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The European Union (EU), including its earlier formations, is a major economic and political actor in the region. This book seeks to gain insight into how EU practitioners consider the policy for which they have direct responsibility. It argues that a specific focus on practitioners' (diplomats, bureaucrats, and public officials) interactions can offer insight into the way EU foreign policy is practised. The book examines the data drawn from research interviews with EU practitioners who work on EU foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. The ways that practitioners manage identity, normative, moral, and collective interest concerns are crucial for international relations (IR) theory, and for understanding EU foreign policy. The book illustrates the factors that have guided the path of the practice theory towards an application within IR and EU scholarship, and explains the notion of indexicality and the subsequent social action. It demonstrates the ways in which EU practitioners both co-construct and deconstruct the concept of the 'European' during research interviews, and focuses on norms and the functions of norms in EU foreign policy. Implying a vocational element to justify the necessary course of action that the EU ought to pursue in its eastern neighbourhood is not new. Practioners ought to be aware that the way in which they practise foreign policy is just as important as the policy itself. They have identified energy security as the most pressing common security interest that unites EU member states' interest into a collective interest, in the eastern neighbourhood.
The European Union (EU) has emerged as an important security actor qua actor, not only in the non-traditional areas of security, but increasingly as an entity with force projection capabilities. This book investigates how the concept of security relates to or deals with different categories of threat, explores the relationship between forms of coordination among states, international institutions, and the provision of European security and the execution of security governance. It also investigates whether the EU has been effective in realising its stated security objectives and those of its member states. The book commences with a discussion on the changing nature of the European state, the changing nature and broadening of the security agenda, and the problem of security governance in the European political space. There are four functional challenges facing the EU as a security actor: the resolution of interstate conflicts, the management of intrastate conflicts, state-building endeavours, and building the institutions of civil society. The book then examines policies of prevention, particularly the pre-emption of conflict within Europe and its neighbourhood. It moves on to examine policies of assurance, particularly the problem of peace-building in south-eastern Europe. EU's peace-building or sustaining role where there has been a violent interstate or intrastate conflict, especially the origins and performance of the Stability Pact, is discussed. Finally, the book looks at the policies of protection which capture the challenge of internal security.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European Union (EU) stands out as an important regional organization. This book focuses on the influence of the World Bank on the EU development cooperation policy, with special emphasis on the Lomé Convention. It explains the influence of trade liberalisation on EU trade preferences and provides a comparative analysis of the content and direction of the policies developed towards the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), the Mediterranean, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It looks at the trade-related directorates and their contribution to the phenomenon referred as 'trade liberalisation'. This includes trends towards the removal or elimination of trade preferences and the ideology underlying this reflected in and created by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation (GATT/WTO). The book examines the role of the mass media because the media are supposed to play a unique role in encouraging political reactions to humanitarian emergencies. The bolting on to development 'policy' of other continents, and the separate existence of a badly run Humanitarian Office (ECHO), brought the lie to the Maastricht Treaty telling us that the EU really had a coherent development policy. The Third World in general, and Africa in particular, are becoming important components in the EU's efforts to develop into a significant international player. The Cotonou Agreement proposes to end the preferential trade margins accorded to non-least developed ACP states in favour of more liberal free trade agreements strongly shaped by the WTO agenda.
The future relationship of Ireland and the EU The aim of this book has been to evaluate how the Irish–EU relationship has been impacted by the “long decade” of crises that have befallen Ireland, the EU and, indeed, the globe. Our focus has included both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. So with two polities to consider and contributions covering social, political
Introduction Extensive asymmetries, geographical distance and limited interdependence define the context of the bilateral relationship between the EU and Mexico. None the less, both parties have sought to develop practices and institutions to increase their political and economic interconnections. Since the early 1990s the EU and Mexico have dealt with the changing global contexts and adapted their relationship to the new circumstances. Two salient moments have defined the relationship in the past three decades. The first
1 The EU discovers Romania Romania first made official contact with the European Economic Community (as it then was) at the height of the Cold War. In 1973 it managed to obtain preferential trading status from the EEC. This was long before Brussels established any formal ties of this nature with other ‘People’s Democracies’ of Eastern Europe.1 Geopolitical concerns motivated the EEC in its relations with Romania. It was a communist state, indeed a dogmatic one, modelled in its later stages on North Korea. But it was also a maverick one which appeared to have
Despite the pomp of the 2003 St Petersburg summit and the breathtaking decision to start the elaboration of the ‘roadmaps’, Russia–EU relations have been stagnating in recent years. They were characterised by a significant lack of substance and a growing gap between Brussels and Moscow on a variety of issues, from the economic consequences of enlargement to the notorious
The foreign policy of the European Union is in many ways a puzzle to students of international relations. Doubts about whether there is in reality a European foreign policy contrast with empirical observations of the considerable influence exerted by the EU, if not always in the international system at large, then at least in Europe. Such observations imply that the EU has a ‘foreign policy’ of sorts
During the 1990s, both the EU and NATO enlarged their memberships: the EU by taking in Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995 and NATO by admitting the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland four years later. These two enlargement processes were not officially linked. In the wake of the developing EU enlargement process in the early 1990s, NATO members had apparently contented themselves
EUD1 10/28/03 2:38 PM Page 1 1 EU development cooperation: from model to symbol? Karin Arts and Anna K. Dickson At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European Union (EU) stands out as an important regional organisation. It entertains formalised relations with almost all other (groups of ) states. Although much of its attention is devoted to internal integration, obviously the European Union cannot and does not wish to be an isolated entity. Instead it has expressed the desire and ambition to take up a prominent place in the working of