The European Union and Global Politics

Richard Youngs

• Publisher: Red Globe Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350928848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica europea

This accessible new textbook situates the European Union in a dramatically changed world order. Resisting a more traditional and abstract introduction to the institutions, structures and policy making processes of the EU, this innovative new text cuts through the jargon to demonstrate how hard the EU must work to retain its international influence. Taking into account the latest empirical developments, including the spread of war and violence in the East with Ukraine and the ongoing turbulent politics of North Africa and the Middle East, Richard Youngs – an expert in the field – introduces us to how the EU has been forced to act differently. The book is unique in offering an outside-in conceptual framework that inverts the way that the EU external action is studied and understood. It unpacks the different international challenges the EU has faced in recent years, including the weakening of global order, the need for more protective security, geo-economic competition, climate change and conflicts to its east and south. In each case the book examines how the EU has responded and how its core international identity has changed as a result, assessing whether the Union still retains strong global influence. This book is the ideal companion for students taking modules on the European Union's foreign policy, global politics, and for students of European Union Politics more broadly at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

1 Introduction

European governments made their first, tentative efforts to coordinate foreign policies fifty years ago, in the early 1970s. Since then, European Union (EU) external policy processes and instruments have developed but have done so slowly and mostly without dramatic change. Coordination between EU states has deepened incrementally in some areas of external policy, while distinctive national foreign policies and elements of clear discrepancy between member states endure. Yet the challenges pressing in on the Union from outside have transfigured its external policy agenda. In contrast to the low-key, incremental advance of the EU’s internal policy processes, the external world has changed almost beyond recognition in the last half-century. These changes have increased the salience of external challenges and required important adjustments in the way the EU engages with the world. This book offers a comprehensive overview of how EU external policies have adapted to these global challenges over time.

A new normal

In the span of the last fifty years, the EU’s external policy challenges have shifted through several phases. European foreign policy coordination was born at the height of the Cold War. In this period, the then European Communities faced an apparently existential threat, within a relatively fixed international system of strategic bipolarity. This system anchored Europe’s geopolitical bearings within a Western camp led by the United States. International issues were coloured by, and generally subordinate to, the binary confrontation of the Cold War. The international sphere exerted a powerful influence over European integration, and it lessened both the possibility of and need for an independent European foreign and security policy.

After the end of the Cold War, these constraints loosened as the 1990s progressed. This was a phase of new opportunity, in which the EU’s aspirations to a united and distinctive international presence became more powerful. The rules and norms of liberal international order appeared to attain a more global reach. The EU was able to move with this tide in projecting outwards its own multilateral notions of economic and security cooperation. An increasing number of countries embarked on democratic transitions, and often sought European assistance to take these processes of reform forward. Regional security challenges arose, and often called for EU involvement separate from US strategic leadership. Trends in national-level politics around the world combined with the post-bipolar structure of the international system to give a fillip to EU external action – in terms of both its internal cohesion and its substantive liberal goals.

From the late-2000s, it became evident that the core features of this post-Cold War era were giving way to other trends. A range of security risks intensified. The shift of global power away from Western advanced economies accelerated. Many rising powers challenged the patterns and rules of the liberal international order. Fiercer geopolitical rivalries displaced notions of cooperative security. While economic interdependence continued to deepen, a pushback grew against globalisation. The spread of democracy stalled and in some countries authoritarianism returned. US leadership weakened; in the years after President Trump was elected the United States in some respects became another foreign policy problem as opposed to core security provider to Europe. The EU’s own loss of power was compounded by a decade of economic crisis and then by the UK’s decision to leave the bloc. In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic both presented an additional challenge and accentuated many of the global dynamics that had been accumulating during the 2010s.

Into the 2020s a whole series of global changes was no longer prospective but had become a new normal. Not everything about this new normal was necessarily adverse. While the EU lost power and geopolitics became more competitive, opportunities emerged as well, in the shape of new partners, alliances and markets. Digital technology changed international relations, in both positive and less positive ways. And while accounts tended to talk of the emergent uncertainties being unprecedented, in some ways the threats of many previous periods were at least as daunting. Yet the crucial starting point for this book is that the new normal had already left its mark on the EU’s external policies. The Union has already spent several years repositioning its role in global affairs. And this suggests a need to re-examine longstanding ways of conceptualising the EU’s relations with the wider world.

An outside-in approach to EU foreign policy

This backdrop calls for an updated coverage of Europe’s role in global politics. This book adds to existing overviews of EU foreign and security policy by tackling the topic from a different angle. It is written around an overarching theme: the EU has in recent years needed to work hard to retain its international influence in a more challenging world and to harness the positive opportunities that might enable it to do so. While most existing analysis of EU foreign policy has tended to focus on how internal coordination does or does not take place between EU member states and institutions, or on the EU using its own models and rules to transform other countries, this book places greater emphasis on understanding how the EU has reacted to the battery of international challenges and constraints it has come to face.

Accounts of EU external policy have traditionally centred heavily around the question of whether the Union can be considered as an international power and how its unique ways of acting globally can best be described. Much of the focus has been on dissecting the EU’s formal institutional processes and the internal policy-making dynamics of its foreign and security policy coordination. This book reports on the latest developments and academic debates with respect to these (still important) issues, but places rather greater stress on substantive external policy challenges. It aims to provide the student and other readers with a full and up-to-date appreciation of the real-world dilemmas that EU external policy confronts as it has adjusted to the new normal.

This can be termed an ‘outside-in’ approach to studying the EU’s role in global politics. That most work on EU foreign policy has focused on internal, institutional questions is understandable. Yet this can also begin to look somewhat self-indulgent in light of the pressing challenges that have taken shape globally. The self-confident focus on conceptualising the EU’s status as a unique power may have been to some extent justifiable while the Union was building up its external instruments and developing the parameters of its international identity. As the EU has had to respond to acute and constricting exogenous challenges, however, an outside-in perspective is today needed to complement inside-out analysis. This focuses on how the bloc has positioned itself towards a reshaped global scenario and whether its external strategies have had meaningful effect or not. The book adopts this conceptual lens on EU ‘external action’, which is understood to embrace the wide range of international policies, including but extending beyond standard foreign policy (as defined in Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 Definitions

The book uses the concept of EU external action. This is defined to include the standard diplomatic issues of foreign policy and the core military instruments of traditional security and defence policy, but also policy areas such as trade, geo-economics, technology, climate and energy that have important external dimensions. The book pays special attention to how these wider sets of issues relate to core strategic goals and interests. In this sense, it uses a broad notion of security that includes but is not limited to military and defence issues.

The book is concerned with EU external action in the comprehensive sense of common EU-level initiatives combined with member states’ national external policies. National policies can drive EU-level positions forward and give them tangible substance or hold back coordination. EU external action can be national actions supported by EU institutions, or the reverse.¹ Instead of trying to hold separate what is strictly ‘national’ and what is ‘EU’ policy, experts have increasingly suggested that ‘EU external action’ needs to be understood as a holistic fusion of the two levels.² The book acknowledges that European policy has become more multilayered, with the national level of external agency influential in many areas.³

The UK is covered as an EU member state up to 2020; the book also examines some of the external policy implications of it no longer being a member from that point.

A conceptual framework for the new normal

The book sets the scene for this outside-in perspective by providing an outline of the historical evolution and institutional processes of EU external action (Chapter 2). It then explains (in Chapter 3) why the changing nature of international politics requires a shift in analytical approaches and unpacks the outside-in conceptual framework. The book then applies this framework to the main themes that have dominated EU external action. Chapter 4 assesses how EU policies have adapted to the changing shape of global order. Chapter 5 examines the different dimensions of ‘protective security’ that have become more prominent drivers of EU policies. Chapter 6 outlines EU geo-economic strategies and stresses the bloc’s evolving approaches to trade and investment. Chapter 7 investigates the special place of enlargement in EU external action and how this may have reached its limit. Chapter 8 unpacks the different elements of EU policies on climate change and energy security, while Chapter 9 assesses how EU support for democracy and human rights has evolved.

The book then looks in detail at challenges facing the EU in two regions. While the book focuses mainly on key cross-cutting themes and purposely does not run through a list of each and every geographical region in turn, two regions merit their own chapters. The Middle East and North Africa have generated multiple security concerns that have had a profound impact on EU interests. To the east, war in Ukraine and Russia’s broader assertiveness have become equally important and taxing priority concerns. Chapters 10 and 11 outline the evolution of EU policies in these two regions over the years, highlighting their resonance with the outside-in conceptual framework. Reflecting the outside-in theme that runs through the book, each thematic and geographical chapter starts by laying out the main challenges facing the Union and how these have evolved in recent years.

The outside-in framework helps uncover five significant adaptions to EU external action in recent years:

External challenges. Powerful international challenges and crises have driven an evolution in EU external action. The Union has moved in significant ways to adjust to the new normal of global politics; such readjustment is no longer a pending imperative but has been ongoing over several years. The EU has had to deal with an unenviable cocktail: the apparent loosening of the international order’s foundations; specific crises and conflicts, like those that have shaken Ukraine, Syria and Libya; and all-embracing thematic challenges like climate change, migration, the geopolitics of digital technology, and from 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges have become defining issues in their own right and have also altered the dynamics of EU external action: the weight of external factors in explaining EU policies has increased relative to internally embedded identities, processes and modes of action.

Unity-with-diversity. In some areas of external action, EU coordination has deepened progressively over the years. In other areas, European governments have put greater emphasis on their national foreign policies and on non-EU levels of international cooperation. While this co-existence of contrasting dynamics is neither new nor surprising, a striking curiosity is that convergence and divergence have both intensified in recent years, rather than these being mutually exclusive trends. The new array of external challenges has pulled European governments together in some instances, but has prompted more flexible, non-EU responses in others. As global politics have become more clearly multi-level, so too has European external action.

A less distinctive power. The EU has remained a sui generis international actor in notable ways. Yet whole areas of its external action have come increasingly to resemble more traditional diplomatic and commercial strategies. The tools and instruments the EU deploys internationally have mixed quintessentially EU policy frameworks, based around the extension of the Union’s own cross-border norms and rules, with more standard forms of conducting foreign relations. The EU has become less unique as an international actor than it once was and certainly than its own rhetoric has long claimed. Its external policies have increasingly been built around a mix of old- and newer-style approaches and ways of acting – a kind of hybrid style of geopolitics.

Protective security. What can be termed ‘protective security’ has become a more notable priority for EU external action. While this is not the term it uses officially, the EU’s clear priority in recent years has been one of self-protection rather than seeking ‘transformative power’ over other countries. The balance has shifted from policies aimed at extending EU presence outwards to minimising the internal impact of external trends. This shift has not been absolute or germane to every issue in all third countries, but it has been decisive. The COVID-19 crisis has most recently pushed this protective logic clearly to the forefront. Protective security has involved a change in how the EU defines its strategic priorities, towards a more immediate or proximate and less diffuse understanding of self-interest. The traditional debate about the balance in European policies between values and interests does not quite capture this shift: the EU has always pursued its interests but has over time redefined what is required to advance these.

A new metric of European influence. Policy-makers and analysts have tended to apply a metric for Europe’s foreign policy impact based on other countries incorporating EU norms and the Union demonstrating its standing as a major power. The changed contours of EU external action call for a reworked measure of effectiveness. The impact of European external action has still sometimes been highly consequential, but in general has become more modest. The EU has in broad terms moved to a more realistic notion of its own power and curtailed its level of ambition in global affairs. While in many ways this is no bad thing, in multiple areas the EU has failed to prevent challenges becoming more acute in circumstances where it could have had more impact. What counts as success in EU external policy has changed and become more difficult to assess.

These five themes form the spine of the book and are addressed in each of the chapters that follow. Each thematic chapter concludes with a brief summary of what light it sheds on each of the five themes. The concluding chapter brings together these different elements of the outside-in conceptual framework and draws out a common theme: the need to update some of the received wisdom that has accumulated around European external action over the years. These conclusions highlight how EU external action has gradually diverged, at least to a degree, from some of its previously defining features. The book is not devised as a critique of everything that may be wrong with European policies; rather, it is a more even-handed mapping of how the EU has adjusted to a new normal in international relations. This raises interesting and, in some cases, counter-intuitive conceptual pointers for how the EU has positioned itself as an international actor into the 2020s.

PART I

BACKGROUND

2 The Evolution and Institutions of EU External Action

Although this book keeps its main focus on contemporary and substantive international challenges, some initial scene-setting background is required on the EU’s history and institutional structures. This chapter describes how EU external action developed in stages from the early days of the European Communities, through the creation of the Common Foreign and Sec...