National and European Foreign Policies

Reuben Wong, Christopher Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136719257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

National and European Foreign Policy explores the processes of interaction between the national and the European levels in foreign policy making in European Union states. The volume also assesses the mutual influence which the Member States exert on each other, independent of the EU institutions, thus tracing the extent to which Member State foreign policies are being Europeanized into more convergent, coordinated policies.

With chapters examining France, Germany, Italy, UK, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Finland, Poland and Slovenia, the overarching questions the volume addresses centre on the nature of the relationship between the foreign policies of the Member States and 'European' foreign policy. Engaging with 'Europeanization' with theoretical rigour, the contributors to this volume examine the EU's impact on the foreign policies of Member States old and new, the impact of the Member States on the EU's external relations, and the influence of the Member States on each other's foreign policies.

Providing interesting detail on changes in foreign policy thinking and national policies using the concept of Europeanization, National and European Foreign Policy will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics and policy formation, foreign policy and International Relations.

1

Introduction

Reuben Wong and Christopher Hill

This book addresses the puzzle of how national foreign policies in the EU affect common EU positions in international politics (e.g. the Common Commercial Policy, Common Foreign and Security Policy, ESDP); while at the same time how these same national foreign policies are to some extent ‘Europeanized’ into more convergent, coordinated policies.¹ The central research question relates to the interaction between the EU’s common positions (i.e. both Community and CFSP positions) and Member States’ national foreign policies. How does the influence run? In what issue areas? With what significance?

The concept of Europeanization has been applied to foreign policy far less often than in domestic politics. Such literature as there is concentrates on explaining the top-down adaptation of national structures and processes in response to the demands of the EU, or what some call ‘EU-ization’ (Tsardanidis and Stavridris 2005; Miskimmon and Paterson 2003). The chapters in this volume, however, will examine both the ‘top-down’ and the ‘bottom-up’ dimensions of Europeanization in European foreign policy. This chapter introduces the reader to a three-fold conceptualization of foreign policy Europeanization, based on frameworks previously developed by the editors and others (Wong 2007a, 2005). Beginning from the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (1991), the ten country chapters that follow apply this framework to assess:

1. the impact of EU membership on national foreign policies (in particular, the impact of European institutions and policy processes such as the Common Foreign and Security Policy [CFSP], and common EU policies [Trade Policy, ESDP, Commission and Council-initiated ‘strategy papers’]). The associated concept of ‘downloading’ predicts cross-national policy convergence between EU states after a sustained period of structural and procedural adaptation.
2. the impact of the national capitals and their foreign policies on EU foreign policy outputs, also called bottom-up Europeanization or ‘uploading’. This second facet of Europeanization refers to the projection of national ideas, preferences and models from the national to the supranational level.
3. the balance of trade (influence) between imports (Europeanization) and exports (national initiatives and concerns).

The above approach can be seen as a relatively narrow process of preference-shaping. But Europeanization here is also understood as a process of identity and interest convergence, so that (to the extent to which it occurs) ‘European’ interests and a European identity begin to take root alongside national identities and interests, indeed to both inform and shape national policies (Aggestam 2004; Hill and Wallace 1996). The subsidiary questions asked of the authors of the country studies are:

1. What were the Member States’ preferences (if any) in the period under study? What were the stated EU objectives and policies? Who shaped them? In the event of a conflict of interests, how was the specific Member State affected by common European policies on international issues?
2. To what extent did the Member State adapt its national foreign policy to the EU/other Member States’ foreign policies? What was the Member State’s input to European Foreign Policy in the formulation of key EU positions on, for example, Russia, the Middle East, China, ESDP and human rights promotion?
3. In what ways and to what extent is the Member State’s foreign policy, in broad terms, being Europeanized?

These questions are not addressed mechanically in the chapters which follow. Each author has had the freedom to focus on the elements most relevant to the country in question, while bearing in mind the central themes.

‘Europeanization’ in Foreign Policy Studies

The concept of ‘Europeanization’ is relatively new in the study of the impact of European regional integration, and in particular in that of the impact of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), on national foreign policies (Bulmer 2007: 57; Wong 2007a). It was presaged, however, in previous works on the interplay between the national and European, notably through the concepts of ‘a distinctive (West) European position in international affairs’ (Hill 1983c: 200), or ‘the European rescue of national foreign policy’ (Allen 1996). Other concepts that have been applied to study national foreign policies within the context of Europe – such as ‘Brusselsization’ and ‘Europeification’ (Allen 1998; Mueller-Brandeck-Bocquet 2002; Andersen and Eliasen 1995) describe and study the top-down impact of the EU/CFSP as a strictly Pillar II (i.e. intergovernmental) phenomenon in national foreign policymaking. While they rightly focus on CFSP decisions as compromises between national foreign policies of Member States rather than binding decisions from a supranational authority, they are less concerned with the interactive, bottom-up phenomenon of national inputs in CFSP, or the informal socialization of norms – both core research questions in relation to foreign policy Europeanization.

The novelty of ‘Europeanization’ in foreign policy studies is a function of the debate on the existence of a common European foreign policy. Although the international system is populated by important non-state actors, the dominant paradigm in international relations still conceives of foreign policy as essentially the domaine réservé of sovereign governments, and therefore exclusive to states. Foreign policy can be defined as

ideas or actions designed by policy makers to solve a problem or promote some change in the policies, attitudes, or actions of another state or states, in nonstate actors, in the international economy, or in the physical environment of the world

(Holsti 1992: 82)

or as ‘an attempt to design, manage and control the external activities of a state so as to protect and advance agreed and reconciled objectives’ (Allen 1998: 43–44). In its essence, it is ‘the sum of official external relations conducted by an independent actor (usually a state) in international relations’ (Hill 2003:3). The problem with the EU of course, is that it is not a unified state actor, nor does it have clear and consistent external objectives. On the other hand, most would agree that it possesses some degree of independent actorness. Any definition of European foreign policy therefore has a particular dimension.

Instead of a coherent and authoritative decision-making centre, we observe persistent national foreign policies that operate under or alongside – and sometimes at variance with – ‘EU’ foreign policies defined by the Commission, the European Parliament and/or the Council. As the EU is not a consistently unified actor, ‘EU foreign policy’ (EFP) is usually understood and analysed as the sum and interaction of the ‘three strands’ of Europe’s ‘external relations system’, consisting of:

1. the national foreign policies of the Member States;
2. EC external trade relations and development policy; and
3. the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU

(Hill 1993; Ginsberg 1999; Zielonka 1998b; White 2001; Smith 2002; Tonra and Christiansen 2004; Keukeleire and MacNaughtan 2008; Hill and Smith 2005b, 2011). All foreign policy suffers from incoherence, but that of the EU is subject to structural incoherence.

The explicit application of ‘Europeanization’ to foreign policy studies really took off with Ben Tonra’s seminal study of the foreign policies of the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland (Tonra 2000, 2001). Other works have looked at Greece, Spain, Germany, Britain, Austria, France and even new and aspiring Member States such as Poland and Turkey (Stavridis et al. 1999; Vaquer i Fanés 2001;Torreblanca 2001; White 2001; Miskimmon and Paterson 2003; Aleçu de Flers 2005; Wong 2006; Terzi 2005; Gross 2009). Tonra (2000: 229) defines Europeanization in foreign policy as

a transformation in the way in which national foreign policies are constructed, in the ways in which professional roles are defined and pursued and in the consequent internalisation of norms and expectations arising from a complex system of collective European policy making.

Ian Manners and Richard Whitman’s volume on EU Member States’ foreign policies uses the term ‘Europeanization’ to focus on the limits on Member States’ pursuit of independent national foreign policies arising from EU/CFSP membership, and concludes that ‘Member States conduct all but the most limited foreign policy objectives inside an EU context’ (Manners and Whitman 2000a: 245).

With respect to the CFSP, ‘Europeanization’ can be understood as a process of foreign policy convergence. It is a dependent variable contingent on the ideas and directives emanating both from actors (EU institutions, politicians, diplomats) in Brussels, and from member state capitals (national leaders). Europeanization is thus identifiable as a process of change manifested as policy convergence (both top-down and sideways) as well as national policies amplified through EU policy (bottom-up projection).

In this volume, Europeanization is understood as three distinct but interrelated processes, according to the agents, targets and directions of change. As a top-down process, Europeanization refers to the changes in national foreign policies caused by participation over time in foreign policymaking at the European level. As a bottom-up process, it is the projection of national preferences, ideas and policy models onto the level of the European Union. A third aspect is the redefinition of national interests and identity in the context of ‘Europe’. Europeanization is thus conceptualized as a bi-directional process that may lead to a negotiated convergence in terms of policy goals, preferences and even identity between the national and the supranational levels. This may be summarised in the term ‘crossloading’. The nature and the extent of that convergence, however, is the subject of the research reported here.

On Agency, Structure and Causality

The debates about the Europeanization of foreign policies have focused on the following five questions (Wong 2007a: 322–329):

• how to conceptualize the process (e.g. is it specific to EU Member States?)
• what is changing and what are the mechanisms and direction of change (top-down from the EU to the Member States, bottom-up, or socialization)?
• what are the scope of its effects?
• is it producing convergence/harmonization?
• what is the significance of informal socialization as a vector of change?

First is the issue of conceptualizing foreign policy Europeanization. This goes back to the wider debate between the paradigmatic European integration theories – intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism. Is foreign policy as an area immune to Europeanization (if we understand the process as ‘policy convergence’)? Intergovernmentalists privilege the role of national governments in defining their national interests independently of the EU, and then bringing these interests to the table for negotiation. Hoffmann (1966, 2000), observing the reassertion of nationalist sentiment in the EC/EU by France under Presidents Charles de Gaulle (in the 1960s) and Jacques Chirac (1995–2007), claimed that states remained the basic units in world politics and that France today remains fiercely jealous and protective of its foreign policy independence. Moravcsik (1991: 56), the chief spokesman for liberal intergovernmentalism, argues that ‘the primary source of (European) integration lies in the interests of the states themselves and the relative power each brings to Brussels’. The key actors are governmental elites and the motivation for (a limited degree of) integration is the preservation of executive capacity at the national level, not its erosion (Moravcsik 1993: 515). On this basis, little convergence can be expected in areas as central to sovereignty as foreign policy.

Neofunctional expectations of convergence have been given a new lease of life in the study of European foreign policy by social constructivist accounts of the interaction of foreign policy elites under the regimes of EPC (1970), CFSP (1991) and ESDP in the 2000s. Enmeshed in such a context of policymaking where national elites interact with Commission, Council and other EU Member States’ national diplomacies, a réflexe communautaire becomes the norm rather than the exception (Øhrgaard 1997; Smith 2000; Tonra 2001; Carlsnaes et al. 2004).

The Europeanization approach attempts to transcend these two rival approaches to the study of EU Member States’ foreign policies. In the traditional approach, the focus is on the foreign policy of individual Member States as utilitymaximizing, selfish and purposive actors – let us call this the ‘state-centric’ school. The ‘hard’ position in this tradition claims that states are the only essential and salient actors, and that EFP decisions are lowest-common-denominator products of intergovernmental bargaining. Any study of EU foreign policy is thus unproductive as the ‘real’ Europe is the one of state governments. ‘Europe’ is not an actor in international affairs, and does not seem likely to become one (Bull 1982). Of course, Bull’s assessment was coloured by the escalating Cold War tensions of the 1980s between the USSR and Reagan’s USA, but his prognosis for a European military capability independent of the USA/NATO finds renewed favour today in the aftermath of Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq (Gordon 1997; Howorth 2005).

In the other camp – which we will call ‘Europeanist’– is the perspective which treats European Foreign Policy as a given, i.e. as a foreign policy that already exists, has a consistent personality that makes an impact on world politics and is taken seriously by other actors (Carlsnaes and Smith 1994; Zielonka 1998b; Nuttall 2000; White 2001; Smith 2002; Keukeleire and MacNaughtan 2008; Bindi 2010). This approach sometimes presumes that EFP’s scope will expand eventually to subsume national policies in almost all other functional areas (Smith 2000). The Europeanist perspective tends to privilege the role of supranational European institutions in building a common ‘European’ identity, and a distinctive moral presence in world politics. François Duchêne (1973), the first major spokesman in this school, envisaged the EU as a ‘civilian power’, which (in our contemporary terms) wields ‘soft power’ on behalf of states which tend to see the use of force as counter-productive and encourage others to do likewise. Taking as their starting point Duchêne’s premise that the EU should and can become a model of reconciliation and peace for other regions in the world, Europeanist authors posit that EU foreign policy should focus on the promotion of democracy, human rights and security cooperation (K. Smith 1998; Zielonka 1998a; Manners 2002).

A second debate revolves around what is changing and in which direction. Questions relating to the national-level impact of the CFSP/ESDP have focused mainly on the ‘socialization’ effect arising from increasingly close links between the foreign ministries of the EU Member States (Hocking and Spence 2002). Whilst the CFSP assumes the continued existence of national foreign policies, the fundamental research question revolves around the extent to which the CFSP socialization process has led to change in either the procedures or the actual substance of national foreign policies. The recent enlargement of 2004–7 provides an opportunity to examine the Europeanization effect on new members with radically different national foreign policy traditions. Inevitably, however, significant change is most likely to be observed in Member States of longer standing.

On the third debate (regarding the mechanisms and scope of foreign policy Europeanization), some scholars have found that foreign policy convergence is to be expected over the long term (Wong 2006, looking at France). Others have argued that only the most superficial convergence – usually in procedure rather than substance – is taking place, and that national foreign policies retain their essential independence (Tsardanidis and Stavridis 2005, looking at Greece). There is general agreement however, that three distinct dimensions of the Europeanization process are evident in the relationship between a Member State’s foreign policy and the EU (Tsardanidis and Stavridis 2005; Wong 2005, 2007a; Major and Pomorska 2005).

The first dimension of Europeanization is used predominantly in the literature to explain the top-down adaptation of national structures and processes in response to the demands of the EU. This concept predicts cross-national policy convergence between EU states after a sustained period of structural and procedural adaptation. The second dimension refers to the bottom-up projection of national ideas, preferences and models from the national to the supranational level. Third, Europeanization in its broadest sense means a process of identity and interest convergence. The three aspects of Europeanization and their expected indicators are examined in more detail in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1: Three dimensions of Europeanization in national foreign policy

Aspects of Europeanization	National foreign policy (FP) indicators
1 Adaptation and Policy Convergence – Harmonization and transformation of a Member St...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. France: Europeanization by default?
• 3. Germany in the European Union
• 4. Resisting Europe? The case of Italy’s foreign policy
• 5. Europeanization and British foreign policy
• 6. Denmark: a committed member – with opt-outs!
• 7. Greece: from special case to limited Europeanization
• 8. Spain and Europe: mutual reinforcement in foreign policy
• 9. The Europeanization of Finnish foreign policy: pendulum swings in slow motion
• 10. Poland: learning to play the Brussels game
• 11. Slovenia: searching for a foreign policy identity via the EU
• 12. Many actors, one path? The meaning of Europeanization in the context of foreign policy
• Bibliography
• Index