Transcript The European North: Historical Geopolitics and

Europe’s North: Historical Geopolitics and International
Institutional Dynamics, 2-5 ECTS
3. European integration in the North: is the EU the leading power?
Autumn 2011
Pami Aalto
Jean Monnet Professor/Director, Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on European
Politics and European-Russian Relations, University of Tampere
[email protected]
<http://www.uta.fi/jkk/jmc/index.html>
Towards a mixed geopolitical/institutionalist
approach
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The late 1990s underestimation of EU’s power in NE, although:
• EU included the Baltics as part of its CEE enlargement against all odds
• EU moved closer to the sphere of influence that Russia more or less
willingly inherited from the Soviet Union
Beyond conventional notions of political agency:
• ‘No’ to traditional-geopolitical, pure state-centrism; locking of
imagination into the category of Westphalian nation
states/Westphalian-federal states. In an ideal-typed Westphalian
nation-state, the power of the centre is uniformly distributed across all
territorial and functional dimensions. The power of the centre reaches
all corners of the state equally and is not territorially and functionally
differentiated unlike in the case of the EU. In Westphalian-federal
states (e.g. GER, USA), the constituent units maintain more
independence, but their ties to the centre are identical to each other
across both territorial and functional dimensions
• ‘No’ to regionalist analyses taking the EU as an organization/framework
for regional co-operation of NE states. International intergovernmental
organizations consist of nation-states, or of federal or other type of
states that are all equally bound by the common rules typically
pertaining to a limited sector of policy. IGOs thus have limited
autonomy from their members. In the EU, member states remain
variably integrated with the common rules whilst remaining greatly
affected by EU integration practically across all sectors of policy (3070% of national legislation originate in European law)
The thesis of the EU as the main geopolitical subject of northern Europe
The opening up of EU’s wider northern Europe
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For the EU, DEN EU membership (1973), GER reunification (1991), and FIN, SWE memberships
(1995) opened up a new view onto NE. They
gradually engaged the Union into their efforts of
overcoming the remaining Cold War era divisions in
northern Europe by regional co-operation
The Baltics, POL sought membership in the mid1990s, joining 2004
Russia bound to the EU direction by a ‘strategic
partnership’ with the Union
NW-Russia tied to the northern EU and EEA area by
the 2006 renewed Northern Dimension (ND) based
on equal partnership (EU, RUS, ICE, NOR)
USA mostly withdrawn from NE after Soviet troops
pull-outs from the Baltic states, 1997 NEI, 1998
Baltic charters, Baltic/POL NATO memberships
In all, a powerful north European opening to the EU
due to the pressure for EU accession states and
applicants to converge with EU legislation and policy
priorities, whilst a less binding but clearly
observable pull applies to the EU’s neighbours with
market and other interests in the EU area
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The EU has become the
entity towards which the
minor, small and great
powers in the European
north, and many
regional agents and
organizations there tend
to look before anything
else, and towards which
regional political and
economic activities
increasingly tend to gear
But it is not taking the
traditional great power
place of RUS/GER!
The geo-economy
of EU’s North at
the time of the
2004 enlargement
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
Imports/EU
23.3%
23.9
%
66.0
%
64.6
%
59.2
%
67.8
%
65.3
%
62.6
%
56.5
%
57.9
%
76.5%
*
Exports/EU
17.8%
19.0
%
54.0
%
51.0
%
48.5
%
66.7
%
72.5
%
76.5
%
69.5
%
68.0
%
82.4%
*
Imports/CIS
21.6%
20.4
%
18.8
%
17.0
%
17.4
%
14.2
%
17.0
%
9.8%
10.0
%
9.5%
13.4%
Exports/CIS
30.4%
30.3
%
25.1
%
25.1
%
26.4
%
20.8
%
13.4
%
4.0%
5.1%
5.4%
6.0%
Estonia’s foreign trade with the EU-15 and CIS, 1993-2003
(% of value)
• With the exception of Russia, and slightly less so,
Norway, the countries of the region have from one
half to two thirds of their EU-bound trade with other
northerners
•Germany occupies a central role in these regional
patterns
• North European countries’ extra-EU trade for
example to the US and Asian directions
•Northern Europe economically a European subregion. Despite notable degrees of regionality, it is
clear that economically northern Europe does not
stand alone, and even less does the post-Soviet
north with its vulnerable small Baltic economies and
export-geared natural resources industries of Russia
•Cohen (1991): CEE from buffer to gateway region;
from geopolitics to geoeconomics
The EU’s wider northern Europe
• Due to strategic
reorganisation of northern
Europe, EU has been invited
into making what can be
termed its ‘wider northern
Europe’, and has also
increasingly exploited the
opportunity to this this
• How wide such a project can
ever be? Even after the
breaking of the Cold War era
bipolar division of the world,
we continue to live in a world
of boundaries and frontiers,
where ‘wide’ always remains a
relative term
•Need to conceptualise the
EU’s rule in more detail
Away from Westphalia
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Traditional European integration theories
functionalism/neofunctionalism and
intergovernmentalism/liberal
intergovernmentalism focus on the character of
EU integration as such and deal with the degree
to which already existing member states decide
to co-operate or compete: internal dynamicsn
The Westphalian claims:
• lack of a common European identity (Smith,
Hoffmann) vs. common and consistently
pursued values e.g. in enlargement; erasing
‘postcommunism’, ‘post-Soviet’ and changing
identity political context of northern Europe
• member states’ ability to formulate common
political interests (Duchene: ’civilian power’;
Medrano: ’economic giant, political dwarf;
Rynning: not a ’strategic actor’) vs. new
treaty, solidarity clause, ESDP, crisis
management troops?
• Hill’s ‘capability-expectations gap’ thesis
(1993) vs. its closing
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Towards a broad view of EU
foreign policy and beyond
rigid distinction between
what used to be the EU’s I,
II, III pillars before the
Lisbon treaty:
• what is said and done to
others under the EU flag,
either by representatives
of the Union institutions
or member states, and
what these ‘others’ take
as EU action, can
conveniently be
understood to connote
EU foreign policy
Focus on the regional policy
impact of various EU
activities
In search of new theories: network
governance and boundaries (I)
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Part of the new multi-level governance approach of European integration
studies, comes from comparative politics, not IR
Conceptualizes the EU’s system of rule as mixing elements of foreign and
domestic policy, and relying on partnerships, networks and interactive
dependencies; the application of the principle of subsidiarity
The EU’s system of rule argued to represent a more complex form of
political agency than in Westphalian entities. This leads to portraying the
EU’s policy activities as prone to incoherence due to the various levels and
actors involved, which often makes the policies difficult to grasp to their
target groups
The EU’s system of rule is not very often unidirectional, but rather a nonhierarchical, fragmented one that uses a mixture of levels and actors
Complex network governance odten makes it unclear for outsiders to
figure out who is doing what within the EU, and where do the EU’s
boundaries eventually reach
EU’s network: e.g. NOR, ICE, NATO, CBSS, NCM, BEAC, OSCE
EU’s policy-export to its network partners, receiving states and regions, is
the subsequent construction of fuzzy, differentially constituted, partly
overlapping and partly separate boundaries around the Union along
geopolitical, institutional/legal, transactional and cultural divisions
In search of new theories: network
governance and boundaries (II)
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Geopolitical boundary: avoidance of ‘fortress Europe’ scenario in NE. The
EU’s multi-level and multi-agent, regionalist engagement of the Baltics and
NW-RUS has supported webs of de-centralized cross-border co-op which
has helped to reduce a little some of the previous tensions
Institutional/legal boundary: soft security challenges from the Baltics/RUS
in the form of organized crime, money-laundering, and trafficking of arms,
drugs and human beings, create a need for a considerable alignment of
legal frameworks between the EU and its network partners
Transactional boundary: efforts to reduce trade barriers among north
European countries. Notable advances regardless of Russia’s rather
complex economic transition problems; some signs of voluntary, though
yet partial adaptation to EU market and trade principles in Russia
Cultural boundary: youth and student exchange, and town twinning
programmes to spread European social and institutional cultures
This literature challenges the Westphalian notion of sovereignty, and
envisions a multi-perspectival/postmodern European polity
Fuzziness and messiness in the Union’s geopolitical form; several ‘grey
zones’ such as the post-Soviet north, where EU, its members, and its
network members and target territories meet and mingle with each other
Yet, the result is a model that eludes goal-oriented action and
responsibility into the multiple layers of EU governance; could ‘incremental
progress’ in fact account for identity and interest building?
In search of new theories:
geopolitics, ES and ’empire’
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Empire literature relates to critical geopolitics and the English School
Introduces power and responsibility much more explicitly into the analysis
Suggests historical analogies for the contemporary European order by
looking at pre-Westphalian world systems; ‘neo-medievalism’, ‘neosumerianism’ (Wæver 1998)
Imperial centredness is about complexity, overlapping authority, and a
diffused nature of the distribution and exercise of power from the EUcentre. This means that the power of the loosely defined EU-centre
gradually fades when one moves away from it, first towards the inner
circles, and then towards the outer circles and the fringes of the
metaphorically understood EU-empire. We end up with a gradated or
concentric model of European integration
Christiansen et al.: EU’s own ‘near ‘abroad’ in the BSR region
Compared to many other historical empires, the EU-empire commands a
striking amount of legitimacy among the Balts, Poles, and others, as they
voluntarily approach the Union as a means of taking distance from Russia
+ the support of Baltic Russophone populations towards the EU accession
of their countries of residence
Tunander: the fuzziness of borders that is implicated in the EU’s and
Russia’s efforts in the 1990s of creating a greater space for themselves
within the Baltics, in fact connotes the prospect of dialogue, which did not
exist in a similar sense in the sharply bordered Cold War era Europe
Concentric EU order (‘EU empire’) with a focus on
northern Europe
• The circles of the concentric
model are best understood as a
theoretical organizing device.
(northwest)
Russia
centre
BSR
• In practice there is movement
and tension between the circles
when member-states take the
lead or strive towards the centre
along some policy sectors whilst
expressing reservations along
some other sectors
• ‘Magnetism’
insiders
semi-insiders
semi-outsiders/close outsiders
‘wider Europe’
northern
Europe
• Continuous strengthening and
expansion of the EU empire until
it found its limits in the case of
Russia in the early 2000s
EU’s northern policies: universalising trends
(vs. the more regional approach of the ND)
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Enlargement policy and the Union’s 1993 Copenhagen criteria:
• Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law,
human rights, and respect for and the protection of minorities
• Functioning market economy capable of coping with competitive
pressures and market forces within the Union
• Candidates must take on the Union’s acquis (80,000-odd pages), and
the goals of political, economic, and monetary Union
Extension of the Union’s Schengen borders regime eastwards: lifts
internal border controls, but introduces tighter visa and other control
procedures in the external borders in order to tame the ‘soft’ security
threats seen as emanating into the Union from the post-Soviet space
• Accession states required to start applying Schengen practices on their
eastern borders already before their EU accession
• In practice, EU required unilateral abolishment of the 1990s simplified
border crossing practices from the EST—RUS and LIT—KAL borders
The 1999 Common Strategy on Russia (CSR) and the 1994/1998 EU—
Russian Partnership and Co-operation Agreement (PCA) proceeded from
‘common values’, since then more pragmatic approach
• The EU-Russia 2003 ‘common spaces’ and the roadmaps of 2004:
common EU—Russian socio-economic space and a free market area
still a goal in addition to international/external security co-op
• PCA still gives institutional framework for EU-RUS co-operation:
summits, Cooperation Council and Committee (officials level)