Christoph O. Meyer

Convergence Towards a European Strategic Culture? A Constructivist Framework for Explaining Changing Norms

The article contributes to the debate about the emergence of a European strategic culture to underpin a European Security and Defence Policy. Noting both conceptual and empirical weaknesses in the literature, the article disaggregates the concept of strategic culture and focuses on four types of norms concerning the means and ends for the use of force. The study argues that national strategic cultures are less resistant to change than commonly thought and that they have been subject to three types of learning pressures since 1989: changing threat perceptions, institutional socialization, and mediatized crisis learning. The combined effect of these mechanisms would be a process of convergence with regard to strategic norms prevalent in current EU countries. If the outlined hypotheses can be substantiated by further research the implications for ESDP are positive, especially if the EU acts cautiously in those cases which involve norms that are not yet sufficiently shared across countries.

Introduction: Charting a Contested Transformation*

The governance of the European Union has been changed through its responses to international terrorism. The analysis of those changes is grounded in an examination of the different perceptions of the phenomenon in academic and political debate. This introductory article traces the most relevant changes across competences, policies and governing modes and highlights dynamics applicable to other areas of EU activity: cross-pillarization, the growth of horizontal governing networks, co-operation outside the treaty framework and the impact of third countries on EU policy-making. The article puts forward a three-pronged constructivist framework to understand better the main dynamics and factors underpinning the various forms of change, in particular why the emphasis has been on co-ordination and information-sharing rather than on supranational integration. Performance issues are then critically assessed, both in terms of whether the new measures, competences, instruments and resources are likely to be effective as well as with regard to the intended and unintended harmful effects for the civil and democratic rights of EU and third-country citizens.

Solidifying Constructivism: How Material and Ideational Factors Interact in European Defence

Constructivist approaches have made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the European Union’s security and defence policy, but their ability to explain and forecast change has suffered from neglecting the link between material structures and ideas. This article attempts to ‘solidify’ constructivism by drawing on realist thought to elaborate a theoretical argument about how material and ideational factors are interrelated and offers four propositions about how changes in material conditions affect the ideational dimension of defence co-operation.

Does European Union politics become mediatized? The case of the European Commission

The article argues that a systematic study of mediatization processes promises valuable insights into problems of European Union (EU) governance. It sets out the mediatization argument and explores to what extent the political system and its major components can be expected to adjust to the logics of the news media. The empirical focus is on the adjustments of the European Commission to six distinct logics of the news media: news values, agenda-setting, news production, news language, investigative/accusatory journalism, and the reciprocal effects of professionalization. The paper finds preliminary evidence of mostly low to moderate mediatization across these six dimensions. Four main moderating factors account for this finding: political disincentives to strive for mass publicity, difficulties of communicating to fragmented audiences, limited scope for legislative initiatives, and the technocratic drawn-out nature of the EU policy process.

International terrorism as a force of homogenization? A constructivist approach to understanding cross-national threat perceptions and responses

Has the emergence of international jihadist terrorism led to common threat perceptions and responses in Europe? The article argues that the homogenization thesis is based around a misguided functionalist notion of a single ‘optimal response’ to an alleged new and potentially catastrophic kind of threat with uniform consequences for all ‘Western’ countries. Drawing on insights from different bodies of literature, the article elaborates a theoretical framework to understand variations in threat perceptions vis-à-vis international terrorism and enrich the socio-linguistic securitization approach of Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde (Security: a new framework for analysis, London: Lynne Reinner, 1998). The article then empirically examines the rise and fall of threat perceptions among selected European publics between 2000 and 2008. Threat perceptions did converge in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but soon afterward started diverging. The article considers the reasons for this finding as well as the implication for the evolution of counter-terrorist policies in the European Union.

Missing the story? Changes in foreign news reporting and their implications for conflict prevention

One consequence of the eroding business model of quality newspapers in Western countries is the reduction in the number of permanent correspondents and regional bureaus. It has been argued that the importance of foreign correspondents has been overstated and that news agencies, social networks and citizen-journalism can fill the gap. In contrast, the authors argue that the loss of presence in foreign countries has harmed the news media’s ability to uncover evolving crises and provide in-depth and reliable background reporting. This is particularly problematic for conflict prevention because decision-makers use quality news media alongside intelligence reports for identifying and prioritizing threats. Cost-considerations stand in the way of re-opening foreign bureaus, but quality news providers need to become more inventive in how they can preserve the early warning function of quality news coverage. One way forward is to cultivate links with country and area specialists from academia, NGOs and the non-profit media.

Over- and Under-reaction to Transboundary Threats: Two Sides of a Misprinted Coin?

ABSTRACT When states over- and under-react to perceived transboundary threats, their mistakes can have equally harmful consequences for the citizens they mean to protect. Yet, studies of intelligence and conventional foreign policy tend to concentrate on cases of under-reaction to threats from states, and few studies set out criteria for identifying cases of under- and over-reaction to other kinds of threats or investigate common causes. The paper develops a typology of over- and under-reaction in foreign policy revolving around threats assessment, response proportionality and timeliness. Drawing on pilot case studies, the contribution identifies combinations of factors and conditions that make both over- or under-reaction more likely. It is hypothesized that three factors play significant causal roles across the cases: (1) institutions have learned the wrong lessons from previous related incidents; (2) decision-making is organized within institutional silos focused on only one kind of threat; and (3) actors have strong pre-existing preferences for a particular outcome.

‘Living by Example?’ The European Union and the Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

Most empirical contributions to the normative power Europe (NPE) debate concentrate on whether and when the EU promotes its core internal norms abroad. In contrast, we investigate how norms emerging from international fora come to be accepted and internalised by the EU in the first place. We examine the case of the emerging responsibility to protect norm (R2P) and argue that the EUs implementation has been more limited and slower than one would expect from the NPE procedural ethics of ‘living by example’. We examine the potential reasons for this failure to ‘live by example’: the role of persuasion by norm entrepreneurs; the role of inducements and costs; the goodness of fit between R2P and existing EU norms; and the clarity of the norm. We find that the lack of goodness of fit and clarity of the norm are important factors, but argue that low levels of bureaucratic receptivity were the greatest obstacle.

Perceptions and responses to threats: introduction

During the Cold War, the study of threats was largely conditioned by the East/West stand-off. Threats were understood in existential and inter-state terms as a result of the high profile of nuclear weapons in deterring either the United States (US) or Soviet Union from encroaching on each other’s spheres of influence. Each of the articles in this section outlines how this conception of threat in the policy community, in public opinion and in the academic literature has undergone significant change. Threat perception and responses to threats have been conditioned by the ‘post-Cold-War disorder’ and by events relating to the US response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 (9/11) (see, for example, Eadie 2007; Edwards and Meyer 2008). Threat perception and misperception can have significant impact on policymaking (Gross Stein 1988), which is complicated in a highly interconnected world defined by key multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Even more radically, it is not just that sources of threat in international politics may have changed since 1989, but also that our way of thinking about how threats are ‘being made’ by various types of actors inhabiting local, national and transnational communities, each interconnected in old and new ways through the conventional news media as well as peer-to-peer information technology. What motivates politicians, news media and political activists when they portray somebody or something as a threat? And do such motives inevitably lead to false threat perceptions? What do our threat imageries tell us about who we are, how we see the world and what we believe in? And, finally, how do our perspectives on threats lead us to privilege certain responses over others? Each of the articles contained in this thematic section sheds light in different ways on these big questions, aiming to advance our critical thinking about, and research into, how threat perceptions form, change and influence behaviour. The section brings together scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds— international relations (IR), EU politics and communication studies—working on the perception of and response to threat. These articles were first presented at a research workshop convened by Christoph Meyer and Alister Miskimmon and held at the Centre for European Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London on 15 February 2008. All of the contributors share the assumption that threats are not

How Do Non-Governmental Organizations Influence Media Coverage of Conflict?: The Case of the Syrian Conflict, 2011-2014

It is often argued that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly visible in media discourses on armed conflict and thus play a growing role in shaping states’ foreign policies. However, there is little investigation of their influence on specific conflict coverage and what types of NGOs are influential, in what way and under what conditions. The authors elaborate a ‘supply and demand’ model of growing or declining NGO influence to theorize these dynamics and take Syria’s civil war from 2011–2014 as a ‘best case’ for testing it. They conducted an interpretative analysis of NGO output and media coverage to investigate the relative visibility of NGOs in the media over time. Further, they examine how different NGOs were referred to during two highly salient phases of the conflict for debates about foreign policy: the first escalation of protests and their repression in 2011 and the use of chemical weapons in 2013. They find evidence of rising NGO visibility and growing reliance on new types of semi-local NGOs for the provision of factual news about the conflict and human rights violations. Yet, large international NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch remained the most influential in pushing normative frames and advocating a tough stance on the Assad regime. The article discusses the implications of the findings for the theoretical argument and for broader accounts of NGOs influence.