Global Networks and European Actors

Navigating and Managing Complexity

George Christou, Jacob Hasselbalch, George Christou, Jacob Hasselbalch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000393057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas europeas

This book examines the ability of the EU and European actor networks to coherently and effectively navigate, manage, and influence debates and policy on the international stage. It also questions whether increasing complexity across a range of critical global issues and networks has affected this ability.

Engaging with the growing theoretical and conceptual literature on networks and complexity, the book provides a deeper understanding of how the European Union and European actors navigate within global networks and complex regimes across a range of regulatory, policy cooperation, and foreign and security policy issue areas. It sheds light on how far they are able to respond to and shape solutions to some of the most pressing challenges on the global agenda in the 21st century.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU/European and global networks and more broadly to European and EU studies, Global Governance, International Relations, International Political Economy, and Foreign Policy and Security Studies.

PART 1

Conceptualising networks in the face of complexity

1
Networks, transnational networks, and global order

Claire Godet and Amandine Orsini

Introduction

Network is a popular concept in hard and social sciences, designating “a set of relations between objects which could be people, organizations, nations, items found in a Google search, brain cells, or electrical transformers” (Kadushin 2012, pp. 3–4). Indeed, networks have been identified in many different academic disciplines such as Biology, Physics, Mathematics, Sociology, Economics, Anthropology, and Computer Science. They label many different relations, such as the ones developed under social media, between business organizations, or across mathematical representations. Since the 1970s, in Political Science and International Relations, scholars have studied networks to better grasp the relationships and the context explaining political behavior and its outcomes (Victor et al. 2017, p. 9). In a period spanning 20 years, technical developments, and especially the use of specialized software, have revolutionized the study of networks, but the core assumption remains unchanged: relationships between actors matter.

Networks are not new. In order to survive within society, individuals have always needed to tie links with each other. International relations are no exception: across time, networks of international actors, known as transnational networks, have spread and gained in stability, some acquiring an autonomous identity such as the G20, a transgovernmental network that became a quasi-intergovernmental organization. Many different types of transnational networks coexist at the global level. Networks can be informal, such as networks of migrants; or can be highly formalized, such as transnational city networks. Networks can be situated at the local, national, or transnational level.

While networks are not new, they have evolved, formalized, and taken changing roles in International Relations. Initially, scholars studied networks as variables only influencing what remained a classical state-centric international system (Castells 2009) organized around international regimes. Progressively, scholars have considered networks as key international actors, bringing by themselves “a new world order” (Slaughter 2004, 2017). Discussions about the European order are illustrative of this shift. In 1993, Moravscik pictured the European Union (EU) as an intergovernmental machine, a set of regimes in the hands of its member states. The only networked forms of governance, according to him, were represented by potentially networked interest groups who were pushing for more regimes within the EU (Moravscik 1995). Yet at the beginning of the 2000s, others have started to describe the EU itself as a networked form of governance, establishing flexible but harmonized policies (Slaughter 2004, p. 11).

This chapter aims at investigating these assumptions on the evolution of the analytical focus from international regimes to transnational networks used to understand global order. It argues that networks do not build a new global order as much as they offer a new perspective on the classical inter-state Westphalian order. The first section clarifies certain definitions in the network literature. The second section presents two different conceptualizations of global order, including networks. The third and fourth sections show, respectively, how a network approach helps change perspective when conceptualizing international relations, and the limits of such a different perspective.

This chapter provides a general definition and overview of a phenomenon, the emergence of networks within the global order, which is replicated at the meso and at micro level of policymaking as developed in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively. While we use illustrative examples to elaborate our analytical discussion, the book then investigates the concrete causes and effects of networks in a diversity of international relations’ fields as outlined in the main Introduction. Below we provide general definitions and understandings, on which these concrete case studies are then later developed in the book.

Networks, network theory, and network analysis

It is necessary to explain certain central concepts that come to mind when talking about networks, namely network theory and network analysis. The aim of this section is not to go into detail about these two concepts but rather to give concise definitions that will clarify the discussion.

On the one hand, network theory – also sometimes named social network theory – attempts to explain political outcomes through relational accounts rather than through characteristics that are intrinsic to actors. The theory is based on three assumptions: the behavior of one node in a network is influenced by the other nodes of the network; the links between nodes allow for exchange (of information, ideas, resources, power, etc.); and the combination of links create a structure that can enable and constrain the nodes. The nodes can be any type of actor (individual or collective, formal or informal, organized or non-organized, etc.), and the links can be any type of relationship (deliberate or incidental, strong or unstable, permanent or ephemeral, etc.). From these general assumptions, network theory deducts proposals that can be applied in different cases. For example, several studies have shown that a node with greater centrality in a network has a greater influence potential over the other nodes (Orsini 2013). Other scholars have attempted to design a model that could explain or predict how innovation or norms can be diffused in a network (Zimmerman 2016). Despite some incipient attempts (e.g. Maoz 2017), the different proposals have not yet been collected and systematized into a coherent set that could constitute a widely approved network theory.

On the other hand, network analysis is known as a methodological tool. Again, it is hardly a unique methodology and the concept has been used to define qualitative and quantitative studies with very different aims (e.g. mapping relationships, evaluating power relationships, or explaining a policy’s outcomes). In the past decade, scholars have attempted to systematize network analysis by defining “a set of concepts, measures, methods, and ideas that are suitable to modelling interactions between units of all kinds – cells and nerves, plants and pollinators, predators and prey, individuals, organizations, and nation-states” (Maoz 2017, p. 2). The flexibility of network analysis allows a better understanding of complex political processes and outcomes. By rejecting the essentialist notion of social units and by seeing social transactions and processes as fundamental constituents of social reality (Bousquet and Curtis 2011, p. 49), network analysis gives clear methodological and conceptual instruments to disentangle complex social reality (see Box 1.1). It is important to emphasize that a network analysis is not a theory but rather “a toolset and a unified methodological perspective for the study of any substantive area dealing with interactions – social, physical, or natural” (Maoz 2017, p. 3).

Box 1.1. Key concepts of network analysis

In order to study the fleeting relations between nodes in a network, network analysis has developed concepts that describe and explain nodes and network’s behavior.

Centrality refers to the number of ties a node has to other nodes. In International Relations, centrality is often used because it relates to power and influence: the assumption is that the higher the degree of centrality, the higher the political influence (Orsini 2013). Other measures can complement centrality: betweenness centrality (how many actors are connected to each other by a given actor?); or closeness centrality (how many ties would it take to get from one actor to every other actor?), for example.

Community detection aims at identifying subgroups in the network: “a community is defined as a subset of nodes within the graph such that connections between the nodes are denser than connections with the rest of the network” (Radicchi et al. 2004, p. 2658). It is also possible to identify cliques defined as “a maximally completely connected subgraph within the network or a group of nodes that are directly connected with each other such that there is no other node to which all of the members of the group are each connected as well” (Patty and Penn 2017, p. 13). The nodes of these subgroups are thought of as having different relations between them compared to with the rest of the network.

Connectivity determines how well two nodes are connected. Is there a path between these two nodes? How short is it? Are there several paths? The answers to these questions help in evaluating centrality, closeness, and community. Bridges are the nodes that, if they were removed from the network, would leave two or more nodes no longer connected by any path.

Embeddedness can refer to structural or relational embeddedness. The latter describes the quality and strength of a tie between two nodes; while the former concerns the network as a whole. Structural embeddedness is about the influence of network configuration, “about the extent to which a dyad’s mutual contacts are connected to one another” (Granovetter 1992, p. 35).

Transnational networks and global order: A new way to look at the world?

The study of networks has transformed the way researchers conceptualize the international scene, and therefore, the explanations available to understand it. This section presents historically how scholars have studied networks and how it has modified their conceptualization of the world order.

The early days: Transnational networks Influencing world order

Social actors create links between them and establish a web of interconnected relationships that form diverse networks. Social actors – being individuals, organizations, or informal groups – have always built relationships that could be mapped as networks. In International Relations, the number of transnational networks has dramatically increased in the 1980s with the transnationalization of world politics favored by, among others, the development of communication technology. Transnationalization meant that new actors, in parallel to states, could act on the international scene, including, among others, experts, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or firms. Since then, networks have appeared either as new types of organizations or as new types of actors on the international scene. In both cases, they have tried to influence classical International Relations. Initially, those scholars that studied them found that they could only marginally change the world order, notably by orientating the intergovernmental agenda.

In the early 1970s, transnationalists discovered a valuable form of organization that supported governments in implementing policies in the shape of transgovernmental networks. Transgovernmental networks were defined by Keohane and Nye as “sets of direct interactions among sub-units of different governments that are not controlled or closely guided by the policies of the cabinets or chief executives of those governments” (Keohane and Nye 1974, p. 43). Simply put, transgovernmental networks are networks of national civil servants who transcend states. Keohane and Nye have shown that transgovernmental relations heightened the interdependence between nation states, contributed to the definition of issues, and promoted coalitions among governmental sub-units (Keohane and Nye 1974, p. 61). They could transcend national borders in order to help states fulfill their missions (Slaughter 2004).

In the 1990s, other scholars identified another key type of network designed to influence politics: epistemic communities. Epistemic communities are defined as “networks of professionals with recognized expertise and com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Networks, complexity, and the global order
• PART 1 CONCEPTUALISING NETWORKS IN THE FACE OF COMPLEXITY
• PART 2 CASE STUDIES IN GLOBAL NETWORKS AND EUROPEAN ACTORS
• Index