European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games

Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Ulrik Gad, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Ulrik Pram Gad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135127787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how sovereignty works in the context of European integration and postcolonialism. Focusing on a group of micro-polities associated with the European Union, it offers a new understanding of international relations in the context of modern sovereignty.

This book offers a systematic and comparative analysis of the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs), the EU and the four affected Member States: UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark. Contributors explore how states and state-like entities play 'sovereignty games' to understand how a group of postcolonial entities may strategically use their ambiguous status in relation to sovereignty. The book examines why former colonies are seeking greater room to manoeuvre on their own, whilst simultaneously developing a close relationship to the supranational EU. Methodologically sophisticated, this interdisciplinary volume combines interviews, participant observation, textual, legal and institutional analysis for a new theoretical approach to understanding the strategic possibilities and subjectivity of non-sovereign entities in international politics.

Bringing together research on European integration and postcolonial theory, European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, EU studies, Postcolonial studies, International Law and Political Theory.

1 Introduction

Postcolonial sovereignty games

Ulrik Pram Gad and Rebecca Adler-Nissen

How do Greenland, Aruba, Mayotte, and other micropolities use the EU in their efforts to transcend their colonial status? How do the EU and its member states deal with these partially independent polities? While these territories are seeking greater room for manoeuvre on their own, they are at the same time developing a close relationship to the supranational EU in (dis)concert with their former colonizers. This book seeks to address these apparently contradictory processes of fragmentation and integration. Theoretically, we argue that sovereignty cannot be understood as a ‘thing’ that is either present or absent. On the contrary, sovereignty unfolds in the legal and political games that must be studied as both discourses and practices. By focusing on these arguably odd political entities, we tell an alternative story about how sovereignty works in international relations.

From its very beginnings in the 1950s, the EU has been part of a story of decolonization. We address the interplay of European integration and decolonization through the framework of ‘intersecting sovereignty games’. Studying these games allows us to understand how a group of political entities with an ambiguous status in relation to sovereignty can play important roles precisely due to their ambiguous status.

Our reconceptualization of sovereignty draws on insights from both EU studies and postcolonialism. The two academic fields — EU studies and postcolonial-ism — have developed separately despite their obvious theoretical and empirical overlaps (Wæver and Tickner 2009: 3; see also Constantinou 2007; Hansen 2002: 486). In 1994, Darby and Paolini called for the bridging of International Relations (IR) and Postcolonialism. They saw the study of European integration as one of the possible places where state-centrism could be relaxed and where IR theories could become more open to concerns central to postcolonialism (1994: 390). A central aim of this book is to facilitate the cross-fertilization of the two academic sub-fields in order to better theorize international politics in a world of interdependence in which the term ‘international’ seems to lose its meaning.¹

This introductory chapter is organized in six sections. The following section introduces the empirical focus of the book — the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) and their relations to the EU and each of their respective metropoles. The second section addresses the IR debates on how best to conceptualize the units and relations of international politics. It briefly presents the various takes on sovereignty in European integration literature and postcolonialism and discusses possible characterizations of the relations between the EU, its member states, and their OCTs. The third section introduces the conceptual framework of the volume, providing a theoretical account of how the triangular relation may be understood as intersecting sovereignty games. The fourth section argues that this triangular relation offers a unique laboratory for studying sovereignty games by comparing these entities and their relations with ‘neighbouring’ categories of entities which also do not fit the traditional concept of sovereignty. Section five presents the analytical strategies employed in the case studies, and the final section presents an outline of the rest of the book.

Europe's last colonies

Europe's last colonies hold a prominent position on the European political agenda. On 9 June 2009, a majority of the people of Greenland voted in favour of increased independence from Denmark, and this interest in increased independence is combined with widespread interest in closer relations to the EU as a means of diversifying dependency. The EU, Denmark and Greenland alike are preparing for a future with climate change, intensive raw material extraction, new transportation corridors, and new claims to Arctic sovereignty. On the opposite side of the globe, in the Pacific Ocean, French Polynesian separatists advocate switching from a French connection tarnished by its colonial past to a closer relation to the EU, which they see as being free of these connotations. Another French possession, Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, recently voted to integrate further into France, becoming a French Overseas Department and hence fully integrated into the EU. In the Caribbean, a rather different and paradoxical process is taking place as a colony refuses to be decolonized: what is now referred to as the ‘Caribbean Netherlands’ have successfully resisted Dutch suggestions that the islands should become formally sovereign, opting instead for a process of internal devolution. Turning to the remnants of the British Empire, the situation of the British Overseas Territories is equally diverse: Bermuda resists any association with the EU, the Turks and Caicos has had its self-government arrangement temporarily suspended, while the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands are struggling with EU and international authorities seeking to somehow influence, if not control, their offshore financial activities. This book outlines the structural patterns in these seemingly contradictory developments. Seeking to outgrow their colonial status, the polities use the EU to acquire subjectivity without becoming fully independent from their metropoles.

At the same time, the EU is developing a common foreign policy using a range of foreign, environmental, security, development, and trade instruments. In this process, the overseas territories are seen as ‘strategically important outposts, spread all over the world, as proponents of the EU's values’ (European Commission 2009: 2). Establishing itself as a global ‘normative power’ (Manners 2002; Whitman 2011), the EU is the world's greatest aid donor and heavily engaged in developing international institutions. Although rarely stated explicitly, much of this involvement is closely linked to Europe's lengthy colonial history. This past has led to an abundance of special relations to former European colonies and dependents around the world. One peculiar type is the so-called ‘OCT arrangement’; that is, the unique legal status of the EU's ‘Overseas Countries and Territories’. The 21 OCTs are constitutionally tied to a member state without being part of the EU.²Their situation is deeply puzzling. Spread around the world seas, these territories are engaged in constructing their own identities — separate and distinct from their former colonizers — in more or less close cooperation with a supranational EU. The complex relations between these micropolities, metropoles, and the EU have a single characteristic in common: they all dredge up legacies from the colonial period while at the same time demonstrating the significance of the EU for the future of these territories. One symptom of the complexity of these relationships is the language used to describe them: in EU jargon, the official term is ‘overseas countries and territories constitutionally related to a member state’. In everyday language, practitioners translate this into ‘OCTs and their mother countries’.³ For reasons argued below, however, we prefer to place the OCTs within the generic category ‘micropolity’. Although the Greek word ‘metropole’ literally means ‘mother state’, it seems to carry less pronounced maternalistic connotations.

In 2008, the European Commission proposed a comprehensive reform of the OCT arrangement. The objective is to reform the arrangement from a traditional form of development cooperation to a new framework that takes circumstances such as the liberalization of international trade into account. On the one hand, this reform appears to be an attempt at closing the book on Europe's colonial legacy; on the other, it can be seen as a form of neo-imperialism, a way for Europe to govern distant parts of the world.

A more pragmatic motivation for changing the OCT arrangement is financial. A number of the OCTs are now more affluent (per capita) than the average EU member state. Some OCTs have done extremely well in recent decades, possibly due to their peculiar status as ‘almost sovereign but not quite’ and their positioning on the margins of the EU.⁴ Economic reasoning, however, cannot explain the EU's talk of the OCTs as strategic outposts. Indeed, as this book will demonstrate, the debates on the future of the OCTs stem from contrasting ways of imagining and organizing political life. Sovereignty is the dominant way of conceptualizing and ordering the world, but sovereignty is not an exclusive organizational template and may not even appear desirable, as the OCTs amply demonstrate.

Focusing on what appear to be marginal sites of international relations, we are able to see much more heterogeneity than IR theory usually allows a glimpse of. In this volume, we look at a particular site where a special meeting takes place: a meeting between the late sovereign EU, the postcolonial Third World, and autono-mous-but-less-than-sovereign entities. The way sovereignty plays out in this site points towards a future which is very different from the (imagined) Westphalian notion of neatly pigeon-holed sovereign states.

This book provides the first comparative analysis of how sovereignty is practised in the triangular relationship between the EU, the micropolities, which have OCT status in relation to the EU, and the member states linking the two.⁵ When it comes to natural resources, economic sustainability, collective identity, human rights, and security, the triangular relationship gives rise to what we call ‘sovereignty games’. These games involve the interplay of the strategies whereby governments and international organizations attempt to increase their room for manoeuvre and legitimacy by playing on the various meanings of the concept of sovereignty.

Sovereignty in European and Postcolonial Studies

The sovereign state dominates our conception of political order, which prevents us from grasping the dynamics that avoid a strictly sovereign form of life. When reading realist international theory, the state appears to be a given. According to Kenneth Waltz, sovereignty means that a state ‘decides for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems’ (Waltz 1979: 97; cf. Morgenthau 1956). This image of political life is strikingly parallel to international legal theory. International law traditionally sees sovereignty as an either/or question: either the state is sovereign or not. From this perspective, sovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise, within a specifiable territory, the functions of a nation-state and be answerable to no higher authority (Espersen, Harhoff and Spiermann 2003:142). This explains why non-sovereign entities such as the OCTs remain objects if viewed from an IR realist or traditional international law perspective. OCTs have no separate identity, no agency, and no subjectivity (Browning and Joenniemi 2004: 700f; 2008: 144; Palan 2003: 74; Anghie 2005: 38–9).

Historians and sociologists, however, paint a different picture of sovereignty. To begin with, the concept of sovereignty has a diverse and uneven past (Bartelson 1995; Grovogui, this volume). Moreover, the conditions for sovereignty have altered over the last few decades (Barkin 1998). Indeed, state sovereignty should not be seen as a permanent situation. Other ways of organizing world politics have been prevalent and continue to exist. This is why Ferguson and Mansbach suggest the label ‘polity’ to describe ‘those entities with a measure of identity, a degree of organisation and hierarchy, and a capacity to mobilize persons and their resources for political purposes.’ Moreover, almost all epochs ‘have been characterized by layered, overlapping, and interacting polities — coexisting, cooperating and/or conflicting’ (Ferguson and Mansbach 2008: 140). The traditional conceptualization of sovereignty is challenged when confronted with self-government arrangements (Petersen 2006; cf. Loukacheva 2007: 6, 145; Baldacchino 2010); and likewise when confronted with the EU (Ruggie 1993; Walker 2003; 2008).

Europe beyond sovereignty?

Jacques Delors once famously described the EU as an ‘unidentified political object’ (Drake 2000: 24). As Mac Amhlaigh shows in Chapter 3, sovereignty is central to the debate on how to characterize ...