Ben Tonra

Democratic foundations of EU foreign policy: narratives and the myth of EU exceptionalism

How can we better understand weaknesses in the democratic legitimacy underpinning European Union (EU) foreign, security and defence policy? The argument presented here is that this weakness can in part be seen as a function of poor narrative construction in Europe. The nascent European public space does not yet provide a solid foundation from which such narratives might be established, contested and developed and from which they might aspire to some hegemony. Instead, the Union remains reliant upon an unstable intersection of national foreign policy narratives and the weak instantiation of an élite European narrative based on exceptionalism. This fails to create a sense of ownership and legitimacy over the international actions of the Union, adversely impacting its effectiveness and credibility. The élite narrative has solid roots in policy, academic and specialist constituencies but is weakly disseminated and vigorously contested.

Identity Construction Through the ENP: Borders and Boundaries, Insiders and Outsiders

The basic conceptual argument for looking at the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) through the prism of identity construction is that this offers a unique frame of reference that is potentially capable of providing a more profound understanding of the European Union — both as an international actor and as source of foreign policy in the international system.

Global Citizen and European Republic: Irish Foreign Policy in Transition

This book offers a new and innovative way of looking at Irish foreign policy, linking its development with changes in Irish national identity. Many debates within contemporary International Relations focus on the relative benefits of taking a traditional interest-based approach to the study of foreign policy as opposed to the more recently developed identity-based approach. Uniquely, this book takes the latter and instead of looking at Irish foreign policy through the lens of individual, geo-strategic or political interest, it is linked to deeper identity changes. (The order of the book is as follows: Introduction * The narrative of the Irish nation * The narrative of the global citizen * The narrative of the European Republic * The narrative of the Anglo American state * Policy actors and structures: The executive drama * Policy actors and structures: The democratic coda * European ambitions and obligations * Security, defence and neutrality * Case study: The war in Iraq 2003 * Conclusions * Bibliography).

To What Ends EU Foreign Policy? Contending Approaches to the Union’s Diplomatic Objectives and Representation

The strengthened Office of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the new External Action Service (EAS) presuppose a set of interests and/or values that the EU wishes to pursue on the world stage. But what are those interests and/or values and how does the EU reach agreement on them? Rather than simply ‘cutting and pasting’ from EU treaties and strategy papers, this paper identifies seven distinct theoretical models of how the EU and its member states arrive collectively at a definition of their diplomatic objectives. The seven models include intergovernmentalist models of veto threats and log-rolling, normative institutionalist models of cooperative bargaining and entrapment, and constructivist and sociological institutionalist models of elite socialisation, Europeanisation and collective identity formation. The paper identifies the logics of each model and notes their implications for the role of the EU’s new foreign policy institutions.

European Union security dynamics: in the new national interest

Friedrich Steinhäusler provides a contribution with counter-terrorism policy recommendations based on the evidence that prevention has not produced satisfactory results so far (p. 202). To this goal, all the stages in the counterterrorism process are given interesting inputs, assuming that strategic terrorism is likely to be the dominant trend in the future and that the possibility of using of weapons of mass killing and mass disturbance creates the most challenging scenario ever. Closing this section, Brigitte Nacos addresses the role of media and public information in the earlier stages of a terrorist attack, presenting the Triangle of Political Communication, a scheme with three vertices, with the mass media on the top and general public/interest groups and government officials/decision makers below, representing the vehicle used by terrorists to pass their message and to reach their goals. As Brigitte Nacos argues, the communication arena is a stage where counter-terrorism policies must act because here the tools through which terrorists achieve their goals can be better countered. Against this background, mass media professionals are inevitably called to have a very important role, having the responsibility to present the news in an accurate, sober way, and to use their capacity to reach a vast audience to address important social issues keeping the population prepared and informed. In the concluding chapter, Bauer and Beyer collect the contributions of all chapters and elaborate on the necessity of redrawing the strategies of combating Islamic terrorism. This new vision (pp. 235 236) would have to (a) include long-term approaches to address the material, political and ideological factors that contribute to the terrorists’ cause; (b) use different counter-terrorism tools beside the military one and provide them a centrality that, in the ‘War on Terror’, has been attributed to the military; and finally (c) to reorient the priorities in order to reduce the vulnerability and the creation of the capacities to respond to terrorist attacks. Yet, the authors recognise that an effective, comprehensive strategy needs to go further than simply to merge those three elements and to count on possible trade-offs and limited resources (p. 237). As Beyer and Bauer show, terrorism is a very complex reality, and this book offers potential points of departure to address some of its most pivotal issues.