This article examines the EU's external power through the prism of perceptions by non-EU countries of the aims of EU's foreign policy, as shown in the Western Balkans. It argues that the EU's policy ...in the Western Balkans lacks a strong normative justification, which affects the degree of compliance with the EU's demands in areas related to state sovereignty. The perceived lack of legitimacy opens up political space for domestic actors to contest the positions taken by the EU on normative grounds. The Western Balkan countries have responded by giving preference to internal sources of legitimacy and asserting domestic reasons for fake compliance, partial compliance or non-compliance with the EU's conditions, with the latter provoking imposed compliance. The article links the enlargement literature with the study of EU foreign policy by offering a new approach to analysing the normative and strategic dimensions of the EU's external power.
This book offers a conceptualisation of unintended consequences and addresses a set of common research questions, highlighting the nature (what), the causes (why), and the modes of management (how) ...of unintended consequences of the European Union’s (EU) external action.
The chapters in the book engage with conceptual and empirical dimensions of the topic, as well as scholarly and policy implications thereof. They do so by looking at EU external action across various policy domains (including trade, migration, development, state-building, democracy promotion, and rule of law reform) and geographic areas (including the USA, Russia, the Western Balkans, the southern and eastern European neighbourhood, and Africa). The book contributes to the study of the EU as an international actor by broadening the notion of its impact abroad to include the unintended consequences of its (in)actions and by shedding new light on the conceptual paradigms that explain EU external action.
This book fills the gap in IR and EU scholarship concerning unintended consequences in an international context and will be of interest to anyone studying this important phenomenon. It was originally published as a special issue of The International Spectator (Italian Journal of International Affairs). Chapters 1, 3, 7, 8 and 9 are available Open Access at www.routledge.com/products/9780367346492.
The Balkan countries have responded differently to the EU's conditional offer of membership. This book examines the diverging compliance patterns of the Balkan accession states and asks why some of ...them have complied substantially, some only partially and others have defied the EU.
The book examines the compliance of the Balkan states with the EU accession conditionality, arguing that the variation in the compliance behavior of Balkan governments hinges on three main factors - the legitimacy of the EU conditions as seen domestically in the accession states, the costs of compliance and the EU's ability and willingness to use its superior power resources to impose compliance when faced with domestic defiance. Placing important events from the most recent political history of the Balkans in a broader historical perspective, the author evaluates the successes and failures of the EU's state building policies in the Balkans, a geographical area of the highest priority for the EU's foreign policy and a test case for the EU's capacity and willingness for foreign policy action.
Based on detailed empirical data, European Foreign Policy and the Challenges of Balkan Accession will be of interest to scholars and students of EU and comparative politics, and those focusing on policy impact in EU integration.
The Europeanization literature predominantly credits the empowerment of pro‐reform political elites through the EU's incentives for the democratization of non‐EU countries. The existing studies ...under‐emphasize the societal dimension of the EU's impact and the normative context in which the EU's leverage is applied. Taking a societal perspective, this article examines societal empowerment as an alternative to elite empowerment and proposes four mechanisms of EU influence on democratization through societies taking into account the EU's structural power and actorness, and considering their effects on the societal sphere and societal actions. Applying the mechanisms to a tough case for societal mobilization for democracy – Bulgaria – the article shows how the EU, through representing a legitimate model of democratic governance, has created a strong pro‐reform societal constituency that can sustain the democratic dynamic. The article also demonstrates the relevance of cross‐national diffusion processes for pro‐democracy societal mobilization.
What accounts for the variation in EU actorness in cases of contested statehood in the European Neighbourhood? A comparative analysis of the EU's policies vis-à-vis three territorial conflicts - ...Kosovo, Abkhazia and Western Sahara - demonstrates the intricate relationship between external conditions and internal EU capability leading to substantial involvement, partial involvement or non-involvement in conflict management. Using insights from the EU actorness debate and the literatures on contested statehood and EU external governance, the paper offers a conceptualisation of the EU's conflict management role and a contingent explanation of the EU's varying commitment to managing conflicts in three cases of contested statehood. The paper finds that external determinants have a considerable weight in EU's policies which existing research tends to overlook owing to its predominant focus on EU's internal institutional procedures and instruments. It teases out the external action-enabling and action-hindering factors, in particular the external structural constraints arising from the nature of statehood contestation and the agency of other international and local players in the three conflicts in the European Neighbourhood.
The impact of external actors on political change in the European neighbourhood has mostly been examined through the prism of elite empowerment through externally offered incentives. The legitimacy ...of external policies has received less scrutiny, both with regard to liberal powers promoting democracy and illiberal powers preventing democracy. This article investigates the conflicting notions of legitimate political governance that underpin the contest between the European Union (EU) and Russia in the Eastern neighbourhood. It proposes four mechanisms of external soft influence that take into account the EU's and Russia's actorness and the structural power of their norms of political governance, and consider their effects on domestic actors and societal understandings of appropriate forms of political authority. It finally traces the EU's and Russia's soft influence on political governance in Ukraine. It maintains that through shaping the domestic understandings of legitimate political authority and reinforcing the domestic political competition, the EU and Russia have both left a durable imprint on Ukraine's uneven political path.
This paper analyses the goals and instruments of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) before and after the Arab Spring, and enquires why there has been little substantive change in the European ...Union's (EU's) approach to the neighbourhood, notwithstanding the acknowledged opportunity for democratic change and the EU's stated willingness to contribute to it. It argues that the institutional governance of the ENP has largely conditioned the EU's response to the historic changes in the neighbourhood. The EU's actorness has been tamed by the underlying differences among EU member states and this has particularly played out in policy areas where the EU institutions have less freedom to act on behalf of the Union. Overall, the EU has asserted itself as neither a strategic actor nor a normative power, but rather as a bystander, trapped in its internal institutional process and passively reacting to crisis events by proposing long-term solutions with little short-term impact.
The introduction to the special issue sets out to examine the normative rivalry between the European Union and other regional actors and how it plays out at the domestic level in the societies of the ...European neighbourhood. Drawing on the International Relations literature on norm diffusion, and in particular on the scholarship on norm contestation, we posit that the degree and nature of domestic contestation of external political norms (both EU and non-EU) has consequences for norm diffusion in specific domestic settings. We deepen the conceptual understanding of the encounter between external and domestic political norms by emphasizing the agency of domestic societies and the importance of domestic normative structures in the processes of acceptance, modification or rejection of external normative influence. We provide empirical evidence about competing normative influences collected from a plethora of case studies from the eastern and the southern European neighbourhoods allowing us to draw a cross-regional parallel about the political ideas more likely to gain traction in the societies of Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa.
This article traces the effects of European Union (EU) normative power on security sector reform in Ukraine. We argue that to get a better grasp of how normative power works in practice, we need to ...scrutinize more closely the domestic journey of EU norms. This local lens allows us to uncover the inherent contestation involved in the transnational travel of norms, emphasizing the importance of local agency and local conceptions of normativity. We reveal the internal struggle between liberal democratic norms and deeply ingrained attitudes, institutions and behaviours linked to the Soviet legacy. We show how EU democratic norms gradually empower domestic constituencies and overcome domestic structural resistance to change, leading to democratic advances in a sector least likely to reform.
This article seeks to unpack the implications of the deteriorating rule of law within the EU's eastern members for the EU's external democracy promotion. We examine the legitimacy of the EU's support ...for democracy in the European neighbourhood in light of the internal EU rule-of-law crisis. Adopting a sociological perspective, we emphasize local perceptions of the EU by tracing the legitimation dynamics at play in neighbouring societies. We adopt a tripartite conception of external legitimacy based on appropriateness, utilitarian consensus, and empathy. Using representative public opinion surveys, we show that the democratic erosion in the eastern EU members has not (yet) negatively impacted the EU's credibility in supporting democracy in the neighbourhood. The article contributes to the research on the legitimacy of EU foreign policy and the literature on the legitimacy of international organizations. It also contributes to the broader effort at provincializing International Relations and decentring EU foreign policy studies.
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