The EU, ISA, and California – a little bit of everything (by Elitsa Garnizova)
Submitted by admin on Tue, 04/17/2018 - 09:48
By Elena Garnizova, London School of Economics and Political Science
This year’s ISA Conference in San Francisco, CA attracted a “record number of submissions” (nearly 6000 paper and panel proposals), reflecting the pull to a forum that provided an opportunity to discuss key topics of the power and rules in international interactions from various perspectives. The conference provoked an engagement with the conceptualisations of power from different perspectives, self-reflectivity on the role of expert knowledge and the Academy in a Post-Truth climate (although the usefulness of this concept has been widely challenged), and intense discussion on the crisis of the Liberal International Order. I found the 59th ISA an amazing occasion to share and discuss my PhD research and side projects with different people due to the quality of discussions, feedback received and suggestions on how to make my research speak to a larger audience. Personally, I should also admit that I was completely charmed by California (from Joshua Tree to Yosemite Park to Big Sur).
The NORTIA network hosted two panels, exploring respectively the internal contestation (TD79) and external contestation (SA45) of rules, norms and practices in EU’s foreign policies and thus provided a strong contribution to the main themes of the ISA. Both of the panels explored key dimensions of EU’s external policies and a range of new and old actors, constituencies, and issues and attracted substantial debate on epistemological and normative challenges. Two common questions emerged from both of the panels: “What is the role of the EU in the future of Liberal International Order?” and “What are the implications of power shifts within the EU and outside of the EU for the future of the Union?”
Particularly striking in the discussion on external contestation was the difficulty to conceptualise European (and EU) norms and values, operationalisation of the concepts, as well as being reflective on what constitutes normative theory in EU studies. One of the comments resonated particularly well with all participants across the panel. Rephrasing Ian Manners’ remark: what should be going on [in foreign policy] if not everyone is following the US approach? His comment highlights the need for a new EU agenda that should be more focused at looking at what the EU ought to be doing in its external policies if it was not following the rules set by the US as well as how it can be taken more seriously in international interactions dominated by China and the US.
The panel on external contestation featured five excellent papers, which discussed the role of the EU in the Liberal International Order and the challenge it faces from key actors, such as the US (going beyond the Trump Administration), Russia, and Turkey. The papers identified different levels and modes of contestation – whereas Russia is perceived as a neo-revisionist power, which does not aim to contest existing norms but contests who defines the norms (Tatiana A. Romanova’s paper), Turkey is perceived to offer alternative norms, rules and approaches, directly challenging the European Union (Senem Aydin-Duzgit & Gergana Noutcheva). While these two papers provide substantial empirical evidence on how these two actors exploit contradictions and incoherence in European and International values and rules, the paper by Stephan Keukeleire & Sharon Lecocq aimed at conceptualising the distance between EU’s norms and values and alternative norms. They extend the work of Fisher Onar and Nicolaïdis (2013) to theoretically explore different value orientations and how these can be incorporated in work on the normative power of the EU. One of the papers addressed the benefits and challenges of the practice turn in International Relations, bringing about an interesting discussion on what constitutes “practice” in the first place. Heidi Maurer shed light on how third countries’ diplomatic services understand and engage with the European Union, highlighting the growing recognition of the EU as a diplomatic actor.
In the panel on internal contestation, the papers explored the implications of new or newly powerful actors (the European Parliament in Kolja Raube’s paper); new constituencies on the subnational level (cities in Robert Kissack’s paper); as well as the (lack of) socialisation of Central and Eastern European countries (Karolina Pomorska on the CFSP). Together with my paper on the challenges to EU’s trade policy, these papers showed how power could be traced across different actors through the expansion of informal practices, the use of windows of opportunity, and the invocation of different framings. In addition, they called for engagement with different perspectives to assess what power relations underpin existing inter- and intra-institutional relations as well as multi-level governance dynamics. For example, Robert’s interesting work on the subnational level explores the possible use of governmentality as a framework to explore the understanding of resilience, security and sustainability in EU’s policies. Prompted by Alisdair Young, the panel also explored how much researchers can rely on what the EU policy documents state and how this information can be used for research purposes.
My own research on the international political economy of regulatory issues and non-tariff measures links both the external and internal contestation of the European Union. Since the defeat of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in 2012 by the European Parliament and civil society actors, the EU’s trade policy has suffered a major backlash as part of a broader anti-globalisation sentiment across Europe. The contestation of free trade as a marker of globalisation came as a surprise to many of the actors in the European Union and caused some observers to wonder whether this is a fundamental shift in trade policy or a temporary hiccup. One of the reasons for the current backlash is the increasing depth and breadth of trade agreements, touching upon domestic regulatory issues, whilst historically they were predominantly focused on tariff negotiations. This has brought about increased involvement of non-traditional actors beyond businesses as well as more contestation among them.
The first paper I presented at the NORTIA panel explored how politicization affects trade policy actors on three levels: understanding of the goals and objectives of trade policy, available instruments, and everyday processes. In particular, it focused on the European Commission and the Council’s Trade Policy Committee to highlight that politicization has not lead to a shift in the existing cognitive and normative frames, which guide policy elites. In consecutive speeches and policy documents, the European Commission has reinstated the importance of openness to imports and trade agreements as the key instrument to achieve that, but increasingly invoking regulatory issues and regulatory cooperation for their value for an ambitious agreement. This highlights a dissonance between external actors concerns over regulatory sovereignty and domestic autonomy and the assessment of the Commission that it needs to find better ways to communicate the benefits of trade policy.
The second paper I presented in the panel on Financial Services Regulation (FB63) focused on regulatory cooperation in FTAs between EU and third countries and the link between trade and regulation; even though it is centred on the EU, it has potential implications for external contestation as well. The paper shows that regulatory issues and regulatory cooperation, as a tool to tackle them, can reflect path-dependent institutional and ideational characteristics in the EU and partner countries. The difficulty of reconciling such regulatory frames, as seen within other International Organisations, is very challenging and requires a different way of analysing the trade-regulatory sovereignty-legitimacy trilemma.
The two panels underline the extensive opportunities for research in the field of internal and external contestation of EU’s foreign and trade policy. Moreover, they highlight once again the importance of scholars working in the EU to engage with the broader academic community in the fields of IR, IPE, Diplomatic and Security studies, as well as other disciplines in order to expand the theoretical and methodological tools available but also to explore cross-linkages among different issues.
I would like to use the opportunity to thank the NORTIA organisers, and in particular Dr Heidi Maurer, for putting together two engaging panels, which allowed EU-focused research to come in touch with a broader audience. I would also like to thank Professor Rachel Epstein and Dr Elliot Posner for the generous comments and suggestions.
Looking forward to the next destinations in new (academic and non-academic) fields where NORTIA will take us!
12 April 2018, by Elitsa Garnizova, London School of Economics and Political Science
E.V.Garnizova@lse.ac.uk or also check @EGarnizova