EU Foreign Policy through the Lens of Discourse Analysis

Making Sense of Diversity

Caterina Carta, Jean-Frederic Morin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317140252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Leading scholars in discourse analysis and European foreign policy join forces in this book, marking a real breakthrough in the literature. Not only do they offer original perspectives on European foreign policy, but they bring together various theories on foreign policy discourses that remain too often isolated from each other.

This theoretical diversity is clearly reflected in the book's four-pronged structure: Part I - Post-structuralist Approaches (with contributions from Thomas Diez, Henrik Larsen and Beste Isleyen); Part II - Constructivist Approaches (with contributions from Knud Erik Jørgensen, Jan Orbie, Ferdi de Ville, Esther Barbé, Anna Herranz-Surrallés and Michal Natorski); Part III - Critical Discourse Analytical Approaches (with contributions from Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Amelie Kutter, Ruth Wodak, Salomi Boukala and Caterina Carta); Part IV - Discursive Institutionalist Approaches (with contributions from Ben Rosamond, Antoine Rayroux and Vivien A. Schmidt). The volume is the first full-length study on how to apply different discourse analytical approaches and methodologies to European foreign policy. The paperback edition makes for a unique selling point as a course text.

PART I
Poststructuralist Approaches

Chapter 1
Speaking Europe, Drawing Boundaries: Reflections on the Role of Discourse in EU Foreign Policy and Identity

Thomas Diez

Introduction: Revisiting ‘Speaking Europe’¹

The role of discourse in the construction of an EU identity and the legitimisation of EU policies has become a widespread object of analysis over the past two decades. It is in fact hard to imagine that when I made a case for bringing together discourse analysis and European Integration Studies some 15 years ago (Diez 1999), these were still two fields that did not really talk to each other. What I outlined then was rather sketchy, suggesting three possible moves in our analysis that clarified the importance of language in European integration: an ‘Austinian’ move focusing on speech acts; a ‘Foucauldian’ move steering us away from individual speech acts to the importance of broader discourses on the construction of meaning; and a ‘Derridarean’ move alerting us to the importance of ever-changing differences in this meaning construction. Much of the debate at the time was inward-looking. Core concerns in the post-Maastricht Treaty era were to do with the features of the evolving EU governance system and its legitimacy, as well as the old arguments about contending explanations of the European integration process (see Diez and Wiener 2009: 6–9).

In the meantime, while discourse analysis has by no means achieved mainstream status in our analyses of European integration, it is nonetheless fair to say that there has been a plethora of writings using a discourse analytical approach to analyse European integration. As one would expect, these writings took different turns, and thus have raised a number of questions. One of these, which I am less interested in for the purposes of this chapter, is the question of whether discourse consists solely of verbal and written utterances, or whether discourse includes all meaningful practices, from flag raising to hand shaking, from images to silences. While the exact relationship between the verbal and the non-verbal is still to be conceptualised, at the same time it is hard to see how a narrow conception of discourse focusing only on the verbal is tenable, as clearly non-verbal interaction also produces meaning (Hansen 2006; Williams 2003). This leaves us with two further questions, which I would like to address in this piece. One is whether discourse analysis is primarily a critical approach or whether it can be used for explanatory purposes. The other is whether the role of discourse is to positively enable particular policies or whether it works through constraining the policies that can be meaningfully and legitimately pursued.

The latter question is particularly pertinent when analysing EU foreign policy and the role of the EU in the international realm. Much of the debate in this area has been on the idea of the EU as a normative power (Manners 2002). And in many of these writings, there is a constitutionalised set of norms that shapes foreign policy, or there is a given EU identity that finds its expression in EU external action. Yet is this really the case? Or is it not at least only one side of the coin?

My argument in this chapter is as follows: first, while I see discourse analysis primarily as a critical engagement in the sense of problematising prevailing understandings in politics, this is logically based on the presupposition that discourse provides the context in which individual policy articulations are set, and in that sense can contribute to the explanation of policy, although this implies a relaxation of the definition of explanation away from its narrow causal-analytical, positivist sense. Second, the way in which discourse informs policy articulations works both through providing meanings on which one can build, and through setting the limits of a meaningful and legitimate policy. Both this ‘enabling’ and ‘disabling’ of articulations are set in a continuous political struggle, which in turn links the critical to the ‘explanatory’ purpose of discourse analysis. Third, these issues play a core role in the analysis of EU external and foreign policy. This is partly the case because the poststructuralist argument that discourse constructs meaning through difference, and therefore through setting limits, is at the heart of analysing the role of foreign policy in identity construction, and therefore at the heart of analysing the interconnections between EU foreign policy and an emerging EU identity.

Discursive Struggles

The concept of ‘discursive struggles’, which is core to my argument, emphasises the argument that meaning does not simply exist as a given, but that it has to be fought over and negotiated – there is a struggle over meaning: a struggle that takes place between discourses that construct and delineate meanings – for instance of what European identity is or where its boundaries lie – in different ways. This is different from a conception of discourse that focuses on coordination and communication, as for instance in the work of Vivien Schmidt (this volume). I will not dispute that actors can use discursive practices for coordinative purposes or to communicate policies in order to legitimise them. Yet I do claim that underneath these functions, there is a more fundamental and continuous struggle over meaning, for instance of the notion of ‘liberalism’ as part of a normative European external and foreign policy (see Rosamond, this volume, who discusses this example).

I understand ‘struggle’ in this context to operate on three levels: on the level of the individual discourse participants, they are engaged in an articulatory struggle in which they have to negotiate the competing demands arising out of complex discursive contexts in order to provide themselves with a reasonably (but never fully) coherent set of meanings. On the level of discursive positions, collective actors articulating their views from these positions are engaged in a struggle with other positions, sometimes compatible, sometimes competing, and by no means necessarily in line with the positions of ‘executive actors’ (Carta and Morin in this volume). On the level of the overall discourse, the picture is one of competing discursive positions that are not only actively pursued by collective actors, but also shape the latter’s identities.

Discourse is therefore not the same as structure, as I will discuss at greater length in the next section. Instead, it both provides a constitutive context for political articulations (leading to the question of how this context works in constituting meaningful practices) and consists of articulatory practices that re-produce but also reshape this context (leading to the question of how the struggles in the process of this reproduction have an impact on the overall discourse). The literature that has analysed EU foreign policy discourse from a discursive perspective so far has in the main not paid sufficient attention to the fact that discursive contexts work through the setting of limits to what is considered legitimate and practicable. Thus, the struggles taking place on the three levels identified above are largely focused on re-setting these limits, although at the same time, these struggles take place within a terrain that is itself bounded by previous articulations and the (often institutionalised) results of previous struggles.

In unfolding this argument, in the next section, I will provide a brief and condensed review of the literature on discourse and foreign policy, especially European foreign policy, and establish the different strands within this literature, elaborating on the questions about the purpose of discourse analysis and the function of discourse. I will then zoom in on the argument about the delimiting effects of discourse, before using the debate about Normative Power Europe as an illustration of my argument.

Discourse and Foreign Policy

Discourse analysis, if it is more than simply a methodological tool, has its roots in poststructuralism (see also Aydın-Düzgit in this volume, engaging with Critical Discourse Analysis as an alternative). As such, it is in the first place a critical theory. Its aim is to problematise what is usually seen as given; to contest that which is uncontested; to interrogate the familiar. Yet when it comes to the analysis of foreign policy, discourse analysis has been used not only as a critical theory; it has also been used in order to explain, or at least in order to better understand how certain foreign policies have come about. The aims of critique and explanation do not need to be mutually exclusive, and in fact critical discourse analysts have implicitly or explicitly included an explanatory element in their analysis. Some have even gone so far as to outline a discursive-analytical framework (e.g., Wæver 2002). Yet it seems to me that in these cases, the concept of explanation needs to be spelled out and qualified. Generally speaking, the thrust of the argument differs between critical and explanatory renditions of discourse analysis, broadly along the continuum between a more traditional social constructivist and a more poststructuralist approach (Christiansen et al. 1999).

For the social constructivist, discourse is important because it conveys norms and identities that shape foreign policy directly through the logic of appropriateness or through the shaping of interests that in turn shape foreign policy. This makes discourse and the norms contained within discourse an independent variable explaining – at least in parts – (foreign) policy outcomes (Schmidt 2010). Actors who advocate norms play an important role in this strand of the literature. These may be individual actors or groups who act as ‘norm entrepreneurs’ and push a particular discourse, or it may be sets of actors such as advocacy coalitions who promote norms (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Klotz 2002).

There is a curious resemblance between such social constructivist work and some of the studies done from a discourse analytical framework in line with the Essex School, following the work of Ernesto Laclau. While theoretically moving away from subjects to discursively framed subject positions from which articulations are performed, scholars in this tradition have used the concept of ‘discursive coalitions’ to capture the struggles between different social groups (or, in my parlance, discursive positions). In relation to EU foreign policy, James Rogers (2009) for instance has used this idea to show how the EU as a ‘global power’ is winning over the concept of the EU as a ‘civilian’ or ‘normative power’. He links this change to the advocacy of ‘euro-strategists … actively pushing for a greater European power role’ (Rogers 2009: 854), and his ‘discourse coalitions’ consist of a variety of actors pushing for either one of the two conceptions of the EU’s foreign policy role. Thus, while coming to the analysis from a critical perspective in order to problematise the present, the logic of the argumentation that Rogers pursues is not that different from the one that we find in more social constructivist, explanatory work.

This is in line with the general research programme of the Essex School as set out by David Howarth et al. While on the one hand seeing discourse analysis as an approach that ‘investigates the way in which social practices articulate and contest the discourses that constitute social reality’ (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 3), on the other hand the authors do attempt to explain political outcomes, although given the inseparability of analyst and discourse, this can only be done through ‘a weakening of the once sacrosanct distinction between objective scientific explanations and subjective hermeneutical descriptions and understandings’ (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000: 6).

While for the Essex School, the discursive struggles between social actors – operating on what I have identified as the second level of discursive struggles – are at the heart of the explanation as well as the problematisation of policies, Ole Wæver and colleagues have formulated a discourse theory of foreign policy that is rooted in a sedimented discursive structure. Wæver (1998, 2002; see also Larsen 1997) is less interested in EU foreign policy than in the European policies of member states, but nonetheless his work warrants a closer look. His main idea is that national discourses are built on a small number of core concepts, central among which are ‘nation’ and ‘state’, with limited variation in their expressions. This leads to the argument that within a national discourse, the meaning of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are fixed in such a way that they make only certain articulations of Europe meaningful and legitimate, and thus can be seen as explaining traditions of European policies, for instance in the comparison between France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Wæver thus operates without recourse to specific actors; his explanation relies on the structure that organises the discourse, or what I have identified as the third level of discursive struggles. While he acknowledges – along the lines of my argument in this chapter – that discourses ‘delimit what can be said and what not’ (Wæver 2002: 29), he nonetheless pursues an analysis focused on the structural influence of discourse on policy where meaning is drawn positively by one layer of discourse from another.

In the present context, I am not interested in a general critique of these variants of the explanatory use of discourse analysis. Instead, I want to focus on two characteristics that all of them share. Firstly, they see their work as explanatory, but explanation in this context must be seen as constitutive rather than causal. Secondly, the constitutive effects of discourse in these works are ‘positive’ in the sense that they provide substantive meaning that enables particular policies.

As far as the status of explanation is concerned, the Copenhagen variant of discourse analysis seems to have the biggest problems. Particularly problematic is that the structure of the discourse is derived from the policy articulations that the structure later is supposed to explain. In other words, the model is tautological if not in theory then at least in its methodological consequences. The fact that articulations are the effect of national discursive structures disregards transnational discourses as much as discursive struggles in the production of meaning, which are at the heart of the Essex School approach. Wæver’s tree model of ‘explaining foreign policy by decoding discourses’ (Wæver 1998) therefore relies on a widened notion of explanation in line with Critical Realism (see Kurki 2010), and unduly privileges structure over agency.

The other approaches focus on agency and process. Yet their ‘explanation’ either falls short of being satisfying in that the conditions under which norm entrepreneurs or advocacy coalitions are able to successfully push their norms must remain vague, or, as in the case of Rogers (2009), it simply traces the process of discursive change and does not actually explain why the process came about.

These problems are hardly surprising. As I have already argued in the introductory section on discursive struggles, discourse has two sides; it has structural qualities that inform articulations, and it relies on articulations to reproduce its structures in constant struggles over meaning which can only be temporarily fixed (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Wæver ignores the latter, Rogers the former. Furthermore, the discursive contexts in which an articulation is made are multiple, and the articulation of a core concept such as ‘Europe’ in turn is an attempt to negotiate and relate these different contexts to each other and thus stabilise their meaning (Diez 2001). We therefore cannot draw causal inferences from articulation to structure, as ultimately they both depend on each other; thus the tautology noted above. And we cannot presume a causal linkage between discursive contexts and the success of norm entrepreneurs, as this ignores the constant struggles over the production of meaning. The relationship between discourse, if by discourse we mean the context in which an articulation occurs, and policy articulation, is therefore at best a mutually constitutive one. It is thus appropriate to say that discourses inform articulations, and that articulations reproduce discourses; but this is not a causal relationship in the positivist sense.

Yet by focusing on discursive struggles, I suggest that we bring the critical purpose of discourse analysis back into focus. It is thus, in the classic sense of a Foucauldian genealogy, the main objective of the discourse analyst not to explain EU foreign policy, but to show how central concepts used in EU foreign policy are actually contested, how the norms reinscribed through foreign policy are the effect of hegemonic practices, and how foreign policy itself is a practice that takes part in discursive struggles, in particular those over identity (Campbell 1998). Such an approach may well help us to better understand how and on which basis specific policies came to be adopted, but it does not resemble an explanation in the positivist meaning of the term.

The explanatory logic that the approaches covered so far share brings out the second problem identified above. Because they see policy as a consequence of norms contained in a discursive structure or promoted by norm entrepreneurs or discourse coalitions, they draw a positive line between norms/discourse and policy. In the following section, I turn to this problem and suggest that we ought to at least supplement such a conception with an understanding of discourse as delimiting.

The Boundary-Setting Function of Discourses

To recognise the importance of discourse as a delimiting force, it is useful to reconsider what I once called the ‘Derridarean move’ in discourse analysis (Diez 1999: 606). This move implied two steps: firstly, that meaning is produced through difference; secondly, that meaning-production, while not being entirely volatile, takes place in a fluid process.

On the issue of constructing meaning through difference, the argument follows Saussure in stating that words do not carry any inherent meaning but gain their meaning through being differentiated from other words. This basic insight has been used in foreign policy analysis to draw attention to the discursive co-construction of ‘anarchy’ and ‘sovereignty’ (Ashley 1988), and in particular the construction of identity through foreign policy (Campbell 1998). In these works, foreign policy does not start from a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: EU Foreign Policy through the Lens of Discourse Analysis
• Part I: Poststructuralist Approaches
• Part II: Constructivist Approaches
• Part III: Critical Discourse Analytical Approaches
• Part IV: Discursive Institutionalist Approaches
• Index