The SAGE Handbook of European Foreign Policy

Knud Erik Jorgensen, Aasne Kalland Aarstad, Edith Drieskens, Katie Laatikainen, Ben Tonra, Knud Erik Jorgensen, Aasne Kalland Aarstad, Edith Drieskens, Katie Laatikainen, Ben Tonra

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473914421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

During the last two decades the study of European foreign policy has experienced remarkable growth, presumably reflecting a more significant international role of the European Union. The Union has significantly expanded its policy portfolio and though empty symbolic politics still exists, the Union's international relations have become more substantial and its foreign policy more focused. European foreign policy has become a dynamic policy area, being adapted to changing challenges and environments, such as the Arab Spring, new emerging economies/powers; the crisis of multilateralism and much more.

The SAGE Handbook of European Foreign Policy, Two-Volume set, is a major reference work for Foreign Policy Programmes around the world. The Handbook is designed to be accessible to graduate and postgraduate students in a wide variety of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Both volumes are structured to address areas of critical concern to scholars at the cutting edge of all major dimensions of foreign policy.

The volumes are composed of original chapters written specifically to the following themes:

· Research traditions and historical experience

· Theoretical perspectives

· EU actors

· State actors

· Societal actors

· The politics of European foreign policy

· Bilateral relations

· Relations with multilateral institutions

· Individual policies

· Transnational challenges

The Handbook will be an essential reference for both advanced students and scholars.

Part I Research Traditions

1 Introduction: Research Traditions

Knud Erik J⊘rgensen

The aim of this introduction is to briefly characterize the main research traditions that have produced the major bulk of research on European foreign policy. The notion of research traditions connotes broad trajectories of scholarship, distinct dialectics of continuity and change as well as the gradual establishment of a scholarly infrastructure.1 Such an infrastructure consists of conventions, associations, specialized journals, a body of research literature, specialized discourses, trends, textbooks, book series and mythologies of origin as well as what Ted Hopf calls ‘a particular well-known consensually foundational literature’ (Hopf 2002: x; see also Olson and Groom 1991). Research traditions provide the general framework within which more specific analytical interventions take place, thereby constituting a field of study. They provide the base camp from which shorter expeditions can be planned, executed and subsequently evaluated. Concerning the latter – evaluation – critical self-reflection is one of the important indicators of a research tradition having reached maturity; that is, the point in time when representatives of research traditions, scientific disciplines and theoretical traditions engage in state-of-the-art exercises and discuss what has been achieved, current trends and where to go next. This Handbook documents that research on European foreign policy has reached a milestone of maturity.

Research traditions impact both theory building and applied theories and methods in significant fields of study. According to Larry Laudan, ‘a research tradition consists of a family of theories sharing a common ontology and methodology’ (Laudan 1977; see also Godfrey-Smith 2009). During the last 60 years (1954–2014) we have witnessed a range of important, constitutive beginnings of relevant research traditions. For the study of European foreign policy, three traditions stand out as being particularly important: International Studies (IS), European Studies (ES) and Foreign Policy Studies (FPS). All three traditions are approaching a common ontology and methodology, but it requires continued negotiation to define these features. The traditions are clearly not mutually exclusive but are instead characterized by movements across traditions and significant overlap, cf. Figure 1.1. Given that they are research traditions, we should expect that they change dynamically and dialectically over time while preserving certain key characteristics, and that their fault lines, modes of relation and overlaps change as well.

Figure 1.1Three research traditions

As mentioned above, each tradition is characterized by distinct trajectories of scholarship and dialectics of continuity and change as well as the gradual establishment of an organization of the field; that is, a scholarly infrastructure. It is therefore not surprising that the three traditions tend to produce different historical narratives, have different understandings of the geopolitical context in which European foreign policy has developed and that they conceptualize as well as theorize European foreign policy differently. In short, they share a topic – an explanandum – but the different perspectives and constitutive conceptualizations imply that the topic is somewhat differently defined. We will now examine the implications of this observation in further detail; that is, how this plays out in more concrete ways.

International Relations

The modest beginnings of International Studies can be traced back to the early 20^th century, when the first academic chairs were established, when an important League of Nations committee began work on defining International Studies and when several professors outlined templates for an International Relations (IR) discipline. Yet IR did not become a discipline of significance until the 1960s and 1970s.

The family of theories constituting the IR research tradition comprises at least six major theoretical traditions: liberalism, realism, international political economy, international political theory, the post-positivist tradition and the international society tradition. It is from within the liberal theoretical tradition that theories of cooperation and integration have emerged. European integration is acknowledged as an empirical field of research that has had a very significant impact on the liberal tradition. Moreover, scholars within the liberal tradition have produced three major strands of thinking: commerce liberalism, republican liberalism and the neoliberal-institutionalist theoretical perspective. Finally, scholars within the liberal tradition have coined numerous key concepts such as interdependence, the trading state, global governance and zones of peace, as well as analysed the degree to which European foreign policy has been informed by liberal internationalism (Youngs 2011).

If processes of European integration provide fair-weather sailing for the liberal tradition, the realist theoretical tradition has been profoundly challenged by the subject matter. This explains the nature of realist encounters with European integration, which are predominantly preoccupied with explaining why more has not been achieved or the lack of cooperation and integration (Pijpers 1991), downplaying achievements (Toje 2011), explaining why processes of integration are epiphenomenal to other more important factors, including first and foremost the ever changing balance of power (Mearsheimer 1994; Wivel 2004, 2005; Hyde-Price 2006, 2008; Rosato 2011; see also Chapter 6 in this volume), and claiming that European integration is bound to fail. Examples of realist theory being used to actually explain (aspects of) European foreign policy are very rare (but see Grieco 1990; Posen 2004).

Cherishing a self-image of being situated between the liberal and realist traditions, the English School has contributed a distinct conception of international society and coined the notion of fundamental international institutions (i.e. diplomacy, international law, balance of power, great powers and war). The tradition is most notably capable of delivering conceptualizations of the social environment in which states an...