EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

EU plans new strategy on foreign and security policy

Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union

Why and how have the EU and its Member states developed a Mediterranean dimension of JHA? What were the motivations to ‘go external’ in the field of JHA? Was it the result of ‘unintended consequences’, or did actors willingly bypass institutional constraints because of rational calculations (both domestic and supranational)? What were the actors’ incentives to develop a Mediterranean dimension of JHA? Was it purely motivated by security concerns? To what extent have legacies influenced the development of a JHA external dimension? Did the Mediterranean partners influence the development of a JHA Euromed agenda? Which institutions were really important in developing an external dimension of JHA? Did the pillar structure and its related institutional set-up, across which the JHA policies extend, constrain actors? All these questions lie at the heart of the thoughts and are approached from a new institutionalist angle. While the case studies selected reflect developments that took place during the 2005-2009 period, I also take into account the changes introduced by the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009.

The objective is to map the inclusion of JHA considerations in the context of the EU’s relationship with its Mediterranean partners (what) and to understand its mechanisms (why and how). The research puzzle in our papers is based on understanding why and how JHA elements became prominent in the EU’s and its Member states’ external relations with Mediterranean partners. Adopting an institutionalist perspective, I investigate which institutions were important in this policy development. Far from suggesting that issues of migration and terrorism are new phenomena in the Mediterranean region, the ambition here is to go beyond the mere ‘security’ explanation and to understand, at the level of sectoral policies, the institutional mechanisms behind the development of an external dimension of JHA. Indeed, while the post-Cold War security landscape might be one of the explanations, what is puzzling for the researcher is that, compared with ten years ago, those issues are today increasingly being dealt with at the EU level, the Member states allowing the EU to develop an external dimension to its internal security while retaining competences at national level.

Neofunctionalism: The ‘externalization hypothesis’ Neofunctionalism has provided a convincing explanation for JHA integration. In this view, the evolution from economic to security measures is explained by the ‘spillover’ effect. The lifting of the borders led Member states to think about its implications in terms of policing, external border management, organized crime and cross-border pursuits. In other words, some ‘compensatory measures’ were needed in exchange for removing internal borders, such as the establishment of a common visa regime and the improvement of coordination between the national law enforcement agencies (the police, the customs and the judiciary), as well as some common strategy to combat terrorism and organized crime. Cooperation in the field of internal security started as a way to accompany the Single European Act of 1986 and the Single European Market and thus to successfully implement the four freedoms of the common market (movement of persons, goods, services and capital). The implementation of the free movement of persons would enable workers’ mobility and therefore ‘guarantee an optimal allocation of labour in the Single Market’. The 1970s and 1980s had also been marked by frequent strikes at the borders, slowing down and inhibiting border controls. For that reason, France, Germany and the Benelux countries considered that it would be less costly to lift border controls among themselves. The gradual extension of co-decision and Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) confirmed by the Lisbon Treaty has provided the European Commission and the European Parliament with greater oversight of the JHA decision-making process. This could play to the advantage of neofunctionalists, who picture integration as driven by the European Commission, in its role of policy entrepreneur, and as a natural spillover from economics.

Neofunctionalism relies on the concept of ‘externalization’, which assumes that, considering external conditions as given, regional units like the EU will naturally be forced, in spite of their original motivations, to formulate common policies vis-à-vis third countries and parties. ‘Spillover effect’ logic is then in place, pushing Member states to cooperate in the external dimension of internal policies. The more integration there is between the Member states, the less they will be influenced by the external environment. Usually the EU externalizes its policies to its neighbors because ‘integration has negative effects on actors outside the EU, and that their application for membership should be seen as a direct response to a fear of exclusion from European cooperation’. Discrimination against outsiders is likely to provide the EU with the necessary ‘external stimuli’ to offer the EU’s neighbors the possibility to participate in common policies. Schmitter predicts indeed that the outsiders will insist that the regional unit assumes more responsibility, such as in the areas of defence and security. But given that the externalization of JHA was initially considered as an internal policy, how can neofunctionalism explain the pressures from outsiders to take part in JHA? The externalization hypothesis relies indeed on the assumption of the attractiveness of the internal market in which the outsiders want to take part. But what neofunctionalism misses is the fact that outsiders might be attracted by the political attributes of the EU, and the external demands formulated by the neighbors to, for instance, exert some political influence on the Middle East peace process.

Another point is how can neofunctionalism account for the security variable and explain integration in a domain that is not entirely related to economic integration? Neofunctionalists would certainly explain that pressures from outsiders have pushed JHA actors to develop an external dimension. If this analysis proves to be true in the case of the eastern neighbours, this reasoning is tenuous when it comes to the Mediterranean partners. In addition, considering the relationship between freedom and security as being functional, this offers a limited explanation for the competition among the stakeholders of JHA, be they Member states, national law enforcement agencies or EU institutions. What is missing is an explanation of why specific institutions and procedures were created to deal with JHA policies, beyond the mere economic argument. Security integration is indeed not only an externality from the single European market, but also very much linked to the concept of ‘citizenship’. The creation of Schengen was concluded a few years before the creation by the Treaty of Maastricht of a EU citizenship, which was evidenced by a common passport, the right to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member states, the right of a citizen to vote and to stand as a candidate at municipal elections and at European Parliament elections in the Member state in which he or she resides, and the right to diplomatic and consular protection by the authorities of any Member state (articles 20, 21, 22 and 23 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).

In contrast to neofunctionalism, realism holds that nation states are the central actors. They remain in control of the outcomes of EU integration as well as its pace via the various treaty revisions. The world out there is characterized by anarchy in which states struggle and compete for their survival. Cooperation among states occurs when there is the perception of an external threat. In their assumptions of state resilience and self-interest, realists and neo-realists have explained the development of European foreign policy (EFP) as the result of ‘epiphenomenal reflections of the underlying distribution of material power in the international system’. The EU does not have any foreign policy, since it does not possess any of the attributes of a military power such as the USA.

Recent developments in European integration constitute a challenge for neo-realists. Contrary to the predictions of Mearsheimer, the end of the Cold War has not led to a slowing down of European integration: quite the reverse. Since Maastricht, the Amsterdam Treaty and the multiplication of European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) missions over the world, EFP has developed considerably. Instruments and objectives have been fine-tuned, as exemplified by the European Security Strategy (ESS). The European External Action Service is also a way of institutionalizing CFSP and EU’s external action through a common European diplomatic service.

Confronted with these challenges, Hyde-Price exposes three traditional assumptions to explain cooperation in the field of EFP. According to the ‘balancing assumption’, Member states driven by their self-interest use the EU for balance against a hegemonic power such as the USA. Another option is ‘buck-passing’, advanced by Christensen and Snyder, according to which the EU would rather let the USA deal with security issues in the rest of the world, in order to focus on economic and trade issues. Finally, there is the ‘bandwagoning’ explanation, which argues that EU Member states in their EFP would rather align with the strongest power in order to gain influence.

Applied to our study, this could result in arguing that, inter alia, Spain instrumentalized the JHA agenda in order to raise its profile within the EU and to shape the EU’s integration path. Following the idea of division of labour with the USA, one could argue that EU Member states agreed on the necessity for the EU to ‘act as a collective vehicle for “milieu shaping” in the East and South neighborhood, focusing on the provision of “soft” security governance’ while leaving the provision of hard security to the USA and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

To some extent, the intervention in Libya through NATO could confirm that hypothesis. The EU would focus on a comprehensive security that would take into account economic, social and cultural factors. In his neo-realist critique of the ‘normative power EU’ concept , Hyde-Price claims that the EU has been instrumentalized by Member states to exercise collective hegemony, notably to shape its near abroad, that corresponds to the interests of the Member states. ESDP is ‘an instrument for coalitional coercive diplomacy’ driven by France, Germany and the United Kingdom in an intergovernmental fashion.

However, these claims provide only a partial answer to the central question of our theme. It disregards the fact that the JHA external dimension was developed before the events of 9/11, which downgrades the impact of the transatlantic dimension on shaping the agenda. In addition realism seems unable to address fully crucial issues of EFP: ‘why it persists, its performance record, its relationship to European economic integration, its procedures and its impact on the domestic politics of its Member states’. This is why, although the case studies reveal that Member states have sometimes followed a cost/benefit analysis to pursue their own domestic interest, my argument combines elements of rational-choice and historical institutionalisms.

The external governance approach

Beyond traditional theoretical approaches to explain JHA integration, a ‘governance turn’ has occurred in EU integration. This governance turn has surfaced not only in the study of the EU’s internal policies but also in the realm of the EU’s external relations, leading to the coining of the term of ‘external governance’. This approach focuses more on the nature of the relationship that EU external policies create with third countries. Offering a middle way between traditional international relations theories and comparative politics, the governance approach sees the EU neither as a traditional international relations actor nor as a traditional nation-state polity, but rather as a ‘new and emerging system of governance without government’ or a ‘government without statehood. The governance approach argues that, instead of explaining the origin and development of EU institutions, it uses the multilevel EU system to study modes of European policy-making. To do so, it looks at the interaction between the sub national and supranational levels, but also at the interaction between public and private actors. Informal outcomes of policy-making are taken into account, in contrast to liberal intergovernmentalism, which would only look at intergovernmental conference bargains.

Three characteristics characterize EU governance studies:

(1) The competencies for decision-making are shared between different levels and are no longer a monopoly for the governments;

(2) The common decisions of the governments in the EU have the effect that individual governments lose control; and

(3) The political arenas are ‘interconnected’.

So far, the governance approach has been applied to the EU’s internal policymaking, analysing its multilevel governance or the presence of governance networks in the policy-making process. The European integration process, rooted in the community method dear to functionalists, has now given way to the so-called ‘new modes of governance’. Increasingly confronted with the issue of output legitimacy, the EU has developed several modes of governance in order to adapt itself to the constraints of the decision-making process. Soft laws, informal policy-making, policy learning, benchmarking and peer review are very much embedded in a participatory style.

The expansion of EU boundaries creates opportunities to expand governance structures and mechanisms, but also impacts on the EU’s internal mechanisms, for instance by changing actors’ preferences. It is possible to identify two branches of the literature of the EU’s external governance. The first focuses on what is exported to third countries, like the export of the EU’s own modes of governance, such as informal networks. The second branch of the EU’s external governance literature concentrates on the form the ‘rule transfer’ takes and how third countries tend, or tend not, to adopt them.

This external governance enables the EU to ‘tackle interdependencies through the external projection of internal solutions’ and to include third countries in the pursuit of internal EU policy objectives. In its external governance the EU pursues two types of objectives: traditional foreign policy objectives, and also internal policy objectives. Thus, policy transfer in the field of trade and JHA helps to ‘increase the efficiency and problem-solving capacity of internal EU policies’, while policy transfer in the field of democratization and human rights serves foreign policy objectives such as ‘shaping the milieu’

Relying on the notion of ‘policy transfer’, Lavenex and Uçarer have identified different modes of export to which the EU resorts. These modes of export can become the object of international negotiations in multilateral forums (i.e. environmental policy, trade policy), but they can also be externalized through ‘unintended externalities’ to third countries. The EU can export internal policy purposefully through bilateral or multilateral agreements, or even institutionalize this policy transfer through other forms of cooperation. Lavenex and Wichmann have deepened the characterization of these modes of governance: hierarchy, cooperation and network. Linking the two dimensions of governance, internal and external, they find that as long as the JHA internal governance is not consolidated, external governance will suffer, notably in terms of implementation of the acquis and networks.

The research agenda proposed by EU external governance can be of added value if it is able to show first the extent to which EU relations with Mediterranean partners are influenced by a multilevel governance environment, and second to what extent this process has ‘transformative effects’ on the institutions of the EU and its Member states. Those transformative effects can be external (i.e. how EU external governance impacts on third countries), but also internal, such as the effect on cross-pillarization.

While providing an attractive venue, external governance focuses mainly in the modes of interaction with the neighbors, but offers few conceptual tools to understand what mechanisms drive those modes of governance and why. Power relationships, the influence of the outsiders, and also domestic and international conditions all need to be taken into account. This is why I believe that in the case of the Mediterranean dimension of JHA an institutionalist approach is relevant.