NORTIA Early Career Residency: Daan Fonck
Submitted by admin on Mon, 09/03/2018 - 15:56
NORTIA Early Career Residency: Daan Fonck (KU Leuven – visiting PhD Student at European University Institute, 1 September – 1 November 2018)
Daan is a PhD student at the Leuven International and European Studies (LINES) Institute of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) where he is a conducting a PhD research on the diplomacy of the European Parliament (supervised by Prof. Dr. Stephan Keukeleire and Prof. Dr. Kolja Raube). He is also the website manager of the eufp.eu platform.
Throughout the last decade, the European Parliament (EP) has come to profile itself as a diplomatic player during several conflicts in the EU’s backyard, ranging from the Arab Spring, the Ukrainian crisis, political upheaval in Eastern Partnership states, to political stalemates in the Western Balkans. This understudied and insufficiently comprehended phenomenon - showing that the EP is not only shaping the EU’s foreign policy from within its hemicycle but also increasingly manifests itself as a foreign policy actor on the ground - forms the object of my PhD research. On the one hand, my research aims at conceptualizing the role the EP plays as a diplomatic actor, while on the other it seeks to reach an explanation for the rise of the EP’s parliamentary diplomacy in EU foreign policy. Empirically, my analysis rests on elite interviews with more than 50 EU officials and counterparts, next to official documents and news wire databanks to study the EP’s mediation practices and its interrelationship with the executive throughout the last decade.
The first part of my research builds on two main case-studies, studying in depth the EP’s diplomatic ventures. First, I have studied the EP’s Cox-Kwasniewski mission in Ukraine (2012-2013), which I have found to be largely competitive of nature vis-à-vis the EU’s executive actors (Commission, EEAS). Initially launched to observe a court hearing against the imprisoned former Ukrainian Prime-Minister Tymoshenko, the EP’s ‘monitoring mission’ evolved into a fully-fledged mediation mission charged with setting the ultimate criteria that would allow the signing of the negotiated Association Agreement with Ukraine. My second case-study, the EP’s mediation in the Macedonian political crisis (2015-2017) is found to be completely different in nature, as it was characterized by a high degree of cooperation and coordination in between the Parliament and the Commission/EEAS.
The reasons for my research stay is however mostly related to the second part of my research, where I seek to explain the process of informal institutionalization of the EP’s diplomatic practices that has occurred throughout the last decade. In that way, I address the discrepancy between the formally prescribed diplomatic prerogative of the EU executive (European Commission, EEAS), and the empirically observed diplomatic agency of the EP.
My stay at European University Institute, supported by the NORTIA consortium, is primarily focused on disseminating my current findings regarding the second part of my research, while getting feedback on this work in progress. Moreover, my stay would allow access to library holdings on the European Parliament located in the EUI’s general library and the Historical Archive of the European Union (HAEU). During my two-month stay at EUI, my research visit will be jointly supervised by Prof. Dr. Federica Bicchi and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Krotz. I am convinced the feedback from them and the EUI’s many other experts in the domain of International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis and EU foreign policy will be of great help for completing the final part of my PhD.
For more information about Daan’s research, please visit his profile page.