External Energy Security in the European Union

Small Member States' Perspective

Matúš Mišík

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351106511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the positions of small EU members in approaching external energy security, using Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia as case studies.

It examines when small EU members support and when they oppose further development of cooperation at the European level in external energy security and argues that their preferences depend on their perceived ability to deal with the challenges of their energy policies. It finds that small EU members whose decision-makers believe that their states can successfully deal with these challenges do not support the deepening of European integration in external energy security as this would mean a loss of competences (and vice-versa), concluding that European integration is considered to be a response to perceived vulnerability.

This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and professionals in EU politics and foreign policy, energy policy and security, and more broadly to security studies, European politics and international relations.

1 Preference formation and
external energy security

This chapter develops a theoretical model that guides the analytical chapters of this book (Chapters 4 to 6) and helps them to answer the central research question: Under which conditions do small EU member countries support the transfer of competences in external energy security to the EU level, and when do they oppose the further deepening of European integration in this area. It discusses how EU member states form their preferences that they pursue at the EU level, examines what exactly defines EU member states that can be considered small and what is the external energy security of the EU. This chapter develops the main assumption connected to perceived vulnerability as a factor that influences small member states’ position towards integration in external energy security at the EU level, arguing that small member states that perceive their position in this area as vulnerable support deepening of integration as they see it as a suitable response to such vulnerability. On the other hand, small member states that perceive themselves as strong actors able to cope with challenges in the energy sector do not support deepening of European integration, as they consider cooperation at the EU level to limit their manoeuvrability. Therefore they prefer to keep competences in their own hands. European integration is thus seen as a solution to perceived vulnerability.

First, external energy policy of the EU and its connection to energy security is examined. The chapter discusses the complex nature of energy security, its internal as well as external dimension. The second section examines small EU member states and argues in favour of relative weight as a defining factor for this group of member states. The third section operationalizes the energy challenge that is a crucial part of the assumptions regarding small EU states’ support or opposition to integration in external energy security. The operationalization develops three types of partial challenges: external, internal and business that can help us to find an answer to the research question and create the main structure of the analytical section of the book. The last section examines case selection and data. It explains the reasons why Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were chosen for the analysis and discusses data that are used in the analysis.

External energy policy of the EU and external energy security

The EU has been developing the security dimension of its energy policy since around the time of the eastern enlargement of the EU. This event together with the 2009 gas crisis unveiled problems in the energy security of some EU member states (especially those from Central and Eastern Europe) and fostered the Commission’s activities in this area. The EU’s involvement in energy security is examined in detail in Chapter 3 and partly also in Chapter 2. Therefore this section focuses mostly on a theoretical discussion about energy security and not on the EU’s activities in this area, although these two are closely interlinked – the development of the EU’s involvement in energy security has fostered increased academic interest in the area. Therefore, we can observe a ‘boom’ in academic publications on energy security issues in connection to the EU, especially after the 2009 gas crisis (for example, Duffield and Birchfield, 2011; Hedenus et al., 2010; Maltby, 2013; Mišík, 2010; Neuman, 2010; Pointvogl, 2009; Pollak et al., 2010; Roberts, 2009; Wood, 2010; Youngs, 2011), although energy security centred analyses have been published prior to this (Haghighi, 2008; Mayer, 2008; Talus, 2008). Later, the scholarship became too wide to present a full list here; moreover, that is not the objective of this chapter (see, for example, Andersen et al., 2017; Filipović et al., 2018; Godzimirski, 2019; Mouraviev and Koulouri, 2019; Szulecki, 2018).

Although there had been a significant development in energy policy by the end of the 2000s, the dominant position at that time was that the policy had a long way to go until it would become a fully-fledged EU policy. For example, Wood claimed that “energy politics betray a basic lack of European unity” (2010: 307) and that there was no common EU energy policy at that time. Due to different energy mixes, “exposures to supply issues” and “divergent views toward external relations”, it was very difficult to find common ground among member states in this area (Birchfield and Duffield, 2011: 265). The Lisbon Treaty of 2009 included energy policy among shared competences between the EU and its member states that brought significant changes into the policy, but these took time to be implemented. Although article 194 of the treaty stipulates in its first part that its aim is to “ensure security of energy supply in the Union”, the second section claims that measures from the first section “shall not affect a Member State’s right to determine the conditions for exploiting its energy resources, its choice between different energy sources and the general structure of its energy supply” (European Union, 2007). This means not only that member states can continue using those energy sources over which there is no consensus at the EU level (for example, coal or nuclear), but also that they are responsible for energy supplies in general and those from third countries in particular. Moreover, foreign policy issues are still firmly in the hands of member states who have the dominant position in spite of the Commission’s efforts to increase integration in this area and develop common institutions like the European External Action Service (Bátora, 2013). As a consequence, member states are able to pursue their own independent foreign policies, although the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU is getting more developed over time (Orenstein and Kelemen, 2017).

The external energy policy of the EU is thus, to a significant degree, in the hands of member states who are responsible for managing their own energy supplies. They sign intergovernmental agreements (IGA) with their suppliers and support their energy companies’ relations with external suppliers in many other ways. The Commission also has a say in external energy relations, however, its role is closely connected to environmental and climate policies (Adelle et al., 2018) or the internal energy market (Goldthau and Sitter, 2014). The EU has pursued environmental goals within the international arena via traditional external policy areas such as trade or development or within the Common Foreign and Security Policy, but also through other policy areas like chemicals policy or energy policy. The link between environmental and climate issues and energy policy is very close as the energy sector belongs among the main polluters. The EU is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases (Welsch, 2017); a significant part of which is created in the energy sector. Although the EU adopted very ambitious domestic goals connected to decarbonization (2050 Energy Strategy), these have not become “a centrepiece of the EU’s external relations with energy partners” (Dupont and Oberthür, 2015: 259).

The other way the Commission can influence external energy relations is by extending its internal energy market rules beyond its borders. The Commission exports EU internal energy market rules to third countries, in most cases the EU’s neighbours, to help them to develop their own energy markets that would create stable investment conditions for EU energy businesses as well as support reliable transit and energy relations in general (the EU’s involvement in the Energy Community is a very good example; see Goldthau and Sitter, 2019). Scholars have argued that this is a specific type of energy relations with third countries and coined it external energy governance (Herranz-Surrallés, 2016) or market approach (Siddi, 2019). Within this approach the EU is not directly involved in development of new infrastructural projects outside of the EU (pipelines) nor does it pursue bilateral energy deals with supply countries. On the other side there is much more active approach that uses foreign policy tools to secure access to energy sources. This approach became known as energy diplomacy (Herranz-Surrallés, 2016) or geopolitical approach (Siddi, 2019). Main trait of this strategy is active support of new pipelines and more direct engagement in discussions with supply countries. Some authors claim that the EU’s approach to its external energy policy has changed since the mid-2000s when the Union started to use energy diplomacy at the international level that caused the erosion of the market-based approach (Kuzemko, 2014). The EU’s engagement in the Nabucco pipeline or the Southern Gas Corridor are prime examples of this new approach towards energy policy. While the former cannot be considered to be a success, as it never materialized, the latter is currently under construction, although its capacity will probably not significantly influence the EU’s natural gas market. Abbasov includes the Southern Gas Corridor among examples of external energy governance of the EU that he defines similarly to the previous authors as “the export of the energy acquis beyond its borders” (2014: 28). He argues that there is more to the gas corridor than bringing additional gas supplies to the EU – what he calls physical supply security – and that the EU aims to export its acquis eastward in order to “minimize the ability of the exporters and transit countries to manipulate energy flow and tailor it to their political/economical objective” (ibid.: 36).

Herranz-Surrallés (2016) points out that while the policy discourse has followed an energy diplomacy trajectory and the EU became more involved in direct energy relations with third countries, the policy practice has not changed, and the Union still utilizes energy governance tools (that help it to transfer its internal energy market rules abroad) while member states pursue national diplomacies (forming energy contracts and building new infrastructure). Indeed, while the South Gas Corridor has been discussed and planned, Germany and the Russian Federation built the first two lines of Nord Stream and developed a solid basis for the start of construction on the second two lines (Nikiforov and Hackemesser, 2018). The Commission has an ability to check IGA between EU members and third countries, however, this fact has not changed the power structure between the Commission and member states. This measure was met with strong opposition from the member states when it was first introduced in 2012 (European Commission, 2016) and it had to undergo a revision in 2016 in order to gain a real impact on these agreements. The main aim of this mechanism was to bring a certain level of transparency into intergovernmental agreements on energy supply and to ensure compatibility of these agreements with the rules of the internal energy market. They enabled the Commission to have an overview of the existing contracts and in this way the Commission can exercise pressure to create an even playing field. However, the ex-post nature of the original compatibility checks between IGAs and EU legislation has not “resulted in the transformation of concluded non-compliant [intergovernmental agreements] into compliant ones” (European Commission, 2016: 5) and therefore the Commission suggested changing the model of compliance check to ex-ante. Nowadays the Commission has the ability to check the compatibility of the new proposed energy contracts before they are signed.

EU member states are thus the key players in external energy policy and therefore we need to examine these actors if we want to look closer at the development in this area. This book concentrates on the small EU member states and how they create preferences supporting or opposing further development in external energy security policy. While the former will be discussed in the next section, the rest of this part takes a look at the latter and tries to establish the place of external energy security within the existing discourse on energy security, characterized by complexity and difficulty to find a universally acceptable definition (see, for example, Azzuni and Breyer, 2018 or Szulecki, 2018 on the current discussion; for earlier, see Chester, 2010). The steep increase in the number of different definitions and approaches to energy security is impressive, especially if considered that less than a decade ago Ciută lamented that “[a]bundant analyses of pipeline politics stand in stark contrast to the very few attempts to make sense of energy security conceptually” (2010: 124). And he was not alone – Chester (2010) also criticized the limited discourse about the nature of energy security. Such calls for energy policy conceptualization were soon answered (see, for example, Winzer, 2012) and nowadays, less than ten years later, scholars dealing with energy security lament over the large number of different approaches and definitions of the concept (see, Cox, 2018). For this reason this chapter does not aim to provide an exhausting discussion on existing academic literature examining different aspects of energy security. Its main goal is to provide a working definition that can be used in the following analysis while acknowledging the complexity of the concept. The main focus here is on external energy security and therefore this section’s objective is to examine the position of this dimension of energy security within a broader discussion on energy security.

According to a very basic definition, energy security can be characterized as “uninterrupted, continuous and sufficient availability of all forms of energy a given entity requires” (Pointvogl, 2009: 5705–5706). However, such a simple definition does not sufficiently mirror the complex nature of energy security with its many dimensions (Sovacool and Mukherjee, 2011). Therefore, many scholars argue that energy security, as a part of energy policy, has to be analysed in its multifaceted character (Hermanson, 2018) comprising of “technical, economic, social, environmental and geopolitical issues in close interaction” (Escribano and García-Verdugo, 2012: 27). Newer papers include even more dimensions including political stability, foreign affairs or market liberalization (Chalvatzis and Ioannidis, 2017). The complexity of energy gives energy security a special position not only within national markets, but also at the global level. According to Goldthau and Sovacool (2012), energy has four distinctive characteristics that makes it difficult not only to analyse, but also to take policy decisions: vertical and horizontal complexity, higher costs and strong path dependency. There is a whole array of definitions reflecting this complexity, and almost every author proposes their own definition (Ang et al., 2015 examined 104 studies on energy security). No single definition prevails in academic literature or within the international institutions that all use their own definition. On the other hand, an often-used argument claims that there is “a need for a comprehensible understanding of the term energy security”, because energy is crucial for the functioning and survival of society (Azzuni and Breyer, 2018: 2; also Dannreuther, 2017) and energy security is its principal component. We can identify several reasons why energy security is so difficult to define.

First of all, energy security is a relative concept that differs among countries as well as in time. Chester argues that “the specificities of [individual components of energy security] will understandably differ at any point in time” (2010: 887). Similarly, Talus (2008) claims that this is the main reason why it is so difficult to find a common definition (for a detailed discussion, see also Bahgat, 2006). Energy security means different things for countries that produce, transit or import energy sources. Besides the energy supply security, which is the main concern for energy importing countries, there is also security of demand, which is an important issue for the exporters (Kirchner and Berk, 2010; Selim and Sah...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Preference formation and external energy security
• 2 The EU and its energy sector
• 3 Development of EU energy policy and its external dimension
• 4 External challenge
• 5 Internal challenge
• 6 Business challenge
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index