Mary Farrell

A Triumph of Realism over Idealism? Cooperation Between the European Union and Africa

Abstract Relations between the European Union and Africa pre‐date the origins of the EU itself. With the Lomé Convention of 1975, relations between the two regions were set on a more solid footing with a highly institutionalised framework of cooperation, hailed at the time as a partnership of equals. The successor to the Lomé Convention, the Cotonou Agreement, is now also portrayed as an innovative form of interregional cooperation, a form of hybrid interregionalism between the formal regional grouping of the European Union and a ‘constructed’ region, comprising the African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries. This article suggests that the EU approach to interregionalism is itself evolving, and the cooperation with the ACP group does not reflect any sustained commitment on the part of the European Union to patterns of cooperation and partnerships built up in the past.

EU policy towards other regions: policy learning in the external promotion of regional integration

Since the 1990s, the European Union (EU) has renewed its support for regional integration in other parts of the world, and incorporated this objective as a part of European external policy. Compared to the embryonic common foreign and security policy (CFSP), the support for regional integration and co-operation has been much less controversial, having been publicly endorsed by European Commission officials, and identified in the policy publications emanating from the various Directorate Generals (DGs). This article adopts a policy learning perspective to investigate this departure in external policy by the EU, and to identify the explanatory capacity of collective learning for the core beliefs, preferences, and policy instruments eventually adopted by European policy-makers. The article identifies what types of learning have taken place, and assesses the impact of learning on the policy outputs and outcomes.

The EU and UN Development Cooperation: Effective Multilateralism for Global Development

The European Union (EU) is considered as a major actor in the international arena, a significant provider of aid and development assistance to the countries of the developing world, and with a growing involvement in global development policymaking through the organisations encompassed within the United Nations framework (Emerson et al., 2010; Farrell, 2008). Since the 1990s, when the EU launched a concerted effort to engage more strategically with the United Nations, and to coordinate the member states’ positions on different issues, and at different levels of the UN, the intention has been to realise a steady movement towards effective multilateralism (Laatikainen and Smith, 2006; Ortega, 2005). The EU and the UN have common goals — international peace and security, respect for human rights, and the promotion of international cooperation in the solution of economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems. Moreover, the European Security Strategy (2005, revised 2008) recognised that ‘in a world of global threats, global markets and global media, our security and prosperity increasingly depend on an effective multilateral system. Strengthening the United Nations, equipping it to fulfil its responsibilities and to act effectively, is a European priority’.