Neil Winn

In search of Europe's internal and external borders: Politics, security, identity and the European Union

Abstract This article argues that it is the experimental and the innovative nature of the European Union (EU) that enables it to respond to multiple agendas and Europes diversity in a flexible manner. In this view, the EU is a harbinger of trends in political and economic order, locked as it is between modernity and post‐modernity ‐ between the territorial national‐state, regionalism, localism, multi‐level governance, globalisation and the politics of identity. In the final analysis, the Union represents a form of deep regionalism in contrast to other regionalisms in the world. From eastern Europe to Latin America and North America the EU model is copied and diffused into world politics. It might be concluded that imitation is the finest form of flattery.

Who Gets What, When, and How? The Contested Conceptual and Disciplinary Nature of Governance and Policy‐Making in the European Union

The present essay seeks to review state of the art literature in the field of European Union (EU) policy-making and governance. In studying the nature of governance in the contemporary Union disciplinary parsimony is of limited utility. Increasingly, disparate disciplines employ different models in order to describe, explain, and hopefully understand the nature of governance and policy-making in the EU. To arrive at ‘one’ model for studying the EU implies both disciplinary formalism and the fruition of an intellectual ‘endgame’. Alternative ‘views’ of EU governance – in the form of disparate models – are presented and critiqued. The essay begins with an assessment of policy networks, garbage can models, advocacy coalitions and epistemic communities. It sets out the main components of each model; then goes on to critique each model, and finally, makes a considered conclusion on the utility of each model as a tool for understanding the EUs policy process.

European Union grand strategy and defense: strategy, sovereignty, and political union

In its purest essence, the European Union (EU) is a political project with a commitment to reaching a finalite politique of a federal Europe. The paper focuses on EU grand strategy with special reference to defense cooperation in Europe in a transatlantic context. The paper analyzes the prospects for an EU strategy in the defense field and also looks at ways to explain this using suitable theoretical lenses as frameworks for analysis, including concepts drawn from the fields of comparative strategy and international relations. The EU is a political project and the paper will also ask how far the defense field is a necessary and contingent part of the drive toward political union in Europe and what this tells us about the prospects for an EU grand strategy in a transatlantic context. The paper will, in particular, focus on a series of case studies to analyze the prospects for a coherent EU politico-military culture, how such a culture operates, and what it means for EU grand strategy in a transatlantic con...

The European Union's external face: The ‘Europeanisation’ of JHA and CFSP

Abstract This paper focuses on the process of ‘Europeanisation’ in European Union (EU) external policy‐making and implementation. Drawing on the theoretical work of Keman, Budge, van Apeldoorn and van Kersbergen, the approach explicated in this paper conceives of European politics ‐ and the emergent European polity ‐ as being the product of a transnational aggregation of interests in an increasingly ‘Europeanised’ policy process. The approach explicated in the paper conceives of European politics ‐ and the emergent European polity ‐ as being the product of a transnational aggregation of interests and policy preferences in an increasingly ‘Europeanised’ policy process. Previously nationally‐determined policy areas are increasingly being ‘communitarised’ and ‘Brusselsized’. The paper focuses on interest adaptation, policy‐making, polity‐making, collective identity formation, and policy adaptation in JHA and CFSP/CESDP since the mid‐1990s. It does this via an in‐depth case study of European/EU policy towards international terrorism after 9/11.

European Union Anti-Piracy Initiatives in the Horn of Africa: Linking Land Based Counter-Piracy with Maritime Security and Regional Development

Abstract Piracy off the coast of Somalia has resulted in a steady decline in trade through the Arabian Sea and higher costs of doing business for multiple world regions. The EU has responded to the threat with a large-scale anti-piracy operation in the Horn of Africa, which constitutes the first free-standing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) military operation that is not entirely dependent on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planning and assets. The operation is designed to interdict Somali piracy operations across the Gulf of Aden and to keep some of the world’s busiest sea lanes open for reasons of world trade. This article argues that the EU preoccupation with military solutions to the piracy problem, based on interventions through the Somali federal government with an emphasis on security, is insufficient because it fails to address the underlying causes of piracy and misunderstands the Somali socio-cultural-security nexus and the need for practical longer term land-based approaches to development. The reduction of Somali piracy activities can be linked to this increased military response capacity as well as to increased security precautions undertaken by shipping companies, but none of these strategies has succeeded in dismantling piracy networks. They therefore offer only a temporary and costly stopgap measure.

Understanding the Connections between the EU Global Strategy and Somali Peacebuilding Education Needs and Priorities

This paper examines the connections between identity politics and European Union (EU) aid effectiveness in peacebuilding education in Somalia. It engages with a severe educational challenge, which is that a lack of capacity in rigorous educational design and/or implementation across Somali Ministries in the South Central Zone, Somaliland and Puntland has led to the importation of multiple foreign curricula into the country simultaneously that do not address Somali history and contemporary conflict drivers and that frequently clash with local values as well as with each other. We critique this from a ‘new barbarism’ perspective, arguing that Somali voices and educational priorities have not been provided a sufficient space for expression in the EU debate on the global and therefore also the national development agenda.

An Historical Analysis of Pillarization

With a view to arguing that the politics of pillarization in the 1990s were critically shaped by patterns of path dependence, this chapter moves through the following stages. The first section considers the development of the external dimension of European integration before 1991, focussing mainly on European Political Co-operation (EPC). The second section attempts an appraisal of EPC in an attempt to establish the institutional challenges that CFSP and pillarization could be expected to meet if they were to constitute an improvement on EPC. The third section reconstructs the bargaining process by which the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on political union (1991) fashioned CFSP and the wider decision to ‘pillarize’ the Union. The fourth section then concludes by specifying the form of path dependence that seems to have governed the evolution of CFSP and pillarization, and by justifying the contention that it offers a better understanding than the likely alternatives of the structures and processes studied by this book over the period 1993–99.

Implementing the Dayton Agreements, 1995–98: Agenda-Setting, Decision-Making and Implementation

This chapter provides an assessment of the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina with reference to the implementation of the Dayton Agreements between 1995 and 1998. The chapter aims to test the various theories of agenda-setting, decision-making, and implementation from a pillarization perspective that were set out in the introductory chapter. The chapter also specifically focuses on process, relationships between joint actions as an unusual policy-making method, actor behaviour, and policy outcomes. It will do this by considering key European Union Joint actions vis-a-vis the implementation of the Dayton Agreements of October and November 1995, which were formally signed in Paris on 14 December 1995.

The Study of Pillarization

The study of pillarization is nothing less than an enquiry into the central organizing principle that lies behind the contemporary European Union (EU). Although the Treaty on European Union (TEU) agreed at the Maastricht European Council of December 1991 and brought into force in 1993 states that ‘the Union shall be served by a single institutional framework’ (European Commission, 1992, Article C), that framework is, in fact, sub-divided into three pillars. The first consists of a wide portfolio of economic, social and environmental policies, more or less related to the European Single Market; the second of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP); and the third of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), covering collaboration on matters of internal security. The ‘single institutional framework that is equally competent across all pillars’ (European Council, 1995) does not endow all the Union’s institutions with the same powers and competencies across all policies. Rather, it is an arrangement whereby just one of those institutions — the Council of Ministers — approximates to parity of role and influence across the range of the Union’s responsibilities.

An Institutional Analysis of Pillarization

The previous two chapters explained the pillarization structure that lies behind foreign policy collaboration in the contemporary European Union, and traced the origins of both CFSP and the pillared framework to the old process of European Political Co-operation (EPC) as transformed by the TEU (1992). As seen, the remainder of the book aims to use examples of one of the policy instruments established under the new CFSP — joint actions — as test cases of pillarization in action. Before turning to the case studies it is, however, essential to clarify what they are intended to demonstrate. This should ideally involve the following: the identification of some central question of academic or practical significance raised by pillarization; the development of alternative theories capable of answering that question; and specification of indicators that would allow us to tell which of the theories is vindicated by the case studies