. Only states could make treaties, join international organizations and be held to account by other states. Legal actorness confers a right to participate, but also to be held responsible by other actors, and to incur obligations.

Whereas for several hundred years there may have been a reasonable correspondence between the legal framework and the political realities of international life, by the mid twentieth century the ‘Westphalian assumptions’ were under challenge. The first formal recognition of this came with the 1948 International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision on the legal status of the United Nations, in the context of the organization’s right to present a claim for damages in respect of the assassination of its mediator in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte. The Court established that the UN had international legal status, but that this was not equivalent to that of a state:

By applying the well-known principle of the ‘specificity’ of corporate persona, the UN and by extension all international organizations are recognized as having the necessary and sufficient capacity to exercise the functions which have been devolved to them by their charters. If IGOs (Intergovernmental Organizations) are in fact governed by international law, distinct from the members which constitute them, they do not enjoy the whole range of competencies which are accorded by law to states.

(Merle 1987: 293–4)

On this basis the European Community achieved legal personality, although its formal status has been that of an intergovernmental organization and it is entitled to act only in areas of legally established competence.

Creation of the European Union, upon entry into force of the Treaty of European Union (TEU) in November 1993, introduced complications for the accordance of actorness in formal, legal terms. The TEU established the Union as an overarching framework comprising three ‘Pillars’, a political compromise which facilitated partial integration of foreign and security policy (Pillar II) and aspects of internal state security (Pillar III), alongside the existing European Community (Pillar I). As a consequence of the political sensitivity of the Pillar II and III policy areas, the TEU did not accord legal personality to the Union. Hence the Union, unlike the Community, cannot conclude international agreements. Not surprisingly this has proved a source of confusion to third parties. However, the Constitutional Treaty, agreed by Member States in June 2004, accorded legal personality to the Union (Article I-7).

This dynamic process of attaining legally sanctioned actorness might be described in terms of the interaction of institutional/legal structures and political agency, in a process of ‘structuration’, where International Law both reflects and shapes the evolution of practice. Certainly there has been an ongoing dialectic between the assertion of rights by bodies such as the EU and the understandings that inform the responses of other members of the international community. This process is evident, too, from the manner in which the EC came to be accepted as the successor to the Member States as a party to certain international agreements. Under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) it was informally accepted as a player representing the contracting parties. It only became a party in its own right, alongside the Member States, with the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994 (Macleod et al. 1996: 235–6). In other areas where a common policy applies, such as international fisheries agreements, the EC is a direct successor to the Member States.

A similar dynamic can also be seen to operate in reverse, in that there is a tension between external demands that the EU should play an active role in the international system and reluctance on the part of Member State governments to accord competence to the EC in areas considered sensitive domestically. Competence is the EC term for ‘powers’, and can be defined as:

… the authority to undertake negotiations, conclude binding agreements, and adopt implementation measures. Where competence is exclusive it belongs solely to the Community to the exclusion of the Member States. Where it is concurrent either the Community or the Member States may act but not simultaneously.

(Macrory and Hession 1996: 183)

Disputes relating to the extent of competence have been evident, to a greater or lesser degree, in all the policy areas we discuss.

The importance of evolving practices in the complex and dynamic processes surrounding attribution of formal legal status reminds us that, while it is necessary to have an understanding of actorness as ascribed by International Law, it is hardly sufficient. Moreover, there is no necessary correspondence between the achievement of legal personality and actorness in behavioural terms. Weak states may have full legal status but are insignificant as actors, while bodies such as the European Union can fulfil important functions without possessing legal personality. Nonetheless, the law continues to have significance in so far as it provides an institutional context which contributes to shared understandings concerning who may act and the appropriateness (or otherwise) of actors’ behaviour.

Actors and actorness in International Relations

In conventional International Relations the answer to the question ‘how do we recognize an actor?’ is essentially the same as that given by the lawyers: statehood. The question of actorness has always been a fundamental one for students of IR, even if the concept itself has not been subject to the kind of scrutiny that its significance would seem to merit. It is fundamental because the term actor is used as a synonym for the units that constitute political systems on the largest scale. Actors, here, are akin to the players in a theatre – the dramatis personae. The attribution of actorness in this sense will determine what is studied.

The classical, or Realist, approach is state-centric, leading to a focus on the international (really inter-state) political system. Other actors, such as intergovernmental organizations and transnational business corporations, may be admitted but their functions are seen as essentially subordinate to those of states. While, in some respects, this approach resembles that of International Law, it departs from it in significant ways. Thus Realism provides an essentially political analysis in which power differentials between states are a central focus. Ultimately, the actors of interest to Realists are powerful states.

From the 1970s pluralist approaches challenged the simplicities of Realism. By identifying a range of significant units, in which non-state actors were not necessarily always subordinated to states, they portrayed an alternative ‘mixed actor’ (Young 1972) or even a ‘world’ or ‘global’ political system (McGrew and Lewis 1992; Bretherton and Ponton 1996).³ The relative inclusiveness of such approaches reflects the condition of world politics at a time when Realist state-centric analyses, with their focus upon ‘superpower’ relations, appeared inadequate to conceptualize a world greatly complicated by the emergence of what Keohane and Nye (1977) describe as complex interdependence.

During the post-Vietnam period, when United States economic and even military predominance appeared to be in question, policy-makers within the European Community began actively seeking to enhance the external policy capabilities of the EC, in particular through a system of foreign policy coordination, known as European Political Cooperation (EPC), initiated in 1970. The abrupt ending of the Cold War, which posed a major challenge to IR scholars and, indeed, to practitioners, exposed the inadequacies of the EPC system. The re-emergence of armed conflict in Europe in the early 1990s, and fears of widespread political instability in Eastern Europe, suggested a significant role for the EU as a regional security actor. For scholars in the fields of IR and Foreign Policy analysis, this aspect of the Union’s external activity has subsequently been the primary focus of investigation. In principle, at least, the EU’s emerging external role could be accommodated in a mixed actor system.

In practice, however, attempts in the IR literature to categorize the actors in world politics have not been notably successful in accommodating the EU. It has been categorized as an intergovernmental organization (Keohane and Nye 1973: 380; Rosenau 1990) in ways that failed to capture the Union’s multi-dimensional character. In other similar exercises the EU has been disaggregated; in effect, appearing as several actors. Alternatively actorness may explicitly be attributed to the European Commission, an approach utilized by Hocking and Smith in discussing ‘the new variety of international actors’ (1990: 75). This approach captures an element of the present reality and is in line with legal competence, where the Commission acts on behalf of the European Community. However it prevents us from assessing the overall impact of the EU – which is our central purpose. A solution may lie in abandoning formal organizational and legal criteria in favour of a behavioural approach.

Behavioural criteria of actorness

The attribution of actorness does more than simply designate the units of a system. It implies an entity that exhibits a degree of autonomy from its external environment, and indeed from its internal constituents, and which is capable of volition or purpose. Hence a minimal behavioural definition of an actor would be an entity that is capable of formulating purposes and making decisions, and thus engaging in some form of purposive action.

In IR approaches to actorness, the concept of autonomy has been accorded central importance (Cosgrove and Twitchett 1970: 12; Hopkins and Mansbach 1973: 36; Merle 1987: 296) This requirement tends to highlight the internal procedures of the Union and it has been possible to arrive at different conclusions concerning autonomy dependent upon the voting arrangements in the Council of Ministers and the competences exercised by the Commission.⁴

Alongside autonomy, the ability to perform ‘significant and continuing functions having an impact on inter-state relations’ and the importance accorded to the would-be international actor both by its members and by third parties have also been stressed as behavioural criteria (Cosgrove and Twitchett 1970: 12). Achievement of actorness requires that these criteria must be met ‘in some degree for most of the time’, a formula which allowed Cosgrove and Twitchett (1970: 49) to conclude, even in the late 1960s, that the EC was ‘a viable international actor’.

We return, later, to behavioural criteria of actorness in relation to the contemporary EU. In particular, we address the issue of actor capability, which both contributes to and overlaps with autonomy. Defined by Gunnar Sjöstedt (1977: 16) as ‘capacity to behave actively and deliberately in relation to other actors in the international system’, actor capability is regarded by Sjöstedt as a function of internal resources. As already indicated, however, we consider an exclusive focus on internal factors – and, indeed, on behavioural criteria generally – to be inadequate in assessing actorness. In consequence, before examining the internal factors which contribute to (or inhibit) EU actorness, we question the extent to which its external activities are the product of purposive action, or agency; or are shaped or constrained by structural factors.

Structural approaches to actorness

Explanations of social phenomena which rely upon action or agency make up one side of the agency/structure debate that has long been evident in most of the social sciences. During the 1960s there was considerable discussion in the IR literature of the ‘level of analysis problem’ – whether attention should be confined to a ‘state as actor’ focus or to the structure of the system.⁵ While the 1970s saw the scope of International Relations broaden to admit ‘new’ international actors, the predominant approaches to analysis continued to privilege the state; moreover they remained primarily focused on behaviour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualizing actors and actorness
• 2 Nature of the beast: the identity and roles of the EU
• 3 The EU as an economic power and trade actor
• 4 Environmental policy: the Union as global leader
• 5 The EU as development and humanitarian actor
• 6 Candidates and neighbours: the Union as a regional actor
• 7 Common foreign and security policy: a political framework for EU external action?
• 8 The EU as a security community and military actor
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index