The European Union in International Affairs

Contemporary trade policy is increasingly framed in geo-strategic terms. But how much of that rhetoric is reflected in actual policy choices by the EU or its trading partners? This book provides a first systematic study of the broader international context in which EU trade agreements are conceived, negotiated, and designed. Building on a refined conceptualisation of geo-economics, the book develops a cogent framework that combines insights from scholarship on the design of free trade agreements with ideas from foreign policy analysis. Empirically, the analysis focuses on the relations between the EU and the Asia-Pacific. Following the United States’ pivot to Asia and the EU’s Global Europe strategy, China’s backyard has become the main arena in which global powers’ geo-economic strategies overlap. Building on a series of case-studies, combining the perspectives from the EU and its trading partners, the book shows that the rhetoric of geo-economic competition is yet to catch up with the actual negotiation and design of free trade agreements. This volume will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners who want to gain a holistic understanding of contemporary trade negotiations.

This book provides a critical and updated analysis of the nature of the EU’s strategic partnership diplomacy, and of the partnerships themselves, in times of power shift and contestation. It links with key aspects of the EU’s Global Strategy; it brings together a strong list of experts who work within a clear framework for analysis; and it deals not only with the substance of the policy but also with the ways in which the policy as a whole has emerged, is conducted and might develop in the future. In offering an inclusive set of case studies and diverse perspectives, this book aims to advance both conceptualization and analysis of the implementation of the established EU partnerships. The book highlights the notion of strategic partnership as a foreign policy instrument to support EU external action in a context of multilevel change and crisis; its policy dimension as a gradually separated, but not separable policy within the Union’s external action; the institutional component given the emergence of SPs as a sort of self-preserving institutional platform allowing for denser and deeper cooperation in various policy areas; and the implications for the EU’s self-conception as an international actor with a global identity and role.

This wide-ranging book analyses EU-Asia security relations in a systematic, substantive and comparative manner. The contributions assess similarities and differences between the EU and its Asian partners with respect to levels of threat perception, policy response and security cooperation in the context of historical, institutional and external factors – such as the influence of the United States. The book presents original empirical research organised in four parts: a number of contributions providing discussions of the global context in which EU-Asia security relations develop; a series of chapters covering the range of dimensions of EU-Asian security, including both traditional and non-military aspects of security; chapters addressing the specific issues touching on bilateral relations between the EU and its partners in the Asia-Pacific region; and a final part presenting the overall findings across the various contributions together with the future outlook for EU-Asia security relations.

Interregional cooperation in peace and security as key feature of the EU external relations is particularly relevant in Africa-EU relations. However, these efforts have not been systematically evaluated to date. Focusing specifically on interregional peace operations, this volume provides the first comprehensive evaluation of the Africa-EU Partnership on Peace and Security. It explains the effectiveness of interregional security cooperation across three cases: (1) the AU-EU response in the Central African Republic (2013) and (2) in Somalia (2007–2017), (3) and the ECOWAS-EU efforts in Mali (2012). The book makes a valuable empirical, theoretical, and methodological contribution to EU foreign policy, comparative regionalism, and conflict studies.

This book analyses why the Ukrainian state established asylum laws and policies in the thirty years since 1991, even though the number of asylum seekers was very low. International and non-governmental organisations transferred international asylum norms to Ukraine. Various state and non-state actors participated in this process, translating, spreading, and resisting those norms. In many cases, legislative adoption was driven by domestic politicians’ pursuit of recognition by international organisations, such as the European Union and the Council of Europe, and by their desire to meet conditionality requirements. NGOs sought to influence administrative practices, alternating between confrontational and conciliatory, formal and informal approaches, and often relying on personal contacts. Actors used and shifted between scales in order to transfer norms or resist transfer. In the process, they produced, renegotiated, and confirmed those scales. For instance, NGOs resorting to the European Court of Human Rights to prevent refoulement placed the European scale above the national scale. This book offers a new multi-actor and multi-scalar analysis of policy transfer.

This is an open access book. With the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, European security has been put on high alert. The implications of the Russian military invasion are many and difficult to grasp in full. However, the need for greater European strategic autonomy appears increasingly evident. The book argues that strategic autonomy may be reached—also in the short run—if differentiated integration is seen as an asset rather than a challenge. While the EU (together with NATO) remains the core in such a system, there is a multitude sub-regional integration processes that need to be taken into account to get the full idea of how European strategic autonomy can be achieved.

This book provides new and established researchers with innovative methodologies and research strategies to explore European security integration from a different perspective, challenging traditional theoretical interpretations. It takes a step back from well-established theoretical approaches to the European Union’s (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) to ask more fundamental questions about the core assumptions underpinning research on European security integration. It supports methodological innovations with an analysis of the most significant empirical problems of European security governance, including the war in Ukraine or the role of Russia in European security. In the last chapter, the author offers ideas for new pedagogical approaches to teaching European Studies.