External Perceptions of the European Union as a Global Actor

Sonia Lucarelli, Lorenzo Fioramonti, Sonia Lucarelli, Lorenzo Fioramonti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135239480
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how the European Union (EU) is perceived beyond its borders in the US; the Middle East: Israel, Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Iran; Russia; China; India; Brazil and South Africa. The book also analyses the main perceptions of the EU in some key international institutions, including the World Bank; World Trade Organization, United Nations, African Union; and transnational actors, including non-Western media such as Al Jazeera. It seeks to provide a thorough analysis of the implications that these perceptions might have for the global role of the EU.

By taking this approach and by providing both conceptual and empirical arguments, the volume provides an innovative perspective on the analysis of the EU as a global actor. It also strengthens a research agenda on the EU external image: an underdeveloped area of investigation in which the editors and the main contributors to this volume have played a pioneering role in the past few years.

It will be of strong interest to academics and students of international politics, European studies and development studies.

1 Introduction
The EU in the eyes of the others – why bother?

Sonia Lucarelli and Lorenzo Fioramonti

One Middle Eastern diplomat put the problem neatly: ‘The US makes offers we cannot refuse; the EU makes offers we do not understand!’ People may not like US policy, but at least its message is clear. The challenge facing the EU is different: people outside Europe are not certain what the Union stands for or whether it matters . . . As the Union develops as a strategic player, . . . [it] must speak to the world clearly, and it must start listening to what the world thinks about it.

(Linch 2005: 11; emphasis added)

Considering the number of issues affecting the European Union (EU) internally, one might wonder why this book bothers to analyse its external image in the world. At a time of constitutional turmoil and growing Euro-scepticism, why should one pay attention to what non-Europeans think of the EU?

In fact, there are several reasons. The first reason is that the EU has become a rather consolidated player in the international arena. After more than a decade of fledgling movements in the global context, the EU is now legally represented in almost all countries and regularly interacts with governments, business, civil society, the media and other relevant groups. If the EU wants to have a chance to implement efficient policies, it cannot avoid taking into serious consideration expectations, images and perceptions in the rest of the world.

In second place, there is a gap in the literature that needs to be filled. The thesis of the EU’s ‘distinctiveness’ (Lucarelli 2007), found widely in the literature dealing with the EU’s specific role in world politics, needs to be further challenged. So far research has been undertaken on evaluating the EU’s coherence and effectiveness, but very little has been done on how the other international players regard the EU. This area of enquiry, therefore, deserves further investigation.

In third place, looking at external images means looking at one of the variables that contributes to shaping a European political identity among the Europeans. As a matter of fact, self-rhetorical representation, public debate and mirror images are fundamental components of a political identity in the making like the EU/ropean one. For this reason it is useful to understand what the external images are.

This introductory chapter deals first with each of these ‘founding reasons’ at a time. It then briefly evaluates what elements most shape external images; and finally it illustrates the structure of the book.

The EU as a deaf global power?

In the past few years the global role of the EU has been widely recognized by a growing body of academic literature (Bretherton and Vogler 2006; McCormick 2008; Hill and Smith 2005). The international ambitions of the EU have been sealed by the establishment of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in 1992, the first out-of-area mission of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in 2003, and the significant growth of the various ramifications of the external policies carried out by the European Commission. The EU has furthermore asserted itself as the largest trade actor in the world, with significant leverage at various international forums such as the World Trade Organization. The EU’s financial and economic policies reach governments, private corporations and nongovernmental organizations across the globe. Finally, the EU is the largest donor of development aid, with offices and delegations in more than 120 countries.

At the educational level, the European Commission has been subsidizing research units on European Studies in various countries around the world. In the global arena the EU has also been leading a number of processes at the multilat-eral level, thereby increasing its power and influence. In short, what is decided at the EU does not only impact the European polity, but also has direct consequences on many countries around the world.

With increasing power comes increasing responsibility. In international diplomacy and foreign policy, mutual understanding is important if common objectives are to be achieved. For instance, the stalemate at the Doha Round has proven that a number of countries previously sidelined in international politics is increasingly demanding to be given a voice. The reform processes at the UN and at the international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have also demonstrated that the traditional global governance set-up has been largely discredited. The growth of regional powers, such as China and India, as well as the creation of parallel institutions, such as the G20, are just a few examples of a growing trend.

Against this backdrop it becomes evident that the way in which the EU is perceived by other countries is likely to have a direct bearing on its success as a player in the international arena. What the world thinks of the EU is therefore an important factor in facilitating or opposing the achievements of EU-sponsored policies. Comprehending the perceptions of the EU can help gauge the extent to which the Union is seen as a credible and consistent actor in global politics. Furthermore, they can also help assess the extent to which the European ‘soft power’ is still a reality in the eyes of citizens around the world. Moreover, external images might tell us something of the degree of the EU’s effective communication skills, which, according to the Middle Eastern diplomat mentioned in the incipit, is not high. In a way perceptions can be seen as ‘early warning systems’ for an actor such as the EU, which is still in the process of establishing itself as a credible international focal point.

The images – self-images: gaps in the literature and the reality

A second reason for studying the external images of the EU is a gap in the literature. As early as the 1970s there was a tendency to describe the then European Community as a progressive international player that followed precise norms and values. Since then, particularly in the 1990s, the literature has rediscovered Duchêne’s original concept of ‘civilian power’ Europe (1972, 1973). Terms such as civilian power (Telò 2006; Whitman 1998), normative power (Manners 2002), structural foreign policy (Keukeleire 2000, 2004), normative area (Ther-born 2001), gentle power (Padoa-Schioppa 2001) and norm-maker (Björkdahl 2005; see also Checkel 1999) have been coined to capture the idea that the EU is a different (read ‘better’) international actor: a new form of global player, profoundly different from ‘traditional powers’. Whether to enrich the concept (Telò 2004) or to revise it (Manners 2002), these authors share Duchêne’s views that the EU is internationally different because its initial telos (peace through integration), its historical developments and its current institutional and normative framework make it better suited to spreading universal values. This scholarly image has been matched by a self-rhetorical representation in EU documents describing the EU as a global player with global responsibility, but also with the will ‘to play a stabilizing role worldwide and to point the way ahead for many countries and peoples’; in other words, it is a player ready to ‘shoulder its responsibilities in the governance of globalization’ (European Council 2001).

For some years the combination of this self-representation and academic literature both supporting the idea of the EU as a ‘distinctive’ power created a highly self-referential attitude not only among EU scholars, but also in the limited-though-existent EU public debate. At this turn of the century there has been growing criticism towards the idea of the EU as a distinctive international actor and an increasing number of studies have started to criticize the very applicabil-ity of the concept to the EU (Diez 2005; Sjursen 2006) and to test empirically both the EU’s coherence as a civilian power and its effectiveness (Panebianco 2006; Smith 2006; Scheipers and Sicurelli 2007; Elgström and Smith 2006; Balducci 2008). This literature has been extremely useful in pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of the EU’s international conduct, its coherence and effectiveness. What this literature has not done so far is to investigate the impact and effectiveness of the EU’s performance on the images that it projects of itself abroad: no systematic research has been conducted on ‘external views’ worldwide.¹ The failure to investigate external images not only results in a gap in the literature that deserves to be filled, but it might also have/have had important practical repercussions. This lack of information is rather worrisome for a new actor with global aspirations and high-flying rhetoric; moreover, it could even be dangerous as it might easily generate cognitive dissonances between what the EU ‘says about itself’ and what the rest of the world ‘thinks’, as we have seen above.

Images and political identity

There is also another reason, which – we think – speaks directly to the hearts and minds of European citizens. Given the history of the European project and its cultural and social mix, a mass-based European political identity is still in the making.

Undoubtedly, various factors influence this process of identity-building. There is a debate in the literature regarding what affects identity-building the most. Authors tend to envisage a different approach to the relationship between political identity, on the one side, and factors such as culture, history and ethnicity, on the other.² We share the view that common identity for the Europeans can only be political, grounded in the set of social and political values and principles that Europeans are ready to recognize as theirs, that make them feel like a political group (Cerutti 2003: 27). According to this view, culture, history, policies and institutions are the frameworks in which the interpretation of political values takes place, thereby giving meaning to political identity (Cerutti and Lucarelli 2008; Lucarelli 2006). Next to these fundamental factors, however, there are other factors, frequently neglected in the literature, that play a relevant role. Probably the most important of these is the relationship with external Others.

The relevance of ‘Others’ (particularly of physical Others – other individuals, other states, etc.) is appreciated in both socio-psychological (Taylor 1994; Turner et al. 1987) and international relations literature (cf. Rumelili 2004; Neumann 1996b). On reviewing the available literature, ‘Others’ are seen to be treated as relevant to the self-identification process in four broad respects: recognition, distinctiveness, labelling and bordering.

Pizzorno reads recognition as ‘the reciprocal attribution of identity, . . . consti-tutive of any form of sociality . . . that simply reflects the arrival on the scene of new actors’ (2007: 190). Charles Taylor asserts that ‘our identity is partly shaped by recognition . . . often by the mis-recognition of others’. He also argues that ‘a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves’ (Taylor 1994: 25). Thus, we can maintain that the Others produce a second ‘mirror’ for ‘us’ as a group engaged in a self-identification process (the first ‘mirror’ being provided by the direct observation of our political action). Hence, images of the EU from the outside might contribute to consolidating a European political identity.

External views are also relevant as inactive objects of our comparisons. Self-categorization theory finds a key psychological motivation for an individual’s endorsement of group affiliation in his/her need ‘to differentiate [his/her] own groups positively from others to achieve a positive social identity’ (Turner et al. 1987: 42). Such differentiation is not necessarily oppositional but entails assuming the positive distinctiveness of one’s group with respect to comparable Others (see Neumann 1996a).

A further way in which external views are relevant to processes of identity formation is by contributing to ‘labelling’ the group and tracing its contours (Huddy 2001). Others’ labelling is an important element in that it creates cognitive boundaries between members of a group and outsiders. Boundaries are both created by the members of a group as a by-product of self-categorization processes, and imagined by outside Others. Moreover, they can be seen as identifying the contour of a group of people either sharing some similarities (for example, having a European passport) or having internalized the meaning of group membership (for example, the difference between having European citizenship and having a European identity). Boundaries as meanings are what count more in identity-formation processes.

Despite the relevance of external perceptions, traditional literature on European identity has not been interested in this topic. This literature fails to study if and how the EU’s foreign policy and external images are relevant to the construction of a European political self-consciousness. Such a lack of interest is striking considering that, according to the Eurobarometer surveys, not only do Europeans have their own vision of the role of the EU in the world, but they tend to find the EU’s international stance legitimate, positive and worth pursuing (Eurobarometer 2007; Transatlantic Trends 2006).

What shapes images?

Before describing the way in which this book aims to study external images, a few words need to be spent on how these images are shaped – a fundamental question if the EU wants to have a chance to influence its future images.

In Social Identity Theory (SIT), social identity influences the group’s per-ception of others, but at the same time is influenced by the cognitive relation-ship that the group establishes with others. One of the factors that influences external perceptions is the very identity of the group that perceives and its need to differentiate itself (Turner et al. 1987). However, this can be considered as one of the dimensions that shape external images. Drawing from both SIT and international relations, it is possible to identify a twolevel model that pays attention to both long-term/framework variables and interactional/contingent factors. In line w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: The EU in the Eyes of the Others – Why Bother?
• Part I: Great Powers, Conflict Areas and Emerging Markets
• Part II: International Organizations, Regional Institutions and the Media