Stefan Borg

Postmodern EU? Integration between Alternative Horizons and Territorial Angst

In the early 1990s, John Ruggie famously referred to the European Community as an emerging ‘postmodern polity’. This article elaborates on the ‘postmodern promise’ of European integration that Ruggie invoked, and formulates such a promise of European integration as one of radically breaking with the violent practices characteristic of the modern state. We argue that such a promise is immanent albeit historically marginalized in the project of European integration itself, exemplified in the article with a tradition called integral federalism. The article then evaluates such a ‘postmodern promise’ in current practices of European integration against the background of a poststructuralist-informed critique of the violent effects of desires for bordered entities and identities. Such a poststructuralist sensibility enables the article to point to the problems of ‘scaling up’ the state in a project of integration that also set out to challenge and subvert its organizing principles.

The Lure of State Failure: A Critique of State Failure Discourse in World Politics

This article critiques state failure discourses from a poststructural and postcolonial perspective. We argue that these discourses are wedded to Euro-Western notions of the state and that, therefore, they fail to articulate other modes of political community to which we seek to open world political theory. First, we deconstruct prevalent state failure discourses to unearth the problematic character of their underlying commitments to a Eurocentric state. Second, we engage the way such discourses are deployed in the Failed States Index. Third, we propose an alternative account of why the Western model of the state has failed, explaining how the (neo)colonialist insistence on the propagation on this model enables the proliferation of violence conventionally attributed to state failure. Finally, we seek to open the notion of state failure to alternative forms of community obscured by the reification of the Western model of statecraft as the universal mode of political life.

Euro-Crafting at Border Zones: The Case of the Greco-Turkish Border and the Question of a European Union ‘Beyond the State’

The European Union is often conceptualised as an entity that is profoundly different from that of the modern state. Through a reading of the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece, the paper challenges the understanding that the crafting of the European Union (‘Euro-crafting’) is qualitatively different from the crafting of the modern state. Conceptually, the paper proposes that Euro-crafting should be thought through in relation to practices of statecraft, instead of a priori postulated as qualitatively different from such practices. Putting such an understanding of Euro-crafting to work, the paper explores the recent humanitarian crisis precipitated by large-scale migration into Greece and demonstrates how practices of Euro-crafting mirror the major desire-driven practices of modern statecraft; practices of ordering, bordering, and identification.

The Arab Uprisings, the Liberal Civilizing Narrative and the Problem of Orientalism

Abstract This article engages the problem of Orientalism in Western elite foreign policy discourse on the Arab uprisings. Reconstructing discursive representations among US and EU foreign policy elites, it argues that the Arab uprisings were inserted into a liberal civilizing narrative that emphasizes the underlying identity of ‘the Arab world’ and ‘the West.’ In this narrative, human rights play a crucial role. Difference, to the extent acknowledged, is inscribed temporally rather than spatially. Such a narrative thus breaks with Orientalizing ways of representing the Arab world as irredeemably different. Having noticed the hierarchical rendition of subjectivity that the liberal civilizing narrative nevertheless enacts temporally, the article also discusses challenges to the liberal civilizing narrative. It concludes by arguing for a politics of rights claiming approach to make sense of the Arab uprisings.

European security and early warning systems: from risks to threats in the European Union’s health security sector

ABSTRACT This article critically examines a poorly understood aspect of the European security landscape: early warning systems (EWSs). EWSs are socio-technical systems designed to detect, analyse, and disseminate knowledge on potential security issues in a wide variety of sectors. We first present an empirical overview of more than 80 EWS in the European Union. We then draw on debates in Critical Security Studies to help us make sense of the role of such systems, tapping into conceptual debates on the construction of security issues as either “threat” or “risk” related. Finally, we study one EWS – the Early Warning and Response System for infectious diseases – to understand how it works and how it reconciles risk – versus threat-based security logics. Contrary to assumptions of a clear distinction between risk- and threat-based logics of security, we show that EWSs may serve as a “transmission belt” for the movement of issues from risk into threats.

The politics of universal rights claiming : Secular and sacred rights claiming in post-revolutionary Tunisia

This article contributes to a theoretical understanding of rights claiming as a specific form of political practice. The article develops and defends a post-foundationalist understanding of rights ...

In Search of a Foundation for Europe

Undeniably, and as I dealt with in the previous chapter, ever since the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, which formally estab-lished the EU, a general legitimation crisis has haunted the project of European integration.1 Such a generalized crisis is to be expected whenever foundationalist rhetorical figures of polity foundation are deployed in an era where the facile appeal to such absolutes has become increasingly questioned. Indeed, European integration could in large part be seen as an attempt at polity foundation in the age of its impossibility — i.e. in an age where the theoretical vocabulary needed for such an endeavor has largely exhausted itself. This historical epoch, which is characterized by, as Jean-Francois Lyotard famously put it, an ‘incredulity to metanarratives,’2 usually goes under the name of postmodernity, and provides the historical backdrop to the attempted European unification.3 The attempt to endow the EU with a constitution, which this chapter explores, may be understood as a high-profile attempt at polity foundation, and at symbolically unifying Europe after two devastating wars as well as the Cold War.4

On the Limited Imagination of Neofunctionalism

Neofunctionalism is an appropriate place to start in launching a sustained critical interrogation of European integration legitimation discourse, a way of theorizing which emerged, in the words of its most prominent theoretician Ernst B. Haas, ‘in order to give the study of European integration a theoretical basis.’1 Neofunctionalism has historically been, and in several ways remains, the most influential approach to theorizing about European integration. As Ben Rosamond points out in his seminal study of European integration theory, ‘for many, “integration theory” and “neo-functionalism” are virtually synonyms.’2 Indeed, it may not be an exaggeration to claim, as Rosamond does, that ‘we cannot think about the analysis of European integration without confronting neo-functionalism.’3 In this chapter, I am not concerned with the question that preoccupies most treatments of neofunctionalism in EIS: i.e., the explanatory, or predictive, power that neofunctionalism may or may not hold in accounting for the trajectory of European integration conceived of as a chain of historical events. Rather, I am interested in the question of what kind of ‘Europe’ neo-functionalist discourse seeks to enact.

Solana’s Struggle

Ever since the inception of the European Political Cooperation (EPC) in 1970, predecessor to the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) which was established in 1993, the way in which the EU conducts external relations has been subject to much academic, as well as more popular, controversy. From Francois Duchene’s and Hedley Bull’s ponderings over the virtues and vices of the EU as a ‘civilian power’ in the 1970s to the more recent debate on the EU as a ‘normative power,’ many commentators have argued that the EU’s approach to international politics is sui generis and qualitatively different from that of the modern state.1 It should from the outset be clarified that in this chapter I will not deal with the question of whether there is a greater emphasis on human rights and international law in the EU’s foreign policy discourse as compared to most states, which is sometimes claimed in the Normative Power Europe (NPE) discourse. Nor will I attempt to assess the justifications for the EU’s military missions undertaken outside of Europe. Rather, my argument in this chapter concerns what I take to be a more fundamental issue for questions of violence and ethics, namely how the European subject is differentiated, and what that might tell us when it comes to the question of the EU’s alleged difference from how the modern state subject is differentiated. In other words, I take up the problem of enacting a bounded identity from the point of view of foreign policy.

The Question of a European Union ‘Beyond the State’

Countless academics, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians of all ideological stripes have celebrated European integration as something novel, innovative, and progressive. In its ‘Fourth Lesson about the European Union,’ the EU’s website rehearses this familiar refrain: ‘The European Union is more than just a confederation of countries, but it is not a federal state. It is, in fact, a new type of structure that does not fall into any traditional legal category.’1 What is more, this ‘new type of structure’ that the reader learns about in their Fourth Lesson about the EU has been widely celebrated from almost all quarters and ideological persuasions. Cosmopolitan theorist David Held laments that the EU suffers from ‘something of an identity cri-sis’ despite ‘all its extraordinary innovation and progress.’2 If the EU could somehow find a remedy to its ‘identity crisis’ and ‘find its true self,’ the reader may infer, the future prospects for global life would rapidly start to look much brighter. Neo-Gramscian Robert W. Cox, contrasting the EU to bete-noire US hyperpuissance, approvingly claims that the EU, by a skillful blend of realpolitik and moral preference, ‘tend[s] to envisage a world political order … as the search for consensus and the elaboration of international law.’3