The Actors in Europe's Foreign Policy

332 Pages·1996·0.64 MB·English

by  Christopher Hill

The Actors in Europe’s Foreign
Policy
The question of whether Europe has a collective foreign policy is an issue that
has surfaced with prominence during many recent crises, most notably when Iraq
invaded Kuwait and over the recent war in the Balkans. The contributors in this
book argue that the European Union has certainly made strides towards acting as
a single bloc, but that expectations have raced ahead of achievements.
The aim of the book’s multinational authorship is to look at the reality of
European foreign policy-making rather than the hopes held out for it. They do so
by examining the policy of the member states and their experience in trying to
make their national concerns converge with the collective view. The
Commission, the main supranational institution to be active in external relations,
is discussed in a separate chapter. The authors seek to go beyond generalities
about Europe to portray the actual positions of member states and to what extent
they are moving towards a collective voice.
The book shows how the foreign policies of the individual states now work
within a broad common framework and that the key to an understanding of the
international politics of Western Europe is the interplay between the national and
the collective.
Christopher Hill is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at
the London School of Economics. He has written widely on issues of foreign
policy analysis, particularly British foreign policy and the external relations of
the European Community.
The Actors in Europe’s Foreign
Policy
Edited by
Christopher Hill
First published 1996
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an International Thomson Publishing company
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
© 1996 Christopher Hill, the edited collection; individual contributions © 1996
the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
The Actors in Europe’s foreign policy/edited by Christopher Hill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Europe-Foreign relations–1989– 2. European Union. I. Hill, Christopher,
1948– .
D2009.A37 1996
327.4–dc20 96–11315
CIP
ISBN 0-415-12222-8 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-12223-6 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-19823-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-19826-3 (Glassbook Format)
Contributors
David Allen Senior Lecturer in European Studies, University of
Loughborough, UK.
Esther Barbé Professor of International Relations, Facultat de Ciències
Politiques i de Sociologia, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Gianni Bonvicini Director, Istituto Affari Internazionali, Rome, Italy.
Christian Franck Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Européennes, Uni-versité
Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Bertel Heurlin Research Director, Danish Institute of International Affairs
and Jean Monnet Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Christopher Hill Montague Burton Professor of International Relations,
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Patrick Keatinge Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration, Trinity
College, Dublin, Ireland.
Françoise de La Serre Directeur de Recherches, Centre d’Etudes et de
Recherches internationales (CERI), Fondation nationale des Sciences politiques,
Paris, France.
Pierre-Louis Lorenz Member of the Diplomatic Service of Luxembourg,
presently Luxembourg Ambassador in Beijing, China.
Simon Nuttall Visiting Fellow, Centre for International Studies, London
School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and Visiting Professor, College
of Europe, Bruges, Belgium.
Alfred Pijpers Senior Staff Member, Europa Institute, University of
Amsterdam, and Department of Political Science, University of Leiden, the
Netherlands.
Reinhardt Rummel Senior researcher, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik,
Ebenhausen, Germany.
Panos Tsakaloyannis Visiting Professor, Athens University of Economics
and Business, Department of International and European Economic Studies,
Athens, Greece.
Álvaro de Vasconcelos Director, Istituto de Estudos Estratégicos e
Internacionais, Lisbon, Portugal.
William Wallace Reader in the Department of International Relations,
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and Professor at the
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Preface
This book is the successor to National Foreign Policies and European
Political Cooperation, published by George Allen and Unwin for the Royal
Institute of International Affairs in 1983. The present volume advances the
themes explored in the first in a number of significant respects. Unusually, it
also draws on a high proportion of the same participants as in 1983, thus making
possible a high degree of continuity and comparability.
National Foreign Policies met a clear need, being the first comparative study
of European foreign policies which was also the product of a multinational group
of scholars from all the EC states. It sold out its print run and was thereafter in
persistent demand from students and observers of European affairs. It
represented a particular perspective on European foreign policy which was
otherwise barely represented in the literature—and is still thin on the ground.
This is far from being an ideological position—the contributors disagree widely
amongst themselves on, for example, the desired future path for the European
Union. It is, rather, a corrective to the general tendency to discuss European
Political Cooperation (EPC), and from 1993 the Common Foreign and Security
Policy (CFSP) largely in terms of the common positions and joint actions which
they are supposed to have produced, with the states left on the margins of the
analysis. This tendency is more common these days than the opposite, crassly
realist mistake of assuming that Europe’s international presence amounts to little
more than the sum of the national interests of the EU’s two or three major states.
Rather, the premise of both this volume and that of 1983 was that this important
and fascinating new development in international diplomacy can only be
understood properly in terms of the interplay between the attempts at collective
action on the one hand and the national foreign policies which continue
vigorously, on the other.
Accordingly, from the early 1990s I have had it in mind to produce a sequel to
National Foreign Policies which would do more than simply change dates and
add a page or two of contemporary history to each chapter. That I was able to do
was thanks to the hospitality and resources of the European University Institute
at San Domenico di Fiesole near Florence, where I was privileged to spend a
sabbatical year. At the end of that time, in July 1993, the European Policy Unit
of the Institute hosted an expert conference on the theme of ‘The Community,
the Member States and Foreign Policy: Coming Together or Drifting Apart?’.
The twin aims of the conference were (i) to examine whether or not EPC had
fundamentally changed in character over the previous decade, in particular as a
result of the upheavals of 1989–93; and (ii) to analyse the interaction between
the various participants in EPC, both states and Community institutions.
These two aims were designed to produce two complementary volumes, of
which this is the first, and the second, The Changing Context of European
Foreign Policy, concentrates on issues and structures. Short papers were
commissioned for both which were discussed extensively at the conference.
These were used, together with the tapes of the proceedings, as the basis of full-
length chapter drafts, and it is these which, duly revised in their turn, make up
what follows. All the chapters in this book are wholly new. The only addition to
the conference cast list is William Wallace, who had in any case shown
enthusiastic support for the project from the start and who was simply unable to
be present in Florence. Moreover, the only chapter from the 1983 book which
does not have at least one of its authors present in the 1996 equivalent is that on
Denmark, where Bertel Heurlin has taken over from Christian Thune and his
deceased colleague Niels Jorgen Haagerup.
Three chapters have been added to the 1983 base. Portugal and Spain, which
joined the EC in 1986, clearly needed representing, while it was thought
important, particularly in the contemporary context of the creation of the CFSP
and its formalization of a joint right of initiative for the European Commission in
foreign policy that the latter’s steadily more distinctive role should be dissected.
On the other hand, I have not included the three states which have joined the EU
on 1
January 1995, on the grounds that their experience of the practice of the CFSP
is not yet sufficient for us to be able to say anything meaningful. Of course,
there are important issues arising out of the accession of such states with
different foreign policy traditions, and these will be dealt with by Elfriede
Regelsberger in the Changing Context volume which follows.
Some theorists in international relations will certainly consider that a book
which takes an avowedly ‘national’ approach to the study of the subject, indeed
even one which focuses on ‘foreign policy’, is inherently anachronistic, given—
as they see it—the decreasing ability of the state to affect outcomes. One answer
to this is simply to point to the current gloom in policy circles about what
‘Europe’
can achieve in Bosnia, and to the central role of the two traditional powers,
Britain and France. This would be superficial. The pendulum of events will
Britain and France. This would be superficial. The pendulum of events will
swing and it will not be long before there is a renewed emphasis on
interdependence and on collective action. A more profound response is to take
the longer view and to expect a dialectical relationship between the actors and
the system, between the nation-states and the EU institutional collectivity, to
endure for some time.
This dialectic is continually being played out, even if at times—such as that of
the Intergovernmental Conference due to take place in 1996—the issues come to
a particular head. The hope here is that the analysis presented of the ways in
which national foreign policies do or do not fit together will help all students of
Europe’s foreign relations, insiders or outsiders, academics or practitioners, to
acquire a better sense of the multiple levels of what we call for the sake of
brevity ‘European foreign policy’, and in particular of the importance of seeing a
problem from a variety of different national perspectives. The choice as title for
the book of the term ‘actors’ rather than ‘states’ or ‘national foreign policies’ is
not intended to denote any fundamental downgrading of the state as actor. Its use
simply makes it possible to include the Commission alongside the member states
(after all, it might on a priori grounds be thought to be at least as influential as
the smaller states) and it draws attention to the fact that within each national
system there are different bureaucracies and political groupings which have the
potential to act transnationally in the wider system—as, for example, defence
ministries have now become drawn into the CFSP and therefore to some extent
compete with the foreign ministries which traditionally dominated EPC. That is,
if ‘Europe’ is a notion to be decomposed in external relations, then it should be
decomposed first into states and then if necessary also into the domestic
constituents of states, which are beginning to get more directly involved in
foreign relations.1
If coherence is the problem in European foreign policy then it is no less a
bugbear of collective publications. The editor took the view, as in 1983, that too
strict an attempt to homogenize the chapters would either be counter-productive
or produce dull results. On the other hand it was important to ensure that the
central themes were addressed by all. To this end the contributors were asked to
bear in mind certain questions, both general and particular. These addressed the
following issues:

the distinctive elements of their country’s attitudes towards EPC/CFSP, and
the impact of the ‘socialization effect’ of EPC;
the extent to which changes in the attitudes of governments and opinion