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Can Russia, the European Union and the three major EU member states adopt a unified policy line in the global arena? This book investigates the cohesiveness of ‘greater Europe’ through the detailed scrutiny of policy statements by the leadership elites in the UK, France, Germany, Russia and the EU in connection with three defining events in international security. The crisis in Kosovo of 1999; the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Iraq crisis of 2003. This extensive empirical enquiry results in a critical constructivist response to neorealist understandings of European security. The book contrasts the EU's new way of ‘doing security’ with the established, competitive bilateral interplay in the European security sphere and provides a clue to the kind of security politics that will prevail in Europe. A joint Moscow Brussels approach would improve the chances of both increasing their relative strength vis-a-vis the USA, but serious cleavages threaten to undermine such a ‘greater European’ common view on security. The book considers the extent to which the major European players pursue similar objectives, and assesses the possible implications for and the chances of greater Europe emerging as a cohesive global actor.
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.
individual member states are most important for shaping the EU’s trade policy with Africa. Compared to the field of trade, the EU’s policies in the field of development cooperation and security policy are often regarded as even more ambiguous and pluralistic, not the least because in these policy fields decision-making is either ‘shared’ between EU institutions and EU member states, or based on inter-governmental decision-making. Key policy-makers, especially from the Commission but sometimes also from individual EU member states, claim that the making of the EU as an
ideal of the spread of freedom, the EU promotes human rights and the rule of law. If the EU and Russia can harmonise their ‘ethical efforts’, by pushing for a more strict application of rule of law in international relations, this might limit the USA’s freedom of manoeuvre in the international arena. Although it is highly unlikely that EU member states would give up their established partnership with the
logic of respect for human rights and democratic values contributing to the political and economic stability of current and prospective EU member states is irresistible. Yet, what is the European driving force in the promotion of human rights? And are the means employed to encourage countries aspiring for membership consistent with the EU’s internal standards for human rights protection? In the fight
10 Martin Dangerfield New member states’ economic relations with Russia: ‘Europeanisation’ or bilateral preferences? This chapter examines connections between economic issues and the various challenges to, and conundrums of, Europeanisation associated with the EU’s relations with Eastern neighbours. It focuses on trade between EU member states and Russia, which until recently had been growing steadily, with particularly rapid expansion after the EU’s eastward enlargement in 2004. The significance of the Russian market means that disruptions to trade caused by
crucial period for the left in Europe. It presents a comparative analysis across two dimensions. The first is between ten EU member states during the economic crisis, including bailout countries and what could be termed ‘creditor’ countries. The second dimension compares the different party families of the left, from social democracy through green left to the radical left. Even allowing for the fact that not every member state has a party system in which all these varieties of the left are present, it still leaves quite some range to consider. Rather than try to
policy towards Russia over much of the past decade has been frankly alarming’. EU member states, it is argued, have switched ‘between neo-institutionalist and neorealist temptations in their relations with Russia’ with national capitals simultaneously seeking to engage Russia in regional, rules-based institutions while attempting to pursue their national interests bilaterally (Braghiroli and Carta, 2009: 2). While the EU had less difficulty formulating a common position towards Russia in the 1990s, coalescing around a strategy of democratisation and Westernisation in a
amid frustration. Neither was it as politically popular and powerful as its advocates often suggested. Even before the 2008 financial crisis, EU member states, predominantly of the right, pressed the EU to focus on ‘competitiveness’ and economic growth, with social policy often viewed just as costs, and only occasionally as contributors to growth. The aftermath of the financial crisis weakened the social Europe agenda even further, as member states and European institutions focused on austere fiscal and social policies, and on market deregulation. The idea