EU foreign policy as a vocation for Europe

This chapter focus on the moral concerns of practitioners regarding the eastern neighbourhood. The normative power literature deliberately decouples norms from values. But this chapter demonstrates that in practice it is impossible to do so. The EU practitioners demonstrate how they operationalise their specific moral concerns for the eastern neighbourhood. Their norm deployments are consistent with Legro, Buzan and Zizek’s claims of norm use. In addition, the analysis reveals instances when practitioners risk sounding moralising rather than moral. This is highly problematic for two reasons. First, moralising endangers alienating neighbouring states who align themselves with the EU but do not want to receive a lecture by EU practitioners. Second, if the EU cannot deliver on specific commitments, this will have implications for its status with regards to support for democracy or human rights in the region.

Constructing the ‘European’

This chapter is about collective identity and how practitioners define this highly complex topic. Two main patterns emerge from the corpus. Practitioners’ main concerns while discussing the concept of ‘European’ identity are as follows: to differentiate between European neighbours and the neighbours of Europe, and to account for the European credentials of the South Caucasus or Kazakhstan. In addressing differentiation between the neighbours, practitioners draw on geography, culture, history and economic ties to distinguish between countries which are in Europe and those which are not. At the same time practitioners make explicit distinctions between the key EU policies: the European Neighbourhood Policy and the enlargement policy. They also build up the category of the ‘European’. When they offer accounts of the South Caucasus and Kazakhstan, one practitioner relies on a heredity account of the European civilization, while others seek to justify, in different ways, the European-ness of the Caucasus and potentially Kazakhstan.

Introduction

In considering EU foreign policy in practice, this book argues that a specific focus on practitioners’ (diplomats, bureaucrats, and public officials) interactions can offer insight into the way EU foreign policy is practised. An assessment of the practices of practitioners through a new type of data set and a new discursive framework demonstrates the significance of European identity, collective interests, and the role that normative and moral concerns play for EU practitioners when they consider EU foreign policy in the eastern neighbourhood. It also highlights that these four concepts are interlinked when they consider the policy, despite the commonly accepted understanding, even by practitioners, that the EU is a normative power in global affairs. These findings are relevant not only for understanding current developments in EU foreign policy, but also for allowing scholars, as well as practitioners, to move away from considering the EU exclusively as a normative power but perceiving it as a more complex power with a collective ‘European’ identity, collective understandings of European norms that are linked to collective moral concerns that at the same time all link to collective European interests. Currently there is a lot of discussion regarding the EU becoming a resilient, or pragmatic power. Only time and EU actions will tell what these terms mean in practice. However, this book is a testament to the fact that practitioners have always considered EU foreign policy beyond the normative. In this introduction I begin by providing some context for the book, followed by an explanation of, and rationale for, its theoretical and methodological approach, as well as an outline of the rest of the book’s structure....

The normative role of the EU in the eastern region

This chapter focuses on norms and the functions of norms in EU foreign policy. The analysis presented here offers an evaluation of the EU’s role as a normative power in the region, examining what EU practitioners understand as norms. It also offers insight in the context in which EU foreign policy is practiced through norms which in turn guide the practices of EU practitioners. The following patterns emerge from the data. First, how norms are constructed, what norms the EU can spread to its neighbours and how practitioners can urge neighbouring states to embrace these norms through the EU’s prescribed reform process. Second, practitioners’ attention shifts to the EU model of norms itself. They strive not only to make the specific EU model relevant but also attractive to the neighbours. In addition, they claim to have the necessary expertise to assist these countries to emulate this model. Third, practitioners address two sources of non-compliance: one is non-alignment with the EU model, and the second is the existence of a competing model, the Russian model, that does not quite meet EU standards of norms. Finally, practitioners put forward an all-encompassing EU-centric view that reveals a particular ethnocentric view.

Studying social action in interaction

Some parts of the discursive literature in IR overlap with the scholarship that focuses on foreign policy practices. This is not surprising given the specific intentions by the scholars behind the practice turn to create an interparadigmatic research programme and promote methodological pluralism (Adler and Pouliot 2011:3). Nevertheless, there seems to be a division developing in the practice turn between those who focus on the language practitioners use by building on scholarship inspired by Michel Foucault, and those who focus on practitioners’ political actions, that is ‘what practitioners do’, in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s work. This book argues that it is instrumental to combine both. However, focusing on the linguistic resources used by practitioners and on the way they construct their social actions allows us to understand and explain specific foreign policy decisions or their practice. In order to do so, a new framework called Discursive International Relations (DIR) is put forward. DIR shares the same philosophical roots as some constructivist and most poststructuralist discursive approaches applied in IR, but it also combines features of discursive psychology (Edwards and Potter 1992), conversation analysis (Davies and Harré 1990; Sacks 1992) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967, Lynch et al 1983) in order to combine discourse and practice.

Studying practitioners’ practices

Practice theory is a diverse and constantly evolving body of ideas regarding the nature of social action, transcending a variety of disciplines in the social sciences. This chapter traces the evolution of the practice turn, from the seminal work in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al, 2001) to a more recent application in the field of International Relations (Pouliot, 2010; Adler and Pouliot 2011) and EU studies (Adler-Niessen, 2016). This chapter illustrates the different debates and discussions that have guided the path of practice theory towards an application within IR and EU scholarship. It particularly emphasises the importance of Raymond D. Duvall and Arjun Chowdhury’s contribution to the field, which highlights the emergence of two distinct approaches that the practice turn facilitates, namely the focus on behaviour/conduct on one hand and the discursive/linguistic on the other. While the former seems to have found greater support in the discipline of IR, this chapter argues that the ontological foundations upon which the practice turn rests allude to the utility and even necessity for a discursive practice approach. The book serves as a contribution to the linguistic approaches within the practice turn.

Conclusion

This book sought to gain insight into how EU practitioners consider the policy for which they have direct responsibility. By first summarising its findings, I reflect on the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of this study and studying EU practitioners in general. I examined data drawn from research interviews with EU practitioners who work on EU foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. Following a poststructuralist theoretical and methodology position within the practice turn, and having an open research question, allowed me to focus on the data and the topics that EU practitioners raised. I analysed these interactions through the application of DPM. DPM enabled me to draw attention to the discursive patterns that practitioners employ when they discuss EU foreign policy in the eastern neighbourhood, what they accomplish with them, how they manage their personal accountability or agency through them, and what implications these formulations have for the practitioners’ practices. This led to a focus on the ways that practitioners manage identity, normative, moral, and collective interest concerns. These four concepts are crucial for IR theory, and also for understanding EU foreign policy. Although each concept was addressed in a separate chapter, I demonstrated points of interdependency throughout the analysis. Their parallel existence is key for this study and for poststructuralist practice theory. It builds on previous constructive works that linked identity and interests, but expanded it to normative and even moral concerns faced by practitioners when developing a specific foreign policy. Drawing this inference was only possible owing to the openness and refusal to take anything for granted advocated by poststructuralists; thus, the focus lies on the topics made relevant by practitioners, and how their accounts build up specific constructions of our world, rather testing for specific categories or for the truth value of their account....

Justifying the EU’s interests in the region: energy security

Building on the three previous chapters’ findings on collective ‘European’ identity, norms and moral concerns, this chapter turns to collective EU interest formulations. There are numerous collective interests such as terrorism, hybrid threats, economic volatility, climate change and energy security that have been identified by the EU Global Strategy (EU HR/VP 2016). These interests not only bind EU member states into acting together, but also signify to other, non-EU states what the EU is focusing on. The practitioners who participated in the study also identified migration, the environment, organised crime and transport as collective EU interests. Unsurprisingly they identified energy security as the most pressing common security interest that unites EU member states. Three main patterns emerge from the corpus. First, practitioners’ constructions of energy interests are examined. The second pattern reveals practitioners’ accounts of future plans to manage the collective EU concern over energy supplies. In the third and final pattern, practitioners offer justifications of EU interests in the eastern region, beyond the collective interests in energy supplies, and again through invoking moral concerns and the vocation attributes the EU has for the eastern neighbours.