Caterina Carta

The COREU/CORTESY network and the circulation of information within EU foreign policy

Abstract The COREU network is a little-studied but vitally important instrument of EU foreign policy, which in 2010 distributed nearly 8,500 messages on EU foreign policy to the 27 member states, the General Secretariat of the Council and the European Commission. This article presents an overview of its functioning and an analysis of its role, taking into account the creation of the European External Action Service. It argues that the COREU network has made it possible to achieve more cooperation on matters of EU foreign policy than would otherwise have been possible, by creating a ‘thick virtual soup’ of information within which officials based both in capitals and in Brussels can more easily participate in EU foreign-policy cooperation. After summarizing the COREU’s early history, the article describes how the circulation of messages is currently organized and traces the spectacular rise and partial fall in numbers of COREU messages through EPC/CFSP. It then analyses how COREU messages contribute to the policy cycle of EU foreign policy and go beyond the remit of CFSP to include national foreign policies. Finally, the article shows how the system pre-dates the more recent surge in Brussels-based actors and has been a necessary condition for it, by tracing the development of the Political Committee/Political and Security Committee.

Struggling over meanings: Discourses on the EU’s international presence

The first section of this article arranges the four theoretical approaches and methods presented in the special issues – namely interpretative constructivism, post-structuralism, discursive institutionalism and critical discourse analysis – along two dimensions: (a) the role of discourse in the constitution of the world, depending on whether approaches perceive social structure as being constitutive of or constituted by discourse; and (b) interpretation of the weight of material and ideational elements in discourses. This model helps to make sense of the profound theoretical diversity that characterises analytical approaches to international relations discourse. The second section tackles the question of ‘who does the speaking’. It identifies the different voices that converge in the EU’s international choir and problematises the discursive environment that forges international discourses through the theoretical lenses of selected approaches. In the last section, the contributions to this special issue are presented.

Overlapping and Evolving European Discourses on Market Liberalization

Research Highlights and Abstract This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses Presents key assumptions discussed in the collection of articles, such as liberalism as a discourse and the conceptualization of discourses as networks. Offers an original typology of liberal discourses regarding State intervention. Introduces two models linking discursive interactions to discursive change, analogous to the operational code approach and to schema theory in cognitive science. Presents original data on DG Trade discourse, to illustrate simultaneous change and continuity. This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses discusses three themes covered by all contributions: (i) the co-existence of several market liberal discourses in the European public sphere; (ii) interactions among these various discourses; (iii) and discursive changes resulting from these interactions.