EU external democracy promotion has traditionally been based on ‘linkage’, i.e. bottom-up support for democratic forces in third countries, and ‘leverage’, i.e. the top-down inducement of political elites towards democratic reforms through political conditionality. The advent of the European Neighbourhood Policy and new forms of association have introduced a new, third model of democracy promotion which rests in functional cooperation between administrations. This article comparatively defines and explicates these three models of external democracy promotion. It argues that while ‘linkage’ has hitherto failed to produce tangible outcomes, and the success of ‘leverage’ has basically been tied to an EU membership perspective, the ‘governance’ model of democracy promotion bears greater potential beyond the circle of candidate countries. In contrast to the two traditional models, however, the governance approach does not tackle the core institutions of the political system as such, but promotes transparency, accountability, and participation at the level of state administration.
The deepening of the EU’s acquis communautaire, transformations of the European continent, and intensifying webs of interdependence have, since the 1990s, prompted a progressing blurring of the functional boundaries of the European Union. Whereas the integration project has produced externalities early on, the EU has engaged in an active promotion of its norms and rules beyond the member states, designing concentric circles of flexible ‘EUropean’ integration. This article offers a typology of these evolving external circles of EU rule-export focusing on the European Economic Area, Swiss-EU bilateralism, the stabilization and enlargement policy towards the candidate countries of the Western Balkans, the European Neighbourhood Policy and countries beyond the neighbourhood. Drawing on the theoretical notion of external governance, it will be shown these outer circles of ‘EUropean’ integration fall into three groups. While the first group, the ‘quasi-member states’ of Western Europe, combine far-reaching regulatory alignment with limited opportunities for organizational inclusion in EU structures, the Eastern and Southern neighbours face less legalized forms of rule transfer along with the establishment of parallel regional organizational structures. Links with countries beyond the neighbourhood finally stress the functionally differentiated rather than political and territorial dynamics of EU external governance.
In the absence of an international migration regime, the rising salience of migration issues and the limits of unilateral policies led the European Union to seek appropriate venues for co-operation with the sending and transit countries of migrants. Many of the newer relevant multilateral or regional venues are soft law frameworks. Conversely, trade agreements provide a formal, hard law instrument for inserting migration clauses. Based on a quantitative analysis of EU trade agreements and expert interviews, this article investigates how far the EU is engaging in strategic issue-linkage when including migration clauses in its trade agreements. Testing hypotheses derived from ration- alist and institutionalist approaches, it thereby provides an empirical test of its acclaimed identity as ‘trade power’ or ‘market power’.
This contribution proposes a decentred conceptualization of Euro- pean Union (EU) international influence based on the external ramifications of its internal policies. It views the EU’s international role less as that of an emerging unitary actor than as conglomerate of loosely coupled sectoral regimes expanding their prescriptive scope towards third countries in differentiated ways. Combining conceptual approaches to (EU) power with empirical – analytical research on external governance and policy diffusion, the contribution defines the mechanisms of regu- latory extension, specifies their scope conditions, and highlights the role of transgo- vernmental networks, often involving international organizations, in ‘co-opting’ third country regulators into EU policies.
In a ‘demoi-cracy’, separate statespeoples enter into a political arrangement and jointly exercise political authority. Its proper domain is a polity of democratic states with hierarchical, majoritarian features of policy-making, especially in value-laden redistributive and coercive policy areas, but without a unified political community (demos). In its vertical dimension, demoi-cracy is based on the equality and interaction of citizens’ and statespeoples’ representatives in the making of common policies. Horizontally, it seeks to balance equal transnational rights of citizens with national policy-making autonomy. The EU belongs to the domain of demoi-cracy and has established many of its features. We argue that both vertical and horizontal demoi-cratization have been triggered by processes of supranational integration in the EU. They differ, however, in the origins and the outcomes. Vertical demoi-cratization has initially been a reaction of parliamentary institutional actors to majoritarian decision-making in regulatory policy-areas, resulting in the empowerment of the EP and the strengthening of parliamentary oversight at the national level. By contrast, horizontal demoi-cratization has been promoted by governments as an alternative to majoritarian and legally binding policy-making in core areas of statehood as well as coercive and redistributive policy-areas; it has resulted in soft, coordinative forms of policy-making, seeking to protect national autonomy. The extent to which these developments actually meet the normative standards of demoi-cracy in practice, however, is mixed.
The independence of International Civil Servants (ICSs) from their country of origin is often presumed but rarely accounted for empirically. In order to address this gap, we investigate whether ICSs face conflicts between national and international interests and which conditions are more conducive to the manifestation of this conflict in International Organizations. We adopt a mixed-methods design, including a survey with 1400 respondents working in two United Nations humanitarian organizations, followed by semi-structured interviews to a purposive sample of respondents. The findings show that such conflicts matter for ICSs, hierarchical grade has stronger explanatory power than the other factors, and the higher the level in the International Organization, the less frequently ICSs face conflict. The qualitative analysis explains this result by pointing to the effects of socialization among ICSs but also by shedding light on a related effect: dilution of national identity, as well as on the implications of locally recruiting lower-level staff.
