Human Rights and Democracy in EU Foreign Policy

Rosa Balfour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136495724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book investigates the disparity between rhetoric and performance in the European Union response to abuses of human rights and transgression of democracy. With the Arab spring putting the spotlight on the EU's self-portrait as committed to promoting global human rights and democracy, this book examines the paradoxes of its international posture and the inconsistencies and double standards of its policies.

With an informative and empirical approach examining EU relations since the end of the Cold War, this book seeks to uncover the reasons behind the Union's actions and understand the foreign policy dilemmas and processes that guide its action. Including detailed analysis of Ukraine and Egypt, and the EU response to momentous changes for neighbouring nations, the author draws upon thoroughly-researched investigation into twenty years of EU foreign policy to create a framework using both EU Studies and International Relations. Providing a deeper analysis than other dominant explanations, this book presents new theories on the reasons behind the mismatch between words and deeds.

An invaluable and timely volume, Human Rights and Democracy in EU Foreign Policy will be of interest to students and scholars of EU politics, International Relations and human rights policy.

1	Introduction

1.1 Paradoxes of EU policies for human rights and democracy

Human rights and democracy have challenged Westphalian concepts of state sovereignty and non-interference since the end of the Second World War, and especially since the fall of the Berlin wall. States and organizations of states have increasingly resorted to such principles to define their foreign policy agenda, going as far as to use them to justify military interventionism. Over the past twenty years the EU has built its own commitment to pursuing human rights and democracy around the world based on so-called ‘EU values’ and on the EU's ‘political and moral weight’ (European Commission 2001c).

The ways in which the EU has committed itself to human rights and democracy have raised expectations that it might display a ‘different’ kind of behaviour as an international actor, conceptualized in ‘civilian’ or ‘normative’ power models, or as an actor committed to an ‘ethical foreign policy’. The EU itself considers that such commitment defines it as a ‘unique’ actor, thus making a claim for exceptionalism that is not dissimilar to that of the US. Despite enormous differences among administrations, human rights and democracy have formed a centrepiece of US public diplomacy from President Carter to Obama, passing through a controversial ‘regime change’ ideology under George W. Bush.

The contemporary debate on the role that these principles play and/or should play in foreign policy opens up philosophical questions and more pragmatic policy dilemmas. These questions concern the definition of human rights and democracy, their (Western) origin and development, and whether they can be considered universal ‘givens’ or culturally determined perceptions. Can human rights and democracy be ‘exported’ in the name of a liberal notion of ‘expanding the democratic community’, or do they reflect ‘euro-centric imperialism’? Is it legitimate to interfere in the internal affairs of other states?

From the more pragmatic point of view, promoting human rights and democracy abroad can pose numerous dilemmas regarding the aims and the approaches of foreign policy. Principles may clash with other interests and promoting them may lead to destabilization or cause a backlash, thus becoming detrimental to initial aims. Criticizing other countries for their human rights record may discourage engagement and international cooperation. And, more fundamentally, do states really embrace human rights and democracy in their foreign policies? If so, what are their motivations?

The current literature on the EU has not so far provided answers to these questions. Theoretical elaborations on the basis of the EU's claims have emphasized that the sources of such ‘normative’ aims lie in the specific and sui generis nature of the EU as an actor. Conversely, empirical research has underlined that the EU's actual performance is far below its rhetoric, making it an object of criticism when it fails to live up to such commitments, undermining the EU's image and credibility internally and with the rest of the world. The EU is variously accused of using ‘normative’ values to dress up its ideology, of inconsistent behaviour with respect to the principles it claims to promote because of security or economic priorities that override human rights and democracy concerns. This gap between rhetoric and performance, between how the EU sees itself and how it is seen by others, is frequently pointed out but seldom explained.

To an extent, we can expect an international actor to develop a public discourse that it does not necessarily fulfil in practice. We can also expect that a collective actor with diverse and extensive global commitments, interests and diplomatic relations will not simply pursue an idealist-based foreign policy. Yet a paradox emerges: why cultivate the image of the ‘good-doer’, raising internal and external expectations, when the actual policies are an easy target for accusations of double standards, inconsistencies, hypocrisy or instrumentalism?

Observers have identified dynamics internal to the logic of integration that pushed towards giving such substance to the emerging EU foreign policy. Explanations focused on the process of integration see the expansion of Community competencies as a consequence of completing the Single Market in 1992 as one of the drivers behind such developments (Neuwahl 1995, Fouwles 1997, Cremona 1998), together with an emerging European ‘identity’ (Neuwahl 1995). Actor- or identity-based conceptualizations have been made to provide appropriate frameworks for the EU's claims regarding human rights and democracy. ‘Civilian power models’, initially developed in the 1970s, focused on the EU's capacity to ‘domesticate’ relations among states within and outside the Community, by raising the stakes of common responsibilities and breaking down the distinction between ‘home’ and foreign affairs, and by encouraging a ‘built-in sense of collective action’ based on internal ‘values’ of equality, justice and tolerance (Duchêne 1973: 19–20). These features have been successively re-defined to include the need to accept cooperation, a concentration on nonmilitary tools and a willingness to develop supranational structures (Duchêne 1972, 1973, Maull 1990, K. Smith 2000, Telò 2006).

On this basis the foreign policy outputs of a civilian power would include long-term goals rather than purely utilitarian short-term and cost-benefit objectives, aiming to ‘modify the basic structural conditions’ of the environment. They would have an impact on the ‘economic, social, political (democratization) and ideational components of partners’, and would be implemented through peaceful and civilian means, encompassing the set of external relations of the EU rather than the narrower Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).¹ Approaches focusing on the EU's international identity (Manners and Whitman 1998, Whitman 1998), or as a ‘normative power’, single out the uniqueness of the EU, which derives from its ‘historical context, hybrid polity, and political-legal constitution’ which predisposes the EU to act normatively on the global scene by diffusing its principles through ideational interaction (Manners 2002: 240).

Empirical research has not dug beneath the limits of the normative power model. While there has been critical theoretical engagement (Sjursen 2006, Aggestam 2008), research has so far shed insufficient light on the most problematic areas of the model. Research has focused on circumscribed areas of EU activity where there was little controversy among the member states.² It has also pointed out the inconsistencies between the normative power model and its practical outcomes (Brummer 2009), or its ineffective outputs (Pace 2007). Normative Power Europe (NPE), however compelling a prescriptive model, does not provide explanations for the cases in which the EU does not behave normatively, which it does not interpret as incompatible with an ‘ethical foreign policy’ (H. Smith 2002), or appears to consider the realm of fact as less important than the realm of discourse and communication (Larsen 2004). In other words, the ontological focus of research agenda promoted by the innovations of Normative Power Europe has not uncovered empirically what the EU does.

Indeed, empirical research has pointed out the limits to such conceptualizations. The EU has been notoriously reluctant to criticize human rights failures in the partner countries. In Eastern Europe, only with Belarus did the EU use the negative tool of suspending the entry into force of the PCA in 1997 on human rights grounds. With regard to the South Mediterranean countries, the ‘human rights clauses’ have never been used, and even through aid the EU has been timid (Bicchi 2004, Youngs 2005, Aliboni 2005, Balfour 2006, 2012). Here, it is argued that the ‘normative’ dimension has been increasingly trumped by the ‘securitization’ of migration and terrorism (Joffé 2008), a general critique of human rights promotion that had been raised already in the late 1980s (Vincent 1989). Globally, the occasions in which the ‘human rights’ clause was invoked were often limited in number and geographical scope to countries of little economic or geostrategic interest to the EU, thus making the pursuit of a normative position costless for its member states (K. Smith 2001). These studies have pointed out the inconsistencies and double standards of the EU's human rights agenda, which would most often be in conflict with or secondary to other foreign policy priorities (Crawford 1998, K. Smith 1998b, Olsen 2000, K. Smith 2001, Ward 1998, Youngs 2001, K. Smith 2003). How can this gap between rhetoric and implementation be explained?

Theoretical approaches have been insufficiently backed by empirical research on political practice, while empirical approaches have tended, with few exceptions, to focus on narrower policies (such as democratization strategies), without reaching generalizations about EU foreign policy as a whole, and without questioning the nature of the EU as an international actor. Hence, alongside the need for more empirically based research examining EU foreign policy, this gap between rhetoric and performance requires further investigation. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the processes behind policy-making in Brussels. Thus an examination of the dynamics that led to specific foreign policy choices can shed light on the reasons behind the EU's performance.

1.2 Rhetoric and practice. The reasons behind the gap

Ukraine and Egypt are two examples in which the high rhetoric has not been matched by EU action in responding to human rights and democracy shortcomings. In 2004 the Ukrainians overturned their corrupt and undemocratic government through the Orange Revolution; in February 2011 the Egyptians surprised the world by ousting their President, Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for three decades. EU policy before and after the revolutions, and its response to them, was overall seen as poor, and its image has been tarnished as a consequence. The European press has been consistently critical of EU performance in Ukraine, and its role has been negatively compared to that of the US. According to Timothy Garton Ash, ‘shamingly, Americans probably have done more to support the democratic opposition in Ukraine, and to shine a spotlight on electoral malpractices, than west Europeans have’.³ In Egypt, the EU has let down the high expectations of ‘normative’ behaviour regarding human rights abuses on part of the NGO community struggling to survive regime clampdowns (Bayoumi 2007). In 2011, critics pointed out that ‘while the protesters in the streets of Cairo and other Arab cities demand the same rights [as those demanded in 1989], European leaders […] have done little to support them’.⁴

The main reasons for these failures have been attributed to the EU's support of the status quo in Kiev and Cairo. Prior to the 2004 Orange Revolution, former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma was considered the best hope to pursue market reform and the most appropriate interlocutor to ensure that the country would be able to continue maintaining reasonable relations with Moscow and with the West even after his ousting. In Egypt, government cooperation in counter-terrorism and, to a lesser extent, in migration control has been highlighted as a key issue that since September 11 has trumped the EU's normative agenda regarding democracy and human rights in the Mediterranean (Jünemann 2003b, Youngs 2006a, Joffé 2008). In other words, dominant explanations see the EU's principles as blocked by strategic considerations.

This book argues that the reasons for which the EU's performance on human rights and democracy has been below expectations run deeper than the strategic considerations mentioned above. In many respects, the principles of human rights and democracy have acquired a certain ‘taken-for-grantedness’ in the post-Cold War Western world. No democracy would admit to not subscribing to them. Yet beneath the surface of this acquired consensus, this book will show quite different views within the EU on why and how the EU should include these in its foreign policy.

The differences do not just regard the ways in which these principles should be promoted and how the EU reconciles its multiple interests and foreign policy objectives, but also whether human rights and democracy should be actively promoted in the first place. Divergences of perceptions highlight how the dilemmas do not merely concern an opposition between idealist values and material interests, as critics often point out, but also cognitive aspects of foreign policy-making. Hence, understanding the paradoxes of the role human rights and democracy play in international relations also requires using rationalist and cognitive theoretical concepts.

Behind a consensus that the human rights and democracy agenda should be dealt with at the EU level, the member states do not share a common understanding of whether and how the EU should respond when responses are actually demanded by ‘policy entrepreneurial constituencies’ within the EU or solicited by events. Competing strategic priorities also reveal cognitive differences on what are assumed to be common ‘principled ideas’ (Goldstein and Keohane 1993a). The end result is that EU policy on human rights and democracy has tended to be limited to ‘integrating’ (or ‘mainstreaming’ in EU jargon) the principles into the statements, documents, some aid programmes and projects, and to declaratory diplomatic positions. The rhetoric and ‘institutionalization’ of human rights and democracy, which has indeed occurred over the past two decades, makes it hard not to respond, but a ‘logic of diversity’ among the member states ensures that diplomacy reflects the lowest common denominator. Indeed, the logic of diversity is considered here as the main source of the problems that the EU encounters in pursuing its declared aims.

While it is undeniable that competing strategic considerations often trump the EU's stated ‘normative’ objectives, these alone cannot be imputed as the key source of the gap between rhetoric and performance. While EU ‘normative’ rhetoric was at its peak in the 1990s, the two case studies show that it was in the 2000s that the EU produced greater political output and diplomatic activity with regard to human rights and democracy in Ukraine and Egypt, even if it was by and large limited to declaratory positions. This coincided with the two countries acquiring greater strategic importance in the EU's foreign policy agenda, in the context of eastern enlargement of the EU, and in the wake of September 11 and the fight against terrorism. In other words, the increase of strategic priorities competing with normative aims – what is often referred to as the ‘values vs interests’ dilemma – alone cannot explain the inconsistencies and paradoxes of EU foreign policy and human rights and democracy.

1.3 EU definitions of human rights and democracy

The EU has sought legitimacy and substance for its insistence on human rights and democracy in its external policies in international law and conventions. In 1991, a substantive articulation of how the EU views human rights and their relation to democracy was made:

The European Council recalls the indivisible character of human rights. The promotion of economic, social and cultural rights, as of civil and political rights, and of respect for religious freedom and freedom of worship, is of fundamental importance for the full realization of human dignity and of the legitimate aspirations of every individual. Democracy, pluralism, respect for human rights, institutions working within a constitutional framework, and responsible governments appointed following periodic fair elections, as well as the recognition of the legitimate importance of the individual in a society, are essential prerequisites of sustained social and economic development (European Council 1991).

However, the legitimacy of these principles, with respect both to the incorporation of such policies in the EU's internal institutional and legal setup, and to their universality as embedded in international law and norms, rests on different sources. The EU places the sources of legitimacy for pursuing human rights in international and regional treaties and agreements, explicitly referred to in all EC/EU declarations. Many of the rights that come under contention when used in foreign policy have actually found international normative consensus in the Universal Declaration and in the various covenants ratified from 1948 onwards (Donnelly 1999), to which Ukraine and Egypt subscribed as well.

In the European context, reference to some key Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) documents such as the Helsinki Final Act (1975) and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (1990), give such principles a more political dressing tied to regional security, by including concepts such as the ‘human dimension’ of the CSCE process (CSCE 1990), which conceptualized the link between individual human rights and security, in addition to the link made between human rights and development in the 1980s.

The internal dimension of building a human rights regime has developed somewhat more slowly. In 1991, Article 6.2 of the Treaty on the European Union made the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms part of the acquis.⁵ But it was only in 1997 that the enforcement dimension was added with Article 7 introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty, which contemplated a set of negative measures, up to the suspension of membership, in the case of violation of the principles outlined in Article 6. After using this article against Austria, when the far right Freedom Party joined the government in 2000, the Nice Treaty agreed in December of that year modified the article from ‘the existence of a serious and persistent breach’ to a ‘clear risk of a serious breach’ (Art 7 TEU cons.). Since the Austrian episode there has been virtually no debate within the EU over internal matters of its members. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union formally codified the rights enjoyed by the citizens of the EU member states, but this became legally binding only as a Protocol to the Lisbon Treaty (with opt-outs to sections of the Charter for Great Britain and Poland), which entered into force on 1 December 2009, giving the European Court of Justice jurisdiction over ensuring compliance with such articles, which it does not enjoy over foreign policy. The Lisbon Treaty also gave the EU the legal personality necessary to accede to those international conventions whose principles form the basis of its foreign policy.

Conversely, while the EU claims a ‘moral’ legitimacy to pursue democratization abroad owing to the fact that its member states all share democratic principles (European Commission 2001c ), ‘democracy’ does not enjoy an international normative definition. In its external relations, the EU has not developed a one-size-for-all conception of democracy, though it has spelt out its basic tenets, especially in the context of enlargement and of regional strategies. The ‘Copenhagen criteria’ for accession entail the ‘stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities’ (European Council 1993). In Southeastern Europe, democratic principles include ‘representative government, accountable executive; government and public authorities to act in a manner consistent with the constitution and the law; separation of power (government, administration and law); free and fair elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot’ (European Council 1997). With respect to relations with the developing world, the EU defined democratic princi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Human Rights and Democracy in EU Foreign Policy
• Routledge Advances in European Politics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Human rights and democracy in EU foreign policy: the search for an analytical framework
• 3  Rhetoric and tools: the genesis of EU human rights and democracy policies
• 4  Reluctant engagement: EU foreign policy towards Ukraine
• 5  Implementing human rights and democracy: press freedom in Ukraine
• 6  Implementing human rights and democracy: elections in Ukraine and the Orange Revolution
• 7  The search for an EU policy towards Egypt
• 8  Implementing human rights and democracy: torture in Egypt
• 9  Implementing human rights and democracy: elections in Egypt
• 10  Conclusions
• Annexes
• Notes
• References
• Index