Arne Niemann

Between communicative action and strategic action: the Article 113 Committee 1 and the negotiations on the WTO Basic Telecommunications Services Agreement

This article argues that Habermas’s concept of communicative action significantly adds to our understanding of EU negotiations concerning the WTO Agreement on Basic Telecommunications Services. Accounts of bargaining and strategic action alone leave us in the dark about important parts of these negotiations. Building on existing work, the paper suggests how the concept can be made operationalizable for empirical research. The most important step in this direction has been a further specification of the conditions conducive to communicative action. Important conditions that have been identified are: a strongly shared ‘lifeworld’ amongst negotiators, uncertainty and lack of knowledge, technical or cognitively complex issues, the presence of persuasive individuals and low levels of politicization. By contributing to the conditions and mechanisms of actors’ preference and (norm) change, the article adds to the debate on socialization. As the concept of communicative action advanced our understanding of international negotiations, it should generally contribute to our comprehension of EU negotiations: an important precondition for communicative action, the existence of a shared lifeworld is particularly well developed in the EU, given its dense patterns of institutionalization and socialization.

European economic integration in times of crisis: a case of neofunctionalism?

ABSTRACT This contribution analyses the relevance of neofunctionalist theory and the various spillover mechanisms for explaining the management of the crisis and the drive towards a more complete Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The management of the crisis resulted in integrative outcomes owing to significant functional dissonances that arose from the incomplete EMU architecture created at Maastricht. These functional rationales were reinforced by integrative pressures exercised by supranational institutions, transnational organized interests and markets. The contribution concludes that, despite shortcomings, neofunctionalism provides important insights for understanding the integrative steps taken during the crisis.

European integration and the crisis: practice and theory

ABSTRACT This is the introduction to a special collection of contributions that analyse the financial and economic crisis through various theoretical lenses. Accordingly, it does four things. First, it describes the EUs institutional response to the crisis in order to provide a reference point for the contributions. Second, it summarizes the contributions. Third, it compares them in order to develop a theoretical dialogue. Finally, it answers the fundamental question at the heart of the crisis and this special collection: why did Economic and Monetary Union become deeper and more integrated when many feared for its survival?

EU external policy at the crossroads: The challenge of actorness and effectiveness

The goal of this Special Issue is to improve our conceptualisation and empirical understanding of EU actorness and effectiveness in International Relations. While the European Union aspires to play a greater global role, its actorness and effectiveness cannot be taken for granted given the nature of the EU as a multi-level and semi-supranational polity encompassing 28 Member States with diverse foreign policy preferences. The EU is presently at an important crossroad. On the one hand, its external policy stature and capacity have been boosted by institutional innovations and by the Union’s increased involvement in the full spectrum of international issues. On the other hand, a number of factors cast doubt on the EU’s real external policy actorness and effectiveness: slow and often only modest internal reforms, an increasing politicisation of formally ‘low politics’ issues, the prolonged sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone, and a less favourable external environment, with the US shifting its focus to the Asia-Pacific region and emerging powers creating a more polycentric world order. In view of these changes and subsequent developments in the scholarly literature, our aim is to re-evaluate earlier conceptions of EU actorness. Central to this re-evaluation will be a shift in focus from notions of actorness to effectiveness. This introductory article will unpack and further elaborate the issues raised in this abstract by delineating the EU as an international actor in the empirical context, by reviewing the existing conceptual literature, defining and conceptualizing key notions and by providing an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue.

The PHARE programme and the concept of spillover: neofunctionalism in the making

This article argues that neofunctionalism has been wrongly underestimated and widely neglected in recent years. It suggests that neofunctionalism can be developed in a meaningful way to explain the emergence of PHARE as well as the decision-making structures and dynamics shaping the programme. A number of subsidiary neofunctionalist contributions have been largely ignored, and many of the recent partial theories either reconfirm neofunctionalist hypotheses or provide useful insights for their revision and development. This analysis aims to upgrade underestimated neofunctionalist assumptions, such as externalization, engrenage and task expansion, as well as to extend the current understanding of neofunctionalism by incorporating the mediating role of the Presidency and the phenomenon of epistemic communities into the theory. The findings of this study challenge those of Haggard and Moravcsiks analysis of the political economy of financial assistance to Eastern Europe. Apart from refuting the conclusions o...

The European Union at the Copenhagen climate negotiations: A case of contested EU actorness and effectiveness

This article analyses the extent of European Union (EU) actorness and effectiveness at the 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009. Although the EU has been characterised as a leader in international climate policy-making for some time, the COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen has overall brought about disappointing outcomes for the Union. This casts doubts on EU actorness and effectiveness in this field. We take the article by Jupille and Caporaso as a conceptual point of departure and then specify a more parsimonious actorness framework that consists of coherence and autonomy. Effectiveness is conceptualised as the result of actorness conditioned by the ‘opportunity structure’, that is, the external context that enables or constrains EU actions. We hold that EU actorness was only moderate, especially given somewhat limited coherence. In terms of the opportunity structure, we argue that the strong involvement of other important actors with rather different positions adversely impacted on EU effectiveness, along with a high degree of politicisation that constrained the European Union’s ability to negotiate effectively.

How) do norms guide Presidency behaviour in EU negotiations

This paper takes stock of the growing body of research on the European Union (EU) Presidency, a vital player in EU negotiations. The paper also suggests new avenues of research, among which we prioritize one issue cluster: we ask under what conditions and in what way (following which social logic) norms guide Presidency behaviour? Our focus is directed towards the impartiality norm as that norm most strongly influences whether, and to what extent, Presidencies act as a ‘broker’, one of the Presidency functions that has received most attention in the literature. We also suggest a number of pointers concerning methodology and operationalization of the above question for empirical research. We conclude with some brief thoughts on the implications of our proposed approach to Presidency norms for bridge-building between rationalist and sociological accounts.

Dynamics and Countervailing Pressures of Visa, Asylum and Immigration Policy Treaty Revision: Explaining Change and Stagnation from the Amsterdam IGC to the IGC of 2003–04*

The objective of this article is to account for the varying, and sometimes puzzling, outcomes of the past three Treaty revisions of EU/EC visa, asylum and immigration policy. The article focuses on decision rules and the institutional set-up of these policies, subjecting the results of the Intergovernmental Conference negotiations leading to the Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice and the Constitutional Treaty to causal analysis. The article maintains that four factors can explain the various Treaty outcomes: (i) functional pressures; (ii) the role of supranational institutions; (iii) socialization, deliberation and learning processes; and (iv) countervailing forces.

The impact of European integration on domestic sport: The case of German football

Since the mid-1990s EU institutions and EU policy-making outcomes have had a considerably more noticeable bearing on the regulation and subsequent development of sport than in the first four decades of European integration. While the developments at European level are relatively well documented, the actual impact of EU law and policy-making on the domestic arena has so far largely escaped thorough academic attention. This essay will give a brief overview of the increased attention that sport has received in EU politics and policy, before embarking on an analysis regarding the result this may have for domestic sport. Our empirical focus is on German football, particularly on three sub-cases: (I) the nationality issue related to the Bosman ruling, (II) the transfer rules resulting from Bosman, and (III) the issue of broadcasting rights. Our (comparative) empirical analysis suggests that domestic level actors can influence the impact of EU level decisions to (quite) some extent. Hence, outcomes depend both on the strength of EU level pressures for domestic change and on domestic level counter-reactions. We argue that the interplay of these levels has led to different outcomes: ‘system transformation’ (Case I), ‘heavy adjustment’ (Case II) and ‘partial adjustment’ (Case III).

Mediating International Conflicts: The European Union as an Effective Peacemaker?

This article examines how the EUs effectiveness as a mediator in peace negotiations can be appropriately conceptualized and analysed. Mediator effectiveness is analysed along two dimensions: goal‐attainment and conflict settlement. Investigation of the conditions of mediator effectiveness is structured around four key sets of variables: mediator leverage, mediation strategy, coherence and the conflicts context. In our empirical analysis of EU mediation between Serbia and Kosovo (Belgrade–Pristina dialogue) we find that the medium degree of EU effectiveness (both in terms of goal‐attainment and conflict settlement) can be explained by its great leverage vis‐a‐vis the conflict parties due to their EU membership aspirations and its strategy of a mix of manipulation and formulation that draws on this leverage to move parties toward agreement through the use of positive incentives. A limited degree of EU coherence and spoiler problems in Northern Kosovo seem to have had a constraining influence on EU effectiveness.