The EU's Role in World Politics

A Retreat from Liberal Internationalism

Richard Youngs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415679459
• eBook ISBN: 9781136939150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Debates on EU foreign policy have been dominated by two opposing schools of argument. One includes a broad range of work that extols the virtues of a European liberal concept of power and the other sees the EU's commitment to cosmopolitan liberalism and soft power as a sign of weakness rather than strength.

This book judges the EU on its own terms as a liberal power, examining its policy record, rather than simply asserting that the EU's liberal commitments in themselves denote either a superior or inferior foreign policy approach. Youngs argues that the challenges facing Europe's role in the world appear to be in its retreat from liberal internationalism through a series of case studies on policy areas: trade, multilateral diplomacy, security, development cooperation, democracy and human rights, and energy security. Presenting detailed evidence that show the EU is moving away from cosmopolitan strategy, Youngs asserts that Europe needs to reassess its foreign policies if it is to defend the kind of liberal world order necessary for its own and other countries' long term interests.

This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of European politics, Foreign Policy and International Relations.

1
Introduction

European foreign policy is in the doldrums. The European Union (EU)’s influence in world affairs appears to be increasingly attenuated. Its success in achieving foreign and security policy objectives and ensuring that external actions contribute to domestic challenges has diminished. The financial crisis has left Europe introspective and defensive. The EU’s aims in the field of trade liberalization have been frustrated. The EU has blunted its own ability to transform other states through further enlargement. Europe has stood impotent as new conflicts have erupted in Africa and the southern Caucasus, and as long-running ones in the Middle East and Southeast Asia have deepened. It has failed to lever progress towards the Millennium Development Goals or to defeat a widespread authoritarian backlash against support for democracy and human rights. And increasing energy dependence has occasioned serious differences between EU member states. As emerging powers rise inexorably, Europe has been mired in the navel-gazing of its own internal institutional modifications, with the importance of the new Lisbon Treaty exaggerated.

This book argues that a common thread weaves its way through all these sobering trends: the EU has become increasingly ambivalent in the pursuit of liberal internationalism. This is both cause and effect of the policy challenges facing Europe’s role in the world.

In recent years, debates on EU foreign policy have been dominated by sharply opposing arguments. A benign take extols the virtues of a European liberal concept of power. This line of thinking holds the EU to represent a new form of power based on normative suasion, and predicts that Europe’s star will be ascendant in the twenty-first century. The opposing arguments are anti-liberal. Realists see the EU’s commitment to cosmopolitan liberalism and soft power as a sign of weakness rather than strength. Critical schools of thought insist that the EU’s liberal internationalism is a mere cloak for self-interested power maximization.

This book argues that each of these perspectives misses the most notable trend in European foreign policy. They misread what the EU actually does in its external policies and the way it wields influence. The EU is increasingly failing to deploy its potential comparative strengths. Its foreign policies are increasingly less liberal across a range of areas. Realists are wrong to think that adherence to a liberal world order is a sign of weakness. Neither is the liberal commitment mere garbed up power politics. For all their apparent diametric opposition, anti-liberals and the ‘EU as superpower’ proponents offer the same diagnosis of the European condition as one of embedded liberal internationalism. The difference is that, whereas the former frown concernedly, the latter are comforted by this condition. But each argument mistakes EU rhetoric for reality and fails to see that, in practice, the EU is not following through in its support for liberal international values.

This book judges the EU on its own terms as a liberal power. It examines the policy record, rather than simply asserting that the EU’s liberal commitments in themselves denote either a superior or an inferior foreign policy approach to that of the United States. The book argues that, in a range of policy areas – trade, multilateral diplomacy, security, development cooperation, democracy and human rights, and energy security – the EU appears to be in retreat from liberal internationalism.

And it suggests that this European retreat is a self-emasculating mistake. In this sense, the book is self-consciously an outlier. It will incur the opprobrium of what are now the mainstream strands of thinking about European foreign policy. This book does not seek to offer a highly nuanced, ‘glass-half-full-half-empty’ type of account. That would be to recount a story already told many times. Neither is it a commentary on ‘the EU versus the US’. Such accounts struggle to avoid clichés on both sides; moreover, this is a focus that misses so much of what now counts in international relations. Rather, the book expounds a single thesis: that the EU has over-reacted to concerns and criticisms made against liberal internationalism. In Europe’s pursuit of cosmopolitan liberalism, diffidence and expediency increasingly subjugate conviction. To its sea of troubles, Europe increasingly applies temporary balm, eschewing the profundity of longer term vision. The evidence offered demonstrates that Europe needs to recalibrate its foreign policies if it is to defend the kind of liberal world order necessary for its own and other countries’ long-term interests. The world does not need intemperate idealism. But Europe increasingly errs in holding a foreign policy of cool-headed wisdom to be synonymous with a patched-up placidity of the present.

The ‘liberal superpower’ argument

The period after the end of the Cold War saw a dramatic revival of liberal accounts of international relations. Liberal internationalism offered a benign ‘inside-out’ view on the changed international system: as more states implemented liberal rights internally, so the risks of conflict between states diminished. External aggression was the product of political elites not being accountable to their domestic populations; as democracy spread, so did international peace. At the same time, free trade would breed mutually constraining interdependencies and assist the development of poorer countries. The expansion in size and policy competence of international institutions was itself generating shared interests and common outlooks, through a commitment to ‘positive sum’ outcomes.¹

Reflecting this trend, analysts increasingly suggest that the EU represents a particularly notable encapsulation of liberal values. Writers compete to devise new terms and metaphors – normative, civilian, neo-medieval power. All reflect the similar notion of the EU being a uniquely cosmopolitan and internationalist power. The EU is deemed to be a ‘liberal superpower’ particularly well equipped for navigating a ‘post-modern’ international system. Analysts contend that the EU has rejected realism, wields power by example rather than by military might, and offers a fundamentally different vision of international relations, in particular compared with that pursued by the United States.² An increasingly common view is that the EU has become the world’s most committed and effective promoter of liberal political rights, collective security and multilateralism.

The EU’s approach to security is focused on promoting global public goods, a broad set of international benefits not exclusive to European interests. Many analysts concur that the EU is driven to pursue ‘milieu’ more than ‘possession’ goals. Experts assert that the EU has an ‘international civilian agenda’ and ‘feels globally more responsible for the world’s public welfare and global good government’ than the US or any other international actor.³ Its foreign policy model is one of inclusiveness, rather than the pursuit of interests through exclusion. European policy aims to make rivals stronger not weaker. Support for its own type of regional cooperation is equally part of this liberal world view. The European Commission is the only major donor that prioritizes support for regional integration projects.⁴ The EU is seen as the ‘engine’ driving the global system towards the same kind of rules-based multilateralism as that underlying its own integration.⁵ In short, the argument runs that the EU supports liberal values, and does so in a way that avoids the counter-productive excesses of power politics.

Analysts increasingly conceive the EU as a political space where foreign policy strategies are argued out in terms of embedded norms, identities and principles. Member states’ foreign policy positions have converged around a common values-based identity.⁶ For one theorist, European foreign policy cooperation can be explained as an international ‘civilizing process’.⁷ Much of Europe’sinfluence comes about through the transfer of its own rules and legal norms to other countries and organizations, a form of institutionally rooted ‘external governance’ quite distinct from traditional concepts of power projection.⁸ The notion is frequently invoked of the ‘institutional patterns’ that embody the EU’s own internal values extending into the realm of foreign relations.⁹

Liberal idealism is said to figure strongly in EU foreign policy to the extent that this ‘promotes a series of normative principles that are generally acknowledged within the UN system to be universally applicable’. These include democracy, peace, social solidarity and sustainable development. Moreover, the EU’s approach is able to reconcile the traditional frictions between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism – between universal values and respect for difference. It is said to do so through supporting ‘system change from Westphalian self-regarding to post-Westphalian other-regarding’ dynamics.¹⁰

In the last half decade, a raft of books has been published asserting the EU’s economic and political superiority over the US. These volumes point out that, in many sectors, the EU enjoys higher productivity than the US and leads in those services whose share of world trade will increase in the future (and where the EU has an even more marked advantage over China). European companies dominate lists of the world’s best run companies. One writer concludes that Europe, not Asia, is the short-term challenger to American primacy and talks of the US needing to hand over the baton of global leadership in a cooperative manner to Europe.¹¹

Books aimed specifically at comparing the US and EU reach similar conclusions on foreign policy. In contrast to the US, the EU tends to ‘recognize not obliterate differences’ and is freer of vested interests.¹² EU foreign policy is ‘utterly different from anything that came before it in human history … built on spreading peace rather than amassing power’.¹³ The US uses military means to treat only the symptoms of security threats and conflict; the EU mixes a wider range of tools to attack the root causes. If the US sees a Hobbesian world as requiring coercion and even force to spread liberal values, for the EU both the method and the ends are liberal.

The sceptics

Such is one, laudatory strand of reasoning. In recent years, scepticism of such liberal thinking has grown. The triumphal optimism of the ‘end of history’ stands comprehensively discredited.¹⁴ This contrasts with the longevity of debate structured around the supposed culturally specific roots of liberalism.¹⁵ The Bush era did much to discredit liberalism. Among international relations scholars, the tide has turned back in realism’s favour.¹⁶ Historians see the current juncture in the context of a longer term decline of the West and ‘its’ values.¹⁷ The notion of supporting a spread of liberal values is now derided by prominent commentators as naïve and harmful ‘utopianism’.¹⁸ Support for extending democracy’s reach is excoriated as ‘ideological overstretch’.¹⁹ Highly respected thinkers detect that the fall-out from the occupation of Iraq leaves the whole association of Western self-interest with liberal internationalism wrought asunder.²⁰ And the financial crisis has been ritually attributed to an excess of liberalism. Liberal internationalism’s appeal took a searingly painful blow with the disastrous invasion of Iraq, was further bloodied by the abuses committed under the ‘war on terror’, and risks being terminally damaged by the financial meltdown.

The realist critique is that EU policies are too oriented towards liberal values, and that this is self-defeating and dangerous for international security. From this perspective, an overdose of liberal idealism is what explains the EU’s failure to deal with terrorism and ethnic conflicts. It also ensures that the EU’s strategic importance in global politics is increasingly negligible. Modifying third countries’ internal politics and economics and encouraging interdependence is not what advances European interests. Rather, the need is to attain a systemic balance of power, and for member states to protect their own ‘relative gains’ within a competitive international system. In sum: ‘The time for liberal-idealist illusions in a Europe “whole and free” is past’.²¹ In classical realist terms, the EU should represent more of a status quo than revisionist power.

Much quoted critics belittle European approaches for being too mushy and liberal, and insufficiently assertive in pursuit of traditional relative power gains. The liberal worldview is not a source of strength but a self-nourishing reflection of European impotence. Europe is accused of being congenitally averse to the kind of geopolitics required as Enlightenment liberalism is revealed to be little more than a mirage. It is admonished as too temperamentally liberal to deal with the emerging ‘nineteenth century redux’ world order.²²

Broader analytical trends have also turned against liberalism. Recent years have witnessed a rise in critical international relations theory that rejects liberalism as a cover for preserving existing power imbalances. Even the apparently progressive development and conflict prevention agendas are pounded as a ‘liberal’ plot to ‘contain’ restive Third World populations by offering them minimal support but not comprehensive social and citizenship rights.²³ Such an angle defines universalism as respect for differences in conscious distinction to the spread of liberal principles. Prominent critical theorists who do adhere to universalism argue that this must take the form not so much of Western support for liberal norms but more of consensus through dialogic compromise between different cultures.²⁴ The rise of ‘critical security studies’ has brought with it an assault on liberalism’s positivist underpinnings. For a wide array of post-structuralists, the whole discourse of liberal internationalism is associated with the replication of existing forms of power. And from a different perspective, within political philosophy, the Platonist backing of elite-guided wisdom over popular clamour has come back into vogue, reflecting a view that the travails of the 2000s derive from liberalism having ‘gone too far’.²⁵

Bookshelves heave with condemnation of Western support for liberalism; they are increasingly bereft of volumes offering it defence. Much of the right excoriates liberalism as a hopelessly idealistic doctrine best kept out of foreign policy; much of the left sees it as a cloak for power interests. One long-time chronicler of liberalism observes that the creed is now suffering a ‘crisis of confidence’, with its advocates increasingly ‘apologetic’. Nominal liberals increasingly favour a ‘narcissistic self-protectionism’ that sees global integration as a threat rather than an embodiment of Kantian cosmopolitanism.²⁶ They herald the demise of ‘globalism’; a welcome return of the ‘local’ in resistance to the international; and a growing recognition that more cross-border trade is not desirable.²⁷ Progressives defending the principle of liberal interventionism have been banished from their circle of erstwhile ‘fellow travellers’.²⁸ Self-avowed cosmopolitan thinkers have increasingly rowed back from advocating fundamental transformation to international politics or to conventional (national, parochial) notions of belonging.²⁹ Cosmopolitan liberalism has been squeezed from the analytical script by recrudescent conservative realism, on the one hand, and the rise of critical theory, on the other hand.

Writings more specifically on European foreign policy have increasingly ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in European Politics
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Economic liberalism and the financial crisis
• 3 Multilateralism and the emerging international order
• 4 Security and counter-terrorism
• 5 Democracy and human rights
• 6 Dealing with conflict
• 7 Combating Third World poverty
• 8 Energy security and climate change
• 9 Europe’s global future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index