Winds of Change: The Europeanization of National Foreign Policy

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Maastricht European Studies Papers 2007/01 Bennet Strang and those which are not” 64 (i Fanés, 2001). Europeanization must further not be thought of as and expected to be an all-explanatory concept. Other influences besides it have also to be accounted for (Major/ Pomorska, 2005). Particularly in foreign policy, the EU impact is very difficult to discern (ibid.), as national diplomats are not keen to admit to have been influenced by anything else than the national side. Another difficulty lies in the task to find indicators of change in foreign policy in the first place (Osswald, 2005). Thus, “…the study of the Europeanisation of a policy is probably the most difficult because of the complexity of isolating an ‘EU-effect’ [emphasis in original]” 65 (i Fanés, 2001). In the quest of identifying this ‘smoking gun’, the “…‘missing link’…” (Goetz quoted in Featherstone, 2003, p. 13) between both the effect and the supposed (European) cause, the attempt is made to uncover the existence of a causal chain connecting both (i Fanés, 2001). On top of that, the question of whether Europeanization is the cause (independent variable) or effect (dependent variable) has to be posed 66 . This would lead to a chicken and egg debate, though (ibid.). Besides this problem, a second challenge is to identify the “…relevance of change…” (i Fanés, 2001), i.e. the ‘deepness’ of adaptation and the transformation(s) it triggered. This is also easier said than done, as the act of attributing relevance is inherently a subjective undertaking, which can effortlessly be challenged. Adding to the collection of challenges is the third one to account for and separate endogenous and exogenous phenomena, which act in parallel to Europeanization, from the latter. Perceiving of Europeanization as an all-explaining causal factor is, thereby, to be forestalled (ibid.). Henceforth, “[t]he foreign policies of EU Member States are subject to a number of pressures and incentives for change which act at the same time as Europeanisation, sometimes in similar directions, sometimes in completely opposite…We should avoid attributing any detected policy change to a vague idea of ‘Europeanisation” (ibid.; Major/ Pomorska, 2005). 64 There is, thus, the need for “…conceptual clarity…” (Smith, 2003, p. 333), in order to avoid the stretching of the Europeanization concept (Radaelli, 2000; Wong, 2005). This very fashionable concept must eventually be clearly defined so as to prevent it from being arbitrarily used for the description of anything. 65 In foreign policy, no “…legal obligation or compliance-mechanism…” (Osswald, 2005, p. 2) exists, which adds to this problem. Thus, in order to discern the European impact on national foreign policy one has to ask what makes foreign policy distinctive compared to other policies (i Fanés, 2001). Provided this factor has been isolated, Wong (2005) proposes criteria with which the degree of a state’s foreign policy Europeanization could allegedly be measured. However, the extents of adaptation, projection and elite socialization are, firstly, very hard to detect and, secondly, even harder to ‘measure’. 66 Notwithstanding, “[t]he boundaries between cause and effect, independent and dependent variables are blurred…” (Bulmer/ Radaelli, 2004, p. 3). 18
Maastricht European Studies Papers 2007/01 Bennet Strang Amongst those factors are things going on, firstly, in the domestic and, secondly, the international sphere. Referring to the first one, there might be national policy-making styles, administrative reforms, political transition processes and changes triggered by particularities of the party landscape, all of which have not been a result of Europeanization whatsoever (i Fanés, 2001). Concerning the second domain, global politics, changes caused by the end of the Cold War, the impact of non-EU institutions in the international system on the member states’ foreign policies and globalization effects 67 can be at the heart of policy changes (ibid.). 5. Conclusion In general, change is the rule, not the exception. This is also very much valid for the evolving conceptual meanings of both sovereignty and foreign policy, which have been triggered by the post-modern European integration and globalization processes. Initially, the focus has been on the connotations of these two dynamic and intertwined concepts and the changes thereto. As the notion of sovereignty has become increasingly blurred, the traditional conduct of state-centric foreign policy, which has always striven to primarily preserve the state’s sovereignty, has increasingly acquired a European dimension. This, in turn, manifests itself nowadays in EU common positions and the EU-3 initiative. In this context, the suggestion of whether there is a shift from modern Westphalian to post-modern European notions of both sovereignty and foreign policy going on, upon which the Europeanization of foreign policy builds, has been put forward. Turning to the concept itself, the paper has shown that foreign policy, being the key sovereignty domain of nation-states, is not immune to the multi-faceted and imprecise concept of Europeanization. It has become apparent, though, that its application in the high politics field of foreign policy represents a special case, against the background of the other multiple usages of the term. However, the very fact that scholars talk about the Europeanization of foreign policy is already indicative of a certain intrusion ‘of Europe’ into this domain. Against the impact of both increasing European integration and global pressures for the EU to act 67 Pirro and Zeff (2005) come up with the interesting question of how Europeanization and globalization fit together. Additionally, one has to draw the definitional boundaries between them, so as to be able to distinguish between them. They, thus, ask further: “…is Europeanization simply a regional variety of globalization?” (p. 211). On top of that, one has to think about whether Europeanization is part of, reaction to or bulwark against globalization (Bulmer/ Radaelli, 2004). Once more, the chicken and egg problem emerges, since “[t]o Wallace, the interaction of globalization and Europeanization is so close, it is hard to determine which is the leader and which the follower” (Pirro/ Zeff, 2005, p. 214). 19
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