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to settings, methods, goals or the paradigm. Symbolic policy change thus can be an important outcome of EU foreign policy change. An important factor in determining the outcome of policy change is the particular temporal context in which the reform process takes place. Events that take place within the particular context can a) increase or decrease the salience of the issue area in question; and b) consequently increase or decrease the urgency for policy reform. The sudden increased salience of the issue area – often exacerbated by media
.1 The decision-making process of EU foreign policy change After first discussing how HI contributes to its foundations, this chapter sets out each of the building blocks of the framework. It explains what is meant by ‘critical junctures’ and how they may open up the political space for foreign policy to change. It explains how institutions shape the process of such change in the EU, not just because the institutional landscape is the setting in which
. Table 2.3 Summary of impact: temporal contingency Temporal development Impact on foreign policy change Structural
This chapter details the 2015 ENP reform after the Ukraine crisis. It explains how the institutional arrangements of the ENP allocated political authority during this critical juncture. Their main institutional ‘effects’ were the ENP’s long focus on trade and socio-economic development; its technocratic approach, particularly towards the east; and how its government made the institutions quite plastic – able to both shape and be shaped by the decision-making process. Germany, France and Poland took the lead in ENP reform because of this plasticity, aided by the political nature of the Ukraine crisis. The chapter discusses how the key actors perceived this critical juncture, their policy preferences and how these affected the reform. It focuses on how the temporal context impacted on the reform process, reconstructing the events that changed key actors’ perceptions: the Vilnius Summit and the ‘Euromaidan’, Yanukovych’s ousting, the annexation of the Crimea and the downing of flight MH17.
This book provides readers with an analytical framework that serves to investigate and explain how the EU adapts its foreign policy in the wake of crisis. While a range of studies dedicated to foreign policy stability and change exist for the US context, such analyses are rare for the assessment and measurement of foreign policy change at the European Union level. This book explores a range of theories of (foreign) policy change and assesses their value for explaining EU foreign policy change. Changes to EU foreign policy, this study proposes based upon an in-depth investigation of recent episodes in which foreign policy has changed, are not captured well using existing typologies of policy change from other fields of study.
Offering a new perspective on the question of change, this book proposes an analytical framework focused on how institutions, institutional ‘plasticity’ and temporal context impact on the decision-making process leading to change. It thus provides readers with the tools to analyse, explain and conceptualise the various change outcomes in EU foreign policy. In so doing, it sets the theoretical approach of historical institutionalism to work in an EU foreign policy setting. Based on a rich empirical analysis of five case studies it provides a revised typology of EU foreign policy change. It proposes two novel forms of foreign policy change, symbolic change and constructive ambiguity, as frequent and important outcomes of the EU decision-making process.
probing how global change is spurring a qualitative transformation of the European Union, it provides a pragmatic and specific framework to unpack the process by which the decision to change foreign policy is made during specific crisis episodes. How do crises in EU foreign policy produce policy changes, and why? The key goal of this book is to improve our understanding of EU foreign policy change, how it happens and what it looks like. To achieve this, this book will develop an analytical framework and a typology of change suitable for this task
issue through a host of different lenses. These stem from the fields of public policy studies or international relations, or are based on accounts which investigate particular EU policy responses to crisis, often from an evaluative or normative point of view. An important ambition for this book has thus been, first, to provide those wanting to study episodes of EU foreign policy change with a single, dedicated, analytical framework that serves to investigate and explain the way in which the EU adapts its foreign policy in the wake of crises. This
that have already made use of this approach to study foreign policy and have identified its most relevant insights. Next, our empirical illustration will examine one particular aspect of foreign policy-making, namely foreign policy change. This does not suggest that MSA can address only issues of change; however, change entails overcoming the inertia of previous policies, in which case MSA is well suited with its analytical tools to account for it. After all, the MSA allows the study of critical junctures in policy-making and foreign policy changes constitute primary
, the concept of veto players has been employed, for example, to make predictions about the relative importance of domestic and international incentives in foreign policy-making (Alons 2007 : 216–218). More broadly, veto player approaches can be useful in adding to the theoretical rigor of liberal second image arguments in comparative foreign policy analysis. The same is true for research into foreign policy change. After all, the main raison d’être of veto player approaches in public policy precisely is to explain and predict patterns of
mean the expansion of more jargon, with some similar terms meaning different things and different terms just reproducing other terms for the same phenomena. Public policy research uses the veto player framework, for example, in a similar way as foreign policy analysts talk about decision units (Hermann 2001 ; see also chapter 5 in this volume) and selectorates and audience costs (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003 ). Punctuated equilibrium may be just a different term for foreign policy change. 3 And work in public policy on advocacy coalitions has a