Values and Principles in European Union Foreign Policy

Sonia Lucarelli, Ian Manners

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415371360
• eBook ISBN: 9781134196104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents a fresh examination of the values and principles that inform EU foreign policy, exploring the implications of these values and principles on the construction of European Union identity today.

The authors show how current debates on European Union foreign policy and on European identity tend to be kept separated, as if the process of identity formation had only an internal dimension or it was not related to the external behaviour of an international actor. Conceiving EU foreign policy in its broadest context as a set of political actions that are regarded by external actors as 'EU' actions, the book focuses on both Pillar I and Pillar II policies, involving EU and member state actions and material political actions and less material ones such as speech acts.

Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective and drawing on political science, political economy, sociology, environmental science and women's studies, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of European studies and politics.

1 Introduction

Values, principles, identity and European Union foreign policy

Sonia Lucarelli

What are we for, what do we believe, what are we prepared to do? Does Europe really have any collective sense of how it can and should stand up for the principles and ideas that (with US help) shaped our current destiny? Do we have in Europe any remaining value-driven vision of the world?

(Patten 1998)

Introduction

The analysis of European Union (EU)¹ foreign policy has long put much more emphasis on its ‘hardware’ dimensions (including institutional infrastructure, personnel, and military equipment) rather than on its ‘software’ dimensions (including visions, aspirations, worldviews, principles, norms, and beliefs). For the first five decades of the life of the EU, in all its guises, the vast majority of discussions regarding its relations with the rest of the world focused on politics, policies, and practicalities. The study of the EU’s common commercial policy, association agreements, development policy, external relations, and political cooperation, for example, was primarily concerned with ‘what were the policies?’ rather than ‘what did the policies tell us about the EU?’ Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly since the agreement of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), discussions of the EU’s relations with the rest of the world have changed. An increasing emphasis is placed on understanding, conceptualising, and thinking more broadly about the EU as a political entity which participates in world politics, and is partially constituted by that participation.

This book is an attempt to move into a generation of scholarship which goes beyond the phases described above, and tries to think thoroughly about the way in which the EU is constituted as a political entity by the values, images and principles (VIPs) which shape the discourse and practice of the EU’s relations with the rest of the world. This endeavour is by no means unique in this respect: the volume undoubtedly stands on the shoulders of scholars who have benefited from the liberating effects of the post-Cold War academic environment to think in new ways about the ontological qualities of the EU, the way in which its policies shape our understandings of the EU, and the way in which the EU is a political and social agent embedded in, and employing, political and social institutions.

We argue that EU foreign policy should tell us far more about the EU as a political and social system than it has so far told us. It should be able to tell us more about the dynamic nature of the EU – the process whereby the Europeans construct their political identity – and about the relationship between values, principles, and foreign policy. To summarise, the book has two basic aims:

1. to analyse the EU as an international polity, intending specifically to highlight the values, principles, and images of the world it represents, voluntarily or not, in its international conduct; and
2. to investigate the implications for the process of identity formation of such a principles-embedded behaviour. What EU international identity and what identity for Europeans?²

In other words, we seek to investigate what type of relationship exists between the values and the principles that are embedded in EU external political behaviour.

The troublesome questions that we are dealing with pose many conceptual and empirical difficulties for the researcher. The very definitions of the terms employed are subject to debate, as are the theoretical relationships between the concepts. Moreover, empirical research on issues such as values and principles poses great methodological problems. The rest of this introduction deals with some of these problems. It first deals with the way that key actors in EU foreign policy, as well as academic observers, frequently refer to values, images of the world and principles that characterise the EU and (should) provide the basis for its role in world politics. It then analyses the fundamental concepts employed in the research project and presents our claim regarding the relationships among them, before turning to the theoretical and methodological research framework. The chapter closes with a presentation of the rest of the volume.

Values and principles in European Union foreign policy

The EU is increasingly presented as an international actor with a principled behaviour in foreign policy. Both key policy actors and academic commentators point to a distinctive role of the EU in world politics that derives from its particular nature. Furthermore, this image is reinforced by examples of foreign policy that seem to point in the direction of a novel international actor that behaves according to a set of dynamic, yet identifiable values, principles, and images of the world. All this is located in a literature that depicts the EU as a novel type of international actor, as we shall consider here.

The EU’s self-representation

Key actors in EU foreign policy frequently refer to values, images of the world, and principles that characterise the EU and that should provide the basis for its role in world politics. During moments of crisis, and during debates on the future of Europe, references to European values and how they should guide EU foreign policy are common. Equally frequent are references to the ‘historic responsibility [of the EU] in the world’ (Ciampi 2002, emphasis added). In the Laeken Declaration that paved the way for the debate on the future of Europe and the European Convention we read:

Does Europe not, now that is finally unified, have a leading role to play in a new world order, that of a power able both to play a stabilising role worldwide and to point the way ahead for many countries and peoples? Europe as the continent of humane values, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the continent of liberty, solidarity and above all diversity, meaning respect for others’ languages, cultures and traditions. . . . Europe needs to shoulder its responsibilities in the governance of globalisation.

(European Council 2001)

Even in the European Security Strategy (European Council 2003) we read:

Europe should be ready to share in the responsibility for global security and in building a better world. . . . The development of a stronger international society, well functioning international institutions and a rulebased international order is our objective. . . . Spreading good governance, supporting social and political reform, dealing with corruption and abuse of power, establishing the rule of law and protecting human rights are the best means of strengthening the international order.

These and many other declarations and speeches delineate an international actor that has two characteristics rarely assigned to a traditional state actor:

1. a stabilising effect in contemporary world politics that Europe derives from its history and its historically-developed and formed values and principles;
2. external relations inspired by an ‘ethics of responsibility’ towards others.

Does this mean that key European actors regard the EU as an example and a motor of a changing paradigm in world politics? Are we actually living in a world of ‘goodness’? What type of political animal is the EU that it deems it necessary to refer to itself with Laeken-like type of terminology? Most importantly of all, can we dismiss all this as ‘simply rhetorical discourse’?

What we can claim from the start, even before presenting our research results, is that the self-representation of the Union cannot be dismissed as simply ‘rhetorical’. As the arrival of Giddens’ structuration theory (Giddens 1979) in International Relations has shown, in world politics, as in any social context, discourse and rhetoric matter in the discursive construction of interests, rather than being simply the product of underlying interests. Interests and identities cannot exist in isolation with respect to the context in which agents and structures interact. Rhetoric is a performative act which might respond to actors’ interests in any given structural context, but which shapes collective understandings of that context and the identities of the actors involved. Put differently, not only can rhetorical discourse become a ‘trap’ which limits the space for manoeuvre of those who use it (as in the case of EU enlargement, Schimmelfennig 2003), but it can even change their very interests and self-perception, as we will explore in the conclusion.

Thus, even if references to values and principles remain exclusively discursive, they would undoubtedly be worth studying in order to better understand both the EU and its relations with the world that contribute to shaping its selfrepresentation. However, as we will argue, this is not the case as the actual performance of EU foreign policy demonstrates recurring patterns of guiding values and principles.

The EU’s principled foreign policy

At various points, the EU and its member states have actively challenged the principles adopted by other international actors that are considered cornerstones of foreign policy in the realist tradition, still predominant in most diplomatic circles. At international negotiations on climate change, for instance, in Kyoto (1997), Bonn (2001) and later in Johannesburg (2002), the EU has showed an attitude towards environmental protection and towards the possibility of turning to alternative sources of energy that distanced it from that of the main other power in world economy – the US (see Baker in chapter five). Differences with the US also emerged at the Doha summit of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November 2001 as in various other occasions of trade negotiations (see van den Hoven in chapter eleven). The EU’s role in the creation of an International Criminal Court, including building the momentum that carried along its more ‘reluctant governments’ – Britain and France – (Human Rights Watch 1999) – is a further example of activism and faith in the development of international norms and cosmopolitan institutions which seem to distance the EU from the major state powers.

A different attitude has also been deployed as far as food protection and research on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is concerned. The latter case in particular seems to point in the direction of a constitutive difference in European and US conceptions of the relationship between science, technology and nature (see Welsh in chapter four) and of individual ‘freedom’, which is a shared value in the Western world and a cornerstone of modernity. In Europe, most voices call for a compromise between individual freedom and the right to protect present and future generations from the potentially negative consequences of manipulations to the DNA of nature.

Moreover, the EU is at the forefront of the fight against landmines, with more than 60 million mines lying hidden and a stockpile estimated at some 250 million. In terms of development aid, the EU followed the lead of the Jubilee 2000 movement in its demands to drop the debt for the world’s poorest countries and to revise the highly indebted poor countries initiative. This has resulted in the everything-but-arms commitment by the EU to systematically open up its markets to these countries for tariff-free trade in all areas except arms.

In the area of democratisation, the EU has been an active agent in the provision of election assistance and observation and has developed guidelines that go beyond simple observation and towards the principles of good governance. In the area of human rights, the EU has developed a pro-active policy of being at the vanguard of the abolitionist movement against capital punishment (Manners 2000a, 2002). Particularly striking in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War is the way in which the EU has led the way in broadening understandings of security by linking military security directly to the development of democratic institutions and economic development in third countries. This rediscovered emphasis on the links between democracy, peace, and security in post-Cold War Europe is not limited to the EU. In an apparent rediscovery of Kantian democratic peace, all the institutions of the European security architecture (including the US) have dedicated a substantial part of their redefined roles in the postbipolar world to democratisation. Overall, this is resulting in the gradual development of a ‘system of liberal-democratic security communities’ characterised by different degrees of maturity and tightness, but with a common sense of ‘us’ – liberal democracy (see Lucarelli 2002a, 2002b).

Problems arise when peace is shattered. When the use of force is required in order to support a value or principle previously affirmed, the EU often fails to maintain consistency (see Lucarelli and Menotti in chapter nine). Agreement on a lower common denominator or paralysis due to disagreement among the member states still tends to be the rule in the ‘hard cases’ such as Yugoslavia 1991–95 and Iraq 2003. Is it possible that the EU is value-led in some spheres (namely those in which decisions are ‘communitarised’) and not in others (namely where the member states have the main say)? Is it a question of institutional structure and sovereignty, a question of unwillingness to pay high costs, or something that has to do with a power which is ‘civilian’ in the narrow sense of refusing to use military force?

Representations of EU ‘gentle power’

Either as a result of wishful thinking or prescriptive argumentation, or as a result of a particular reading of examples of EU foreign policy, there has been a certain tendency to describe the EU as an international actor with a principled behaviour in the international sphere. François Duchêne’s well-known image of the EU (then EC) as a civilian power (1972; 1973) was not just the description of an economic giant with little political power, but the representation of an international actor that spreads civilian and democratic standards of governance on the basis of an ‘ethics of responsibility’ which is usually associated with home affairs (Duchêne 1973). A recent evolution of this line of thought is Jürgen Habermas’s idea of Weltinnenpolitik – domestic politics of the world as the disappearance of barriers between internal and international politics make any political decision-maker responsible before all those affected by their decisions, despite a formal belonging to a political community (Habermas 1998; Bonanate 2001; Badie 1999). The civilian power EU would be better equipped than others to assume such a responsibility.

Focusing more on the normative content of the EU foreign policy is Gőran Therborn’s image of Europe (and particularly the EU) as ‘normative area’ – a loosely coupled system of regulatory norms, which developed through historical experiences (basically the ‘isms’ of European history), and ‘a certain legacy of social norms, reflecting European experiences of class and gender’ (Therborn 2001: 85). The role that Europe (and the EU within it) can have in tomorrow’s world, affirms Therborn, is directly linked to this ‘normative’ nature and its economic institutional model – exerting ‘influence’ (rather than ‘power’) by providing an economic model – ‘of market unification and supra-state economic organisation’ or/and (the two possibilities are not incompatible) a normative model ‘of human rights, citizenship, gender and generation relations, of supranational norms and institutions.’ (Therborn 2001: 92).

Attention to norms then becomes central, in Ian Manners’ representation of the Union as a ‘normative power’ (Manners 2000a, 2002):

The concept of normative power is an attempt to suggest that not only is the EU constructed on a normative basis, but importantly that this predisposes it to act in a normative way in world politics. It is built on the crucial, and usually overlooked observation, that the most important factor shaping the international role of the EU is not what it does or what it says, but what it is.

(Manners 2002: 252)

Identity and foreign policy are here strictly interconnected. The construction of the Union, its specific constitution is what characterises it most as an international actor (also Manners and Whitman 2003).

More specifically focused on the characteristics of EU foreign policies is Stephan Keukeleire’s concept of ‘structural foreign policy’ (Keukeleire 2000, 2002). A ‘structural foreign policy’, as opposed to a ‘traditional foreign policy’, is one which ‘aims at influencing in an enduring and sustainable way the relatively permanent frameworks within which states relate to each other, relate to people, or relate to corporate enterprises or other actors, through the influence of the choice of the game as well as the rules of the game’ (Keukeleire 2002: 14).

Building on Keukeleire’s work (Telò 2001b: 264), Mario Tel` argues that the Union’s structural foreign policy aims at affecting ‘particularly the economic and social structures of partners (states, regions, economic actors, international organisations, etc.), it is implemented through pacific and original means (diplomatic relations, agreements, sanctions and so on), and its scope is not conjunctural but rather in the middle and long range’ (Telò 2001b: 264; Telo` 2003; see also Padoa-Schioppa’s concept of ‘gentle power Europe’, 2001). These and other representations of the nature of the international identity all point to the idea that the EU is a different type of international actor as it has a different type of foreign policy (see Manners and Whitman 1998, 2003 on international identity).

Before we discuss the hypotheses that can explain ‘EU difference’, a clarification is necessary. Our discussion of the EU’s self-representation, including examples of principled foreign policy and scholarly attempts to describe the EU, might easily lead to a misunderstanding. A VIPs-informed foreign policy is not necessarily a benign or soft one. As Knud Erik Jørgensen argues in chapter three, ‘values, images and principles are completely agnostic along the dichotomies of benign/malign and soft/hard. Indeed, some of the worst foreign policy practices are based on strong values, deeply held images and principles etched in stone’. What is of interest for us is not to demonstrate that the EU is a realm of goodness that exports goodness, but to gain insights into the EU as a political and social polity from the analysis of the VIPs in its foreign policy.

A constitutive identity?

The most common response to the argument that the EU tends to adopt a structural foreign policy (to use one of the labels we have just introduced) is that there is nothing else it can do. To put it simply, this would be a ‘necessary virtue’, given the fact that the EU lacks traditional foreign policy capacity (the CFSP branch of EU foreign policy), while it has developed instruments and decisional capacity of a non-military, non-diplomatic nature (namely, the external relations branch of EU foreign policy). This argument can be taken to an extreme by concluding that developing a military capacity (typical of traditional foreign policy) would put civilian power Europe at risk (K. Smith 2000).

This explanation, although not easily dismissible, is by no means satisfactory. Even recognising that the unbalanced sovereignty and decision-making capacity of the Union in Pillar I (external relations) and Pillar II (CFSP) is such that the Union is better equipped to perform a structural rather than a traditional foreign policy, this does not explain the value and emphasis placed on democratisation and respect for human rights as a means to construct a safer international environment. Furthermore, on issues such as global warming, despite having similar economic concerns to those of the United States, the Union has assumed a different attitude, constructing a legitimising discourse for its position that refers to principles other than those held by the US.

The second type of explanation, that builds on and enlarges the first one, has to do with the ‘incomplete’ character of the Union. The fact that the Union is at the same time an actor, a process and a project makes it behave differently in comparison to traditional actors in world politics. In any foreign policy decision, the involved agencies also tend to evaluate the decision for its implications on the next step of European integration (see Lucarelli 2003). Where integration is already more consolidated, such as in Pillar I, there are less implications and decisions are easier to take, despite any potential financial costs for the member states (as in the case of climate change). Moreover, the existence of the ‘EU as a process’ influenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Constitutive Nature of Values, Images and Principles in the European Union
• 3 Theoretical Perspectives on the Role of Values, Images and Principles in Foreign Policy
• 4 Values, Science and the European Union
• 5 Environmental Values and Climate Change Policy
• 6 The European Union and the Value of Gender Equality
• 7 Principles of Democracy and Human Rights
• 8 Promoting Human Rights and Democracy in European Union Relations with Russia and China
• 9 The Use of Force as Coercive Intervention
• 10 Values in European Union Development Cooperation Policy
• 11 European Union Regulatory Capitalism and Multilateral Trade Negotiations
• 12 Conclusion
• Bibliography