Eu Foreign Policy in a Globalized World: Normative Power and Social Preferences

EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World

Written by leading experts in the field, this volume identifies European collective preferences and analyses to what extent these preferences inform and shape EU foreign policy and are shared by other actors in the international system. While studies of the European Union’s foreign policy are not new, this book takes a very different tack from previous research. Specifically it leaves aside the institutional and bureaucratic dimensions of the EU’s behaviour as an international actor in order to concentrate on the meanings and outcomes of its foreign policy taken in the broadest sense. Two outcomes are possible: •

•

either Europe succeeds in imposing a norms-based international system and thus, in this case, its soft power capacity will not only have been demonstrated but will be enhanced; or, on the contrary, it does not succeed and the global system will become one where realpolitik reigns; especially once China, India and Russia attain a preponderant influence on the international scene.

EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, foreign policy and politics and international relations in general. Zaki Laïdi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre d’études européennes of Sciences Po, Paris, France. He is also Professor at Sciences Po, Paris and Collège de Bruges, Belgium.

Routledge/GARNET series: Europe in the World Edited by Mary Farrell and Karoline Postel-Vinay Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI), France

Editorial Board: Dr. Mary Farrell, Sciences Po, Paris; Dr. Karoline PostelVinay, CERI, France; Professor Richard Higgott, University of Warwick, UK; Dr. Christian Lequesne, CERI, France and Professor Thomas Risse, Free University Berlin, Germany. International Advisory Committee: Dr. Salma Bava, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; Dr. Knud Erik Jørgensen, University of Aarhus, Denmark; Professor Sunil Khilnani, SAIS, John Hopkins University, USA; Dr. Anne-Marie Legloannec, CERI, France; Dr. Xiaobo Lu, SIPA, Columbia University; Professor James Mittelman, University of Washington, USA; Dr. Karen Smith, London School of Economics, United Kingdom; Professor Elzbieta Stadtmuller, University of Wroclaw, Poland. The Routledge/GARNET series, Europe in the World, provides a forum for innovative research and current debates emanating from the research community within the GARNET Network of Excellence. GARNET is a Europe-wide network of 43 research institutions and scholars working collectively on questions around the theme of ‘Global Governance, Regionalisation and Regulation: The Role of the EU’, and funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme for Research. 1 EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World Normative power and social preferences Edited by Zaki Laïdi

EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World Normative power and social preferences

Edited by Zaki Laïdi

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2008 Selection and editorial matter Zaki Laïdi; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data EU foreign policy in a globalized world: normative power and social preferences/edited by Zaki Laïdi. p. cm. – (Europe in the world; v. 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. European Union countries–Foreign relations. 2. Democratization–Europe. 3. Europe–Social policy. 4. European Union. I. Laïdi, Zaki. JZ1570.A5E86 2008 341.2422–dc22 2007046238 ISBN 0-203-92740-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-43363-0 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-92740-0 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-43363-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-92740-3 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations Notes on contributors 1 European preferences and their reception

vii viii 1

ZAKI LAÏDI

PART I

Norms and preferences: history and principles 2 The normative power of the European Union in a globalised world

21

23

IAN MANNERS

3 The historicity of European normative power

38

KAROLINE POSTEL-VINAY

PART II

The reception of democracy 4 Democratization by extension: seeking reinsurance

49 51

ANNE-MARIE LE GLOANNEC AND JACQUES RUPNIK

5 The EU’s promotion of democracy in the Balkans

68

DAVID CHANDLER

6 A missed opportunity? The EU and the reform of the UN human rights architecture FRANZISKA BRANTNER AND RICHARD GOWAN

83

vi

Contents

7 The reception of EU neighbourhood policy

103

FLORENT PARMENTIER

8 European Union’s exportation of democratic norms: the case of North Africa

118

LUIS MARTINEZ

9 The uncertainties of democratic promotion in Afghanistan

134

JEAN-NOËL FERRIÉ

10 The European Union, China and human rights

143

RICHARD BALME

Bibliography Index

174 193

Illustrations

Figures 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Number of EU splits in General Assembly, 1997–2007 Voting coincidence in General Assembly, in cases of EU consensus, 1997–2007 EU splits on General Assembly human rights votes, and voting coincidence with EU consensus positions, 1997–2007 Voting coincidence with China, EU, India, Russia and US on human rights votes in General Assembly, 1997–2007 Support for country-specific rights resolutions in General Assembly, 1997–2007

86 87 88 88 89

Tables 6.1 6.2

Distribution of seats on CHR and HRC Score voting coincidence

91 101

Contributors

Richard Balme is Professor at Sciences Po, Paris and Visiting Professor at the School of Government, Peking University, since September 2006. He is Director of the Programme Sciences Po in China. He recently edited (with Brian Bridges) Europe-Asia Relations: Building Multilateralisms? (Palgrave 2008). Franziska Brantner is Research Associate at the European Studies Center, Oxford University. David Chandler is Professor of International Relations, the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. His most recent books include Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building (2006); From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond (new ed., 2006); (ed.) Peace without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Building in Bosnia (2006); Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations (2005). Jean-Noël Ferrié is Research Director at CNRS Grenoble. He is the author of numerous works on Egypt and Islam, such as Le régime de la civilité. Public et réislamisation en Egypte (CNRS 2004) and La religion de la vie quotidienne chez des Marocains musulmans (Karthala 2004). Richard Gowan is Research Associate at the Center on International Cooperation, New York University. Mr Gowan works on peacekeeping and multilateral security arrangements. Zaki Laïdi is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre d’études européennes of Sciences Po, Professor at Sciences Po, Paris and Collège de Bruges. He is the author of numerous books including, among others, A World without Meaning (Routledge 1998), The Great Disruption (Polity Press 2007) and Norm over Force. The Enigma of European Power (Palgrave 2008). Anne-Marie Le Gloannec is Senior Research Fellow at Sciences Po, Paris. She has written extensively on Germany: her recent publications include NonState Actors in International Relations. The Case of Germany (Manchester University Press 2007, AMLG ed.) She is currently working on a book on European Foreign Policy.

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Ian Manners is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. His publications include, with Sonia Lucarelli (eds) Values and Principles in European Union Foreign Policy (Routledge 2006); with Richard Whitman (eds) The Foreign Policies of European Union Member States (Manchester University Press 2000); and Substance and Symbolism: an Anatomy of Cooperation in the New Europe (Ashgate 2000). Luis Martinez is Research Director at Sciences Po in Paris. He was Associate Professor at SIPA – Columbia University and visiting fellow at Cérium – Montréal University. He has published numerous articles and essays on North Africa, including The Civil War in Algeria (Hurst 2000) and The Libyan Paradox (Hurst, 2007). Florent Parmentier is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at SciencesPo/CERI. His main publications include La Moldavie à la croisée des chemins (Editoo 2003) and L’empire au miroir. Stratégies de puissance aux Etats-Unis et en Russie (Droz 2007). Karoline Postel-Vinay is Research Director at Sciences Po in Paris. She is the author of several articles and books on Japan, such as L’Occident et sa bonne parole (Flammarion 2005), Corée, au Coeur de la nouvelle Asie (Flammarion 2002) and La revolution silencieuse au Japon (Calmann-Lévy 1994). She is also the editor of the Routledge/GARNET series ‘Europe in the World’. Jacques Rupnik is Research Director at Sciences Po, Paris. Among his recent positions, Jacques Rupnik was adviser to Czech President Vaclav Havel, 1990–1992, Executive Director of the International Commission for the Balkans at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1995–1996 and member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 1999–2000. His forthcoming book is entitled Les Banlieues de l’Europe, l’UE et ses voisinages (The Suburbs of Europe: the EU and its Neighbourhoods), and some of his recent work include L’Europe des Vingt-Cinq. 25 cartes pour un jeu complexe (with Christian Lequesne), Balkan Diary and articles such as: ‘America’s best friends in Europe: East-Central European perceptions and policies towards the US’ in T. Judt and D. Lacorne (eds) With US or Against US, Studies in Global Anti-Americanism.

1

European preferences and their reception Zaki Laïdi

An ever less European world Since 1957, Europe has lived in the oblivion of the rest of the world. This was possible because its security was ensured by the United States while its economy was protected by the partial closure of its markets. Today, this Eurocentrism has been eroded by the opening of markets and the emergence of new, non-Western, powers (Aussilloux and Bourcieu 2005).1 Therefore, Europe is now surrounded by an ever less familiar world with which it must come to terms. To illustrate this new reality, if, in a globalised economy, what we call core labour standards are not respected, Europe, which enjoys very high labour standards, will suffer from a possible race to the bottom.2 If, within this same global economy, environmental standards are weaker than European ones, Europe will face an inevitable comparative disadvantage and therefore be forced to promote their harmonisation at the global level. Moreover, if European standards are not shared by others, European production may be relocated to low-wage countries. The only alternative would be to set up a tax mechanism for products from areas having low environmental norms (Ismer and Neuhoff 2004). Those simple examples make it easy to understand why, in a less and less European world, Europe needs to act in defence of its own social preferences. One of the hypotheses of this book is that a good way to defend Europe’s preferences in the world would be to expand the scope of European normativity in a world that is not necessarily inclined to accept such a perspective. Indeed, the concept of European norms is ambiguous: does it express a sort of European virtue claiming universal validity or is it a weapon in the hands of Europe to promote its own interests? In order to answer this question, this collection of essays will try to investigate the norms Europe stands for and the way European norms are received by the other actors of the international system. Europe is also given meaning by non-Europeans. That dimension has not been investigated by the literature, and yet it needs to be explored seriously. It should first be remembered that European policies have historically been shaped either to deal with homogeneous situations or with situations in which Europe benefited from highly asymmetrical power. For example, the enlargement policies conducted by Europe from 1957 to 1991 applied to states more or

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less similar to those of the founding group in terms of living standards and political system. In 1973, the three new member states had a per capita GDP that neared 80 per cent of the average of the first six. In 2007, this figure fell to 15 per cent for the last 12 applicants (Moravcsik and Vachudova 2003: 46). Beyond the borders of what was not yet called European Union, the situation was not so different. The main instrument of external policy in the hands of the European Community was its trade policy. This last one was limited to policies of dismantling tariff barriers with the United States or Japan, which were in any case societies with a comparable standard of living and sharing the same liberal vision of the world. Therefore trade negotiations were very different from the ones we are used to today because they undermined neither European public policies (especially the CAP) nor social or monetary policies. Broadly speaking, European preferences were sheltered both at the European and national level. Obviously, Europe’s relationship with developing countries was very different. But those countries needed European aid more than Europe needed them. There was such an asymmetry in their relationship that they hardly influenced European choices. Moreover, preferential access to European markets was compatible with a high degree agricultural protectionism. It is this configuration that is dramatically changing today. The first change took place in the ‘first circle’, which regroups the present members of the EU. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, integration no longer involves countries sharing the same history since 1945, having similar standards of living and benefiting from firmly rooted institutions. Since 1989, integration pertains to countries that for 50 years have been isolated from the rest of the world, which had weak or chaotic democracies and very poor living conditions. This heterogeneity is ever increasing with the opening of accession talks with the Balkan countries. In this book, Anne-Marie Le-Gloannec and Jacques Rupnik explain to what extent the European involvement in the Balkans has modified the meaning and the content of its policy vis-à-vis, for example, democracy. Bringing democracy in societies where the demos is so weak gives the EU an enormous responsibility as a nation-building entrepreneur. In the same vein, David Chandler mentions the difficulties and illusions of bringing democracy from above. In the ‘second circle’, which refers to Western developed countries, the issues at stake have changed. Today, Europe and the United States are more or less equivalent economic powers. Between them, the problem is less to reduce trade protection than to harmonise their respective models of economic, financial and environmental governance in a globalised economy: accounting and financial rules, environmental norms, protection of personal data in the context of the fight against terrorism, etc. But it is in the ‘third circle’, by which is meant the developing world, that heterogeneity is the most salient. The postcolonial space of the Africa, Caribbean, Pacific group of states (ACP), which Europe used as its backyard, is dislocated, both because of the erosion of their trade preferences in Europe and because Europe does not need this space for economic purposes as it once did (Bouët et al. 2005). Moreover, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep

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this area at bay through the traditional aid policy. The asymmetrical relation between Europe and the ACP has created imbalances that have direct consequences on European security, especially through migratory pressure. Therefore Europe tries to export its security norms through a set of carrots and sticks in order to avoid the import of insecurity (Wallace 2003). That is why European cooperation and aid policies are becoming more and more concerned with security issues and political conditionality (European Commission 2006). Europe is then facing a combination of security threats from poorer countries and economic challenges due to the rising competitiveness of emerging markets. The latter, too, are making Europe more vulnerable, either because they are seeking access to Europe’s protected agricultural markets (Brazil and Thailand) or because they remind Europe of its own economic dependence in certain strategic sectors, such as energy (Russia). That is why Europe needs to develop a new discourse, define a new strategy, devise new instruments and envisage new practices vis-à-vis all these new actors. Europe is therefore forced to rethink deeply its relationship with the rest of the world, not out of strategic ambition or a thirst for power but under the constraints of a globalised world. Introversion is no longer an option for Europe, unless it is prepared to accept its own decline.

European preference for norms In order to understand the impact of these new challenges, it is important to first identify European preferences. They will then be analysed in light of how they are received by the actors according to whether they share, challenge or accept them by necessity. Reasoning in terms of preferences means first sharing a liberal vision of international relations, which implies that states’ choices are not historical or cultural invariants, but are complex games of interests and identities played by individuals and groups to force public actors to take decisions according to their preferences (Moravcsik 2002; Gerstlé 2003; Feho and Fischbacher 2002).3 In Europe, this reality is favoured by the structure of European governance itself: multilevel governance where the member states, the European Commission and the European Parliament interact, not to forget, of course, all the social actors that try to influence the decisions of the different institutions (Majone 1996). Reasoning in terms of preferences also means understanding that each political community tries to unveil its preferences under constraint of other actors’ preferences (Moravcsik 1997: 51). This is exactly what is at stake with globalisation. The variety of ways in which European norms are received is linked to the degree of Europe’s engagement in promoting them, itself linked to the coherence of European preferences and the challenges that Europe faces. This chapter will thus focus on three issues: • • •

the norms Europe stands for; the perception of normative Europe by non-Europeans; the limits of norms in a geopolitical context.

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The norms Europe stands for There is a strong homothetic relation between the way Europe is constructed and the way in which it sees the world. This is an obvious but fundamental starting point. It helps to understand why the preference for international norms is at the same time the product of a specific history and the ideal-type through which Europe represents itself to the world. In the European vision, the peculiarity of its model and its universal character necessarily go together, since one always sees the world through the lenses of one’s own history. Over the years, the normative character of European construction has grown considerably simply because Europe has penetrated very deeply within each European nation state (Quermonne 2002). It has grown both quantitatively and qualitatively, making recourse to norms more and more constraining and affecting sensitive fields for the member states. But what is meant by norms? Norms are standards aiming at codifying the behaviour of actors sharing common principles and this in order to generate collective disciplines and to forbid certain conducts in the different fields of public policies (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Europe spontaneously tends to extend to the rest of the world the governance through norms that it experiences within its own borders. Implicitly, Europe makes the assumption that global governance goes through an increase of norms and that such governance through norms is the most suitable political model for an interdependent world, since it constitutes a factor of equalisation of power (Laïdi and Lamy 2002). This is for example the gist of Pascal Lamy’s speech made when he was European Commissioner, with regard to developing countries that wanted to be included in the WTO game (Lamy 2002). Europe thus wants to exert its power through norms and at the same time it wants to make world powers acting accordingly (Laïdi 2005; Triscritti 2007).4 Yet, a normative power is not only a norm-making power. It is an actor that struggles to convert its standards into international rules that are acceptable for those who receive them (norm-takers), because they find a tangible and immediate reward (such as European Union membership or access to its markets), because they see norms as a way of adopting a discipline that cannot for whatever reason impose on themselves, or because, in adhering to those norms, norm-takers will also take part in their implementation. Europe is structurally inclined to impose norms on the world system in order to counter two difficulties. The first is to prevent global norms from being less exacting than European ones so as not to place Europe at a comparative disadvantage. The second is its lack of power – in the sense of hard power – to impose norms on reluctant actors. Europe needs the support of the international system to advance its own interests. This last point is fundamental. Actually, when Europe discusses global issues (the environment, human rights, core labour standards, property rights) with the main world actors, it can hardly engage in the usual political bargaining. Europe has almost no tools to pressure the United States and convince them to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, except to

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attempt to sway world public opinion and American actors willing to bring the US out of its isolation on this issue. Europe can hardly reduce its pressure on China regarding human rights issues in exchange for China’s commitments on Taiwan. This induces serious limitations to the European power vis-à-vis China, as Richard Balme explains it in Chapter 10 of this book. The European political structure does not permit such a trade-off, since the EU is not a state. For nonEuropean actors, Europe is a power without any coercive force. But this estimation should be qualified. Europe has considerable economic and commercial leverage. It is through this that Europe managed to convince Moscow to sign the Kyoto Protocol in exchange for Russia’s joining the WTO. But Europe’s power does not go any further, except, of course, when there is at stake the possibility of joining the EU (Andreosso-O’Callaghan and Nicolas 2007: 32).5 But Europe’s power cannot extend to the fields of strategic or military affairs. It is also very limited when it comes to promoting democracy in countries that are not slated to join the EU in the near future. Europe cannot extract trade concessions from India in exchange for concessions on nuclear energy, for instance. Europe cannot behave as a superpower that would arbitrate among the various components of its strategy. It is forced to impose its norms on the world system on a fragmentary basis and to mollify power politics through norms. That is why Europe is much more effective on issues pertaining to global public goods, such as the environment, international justice and sustainable development, than on security or diplomatic issues. How is this European preference for norms expressed in practical terms? First of all, Europe expresses its preference for norms by strong support to the normative basis of global governance, which could be defined as the body of international texts and treaties that rules the international system. Europe is the global power that has signed most of the 40 documents that constitute the basis of global governance: European member states have signed 34 of those treaties and texts, compared to 11 for the US, 16 for China and 15 for India (Laïdi 2004: 115). The most emblematic among those texts is the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Despite opposition from the Bush Administration, the European Union has managed to keep the two essential mechanisms of the Protocol on the world agenda: binding quantitative reduction targets coupled with a carbon quotas market. The European endeavour was reaffirmed at the G-8 Summit at Heiligendam in 2007, where Germany convinced the other countries to approve the principle of a 50 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a commitment already made by the EU (European Council 9 March 2007: 12). Second, the European preference for norms is expressed by its commitment to multilateral institutions within which it seeks to enhance normative standards in order to protect its own norms. This is clear in Europe’s strategy at the WTO, where it attempts to defend the ‘Singapore issues’, core labour standards and the respect of environmental standards in trade relations. The Singapore issues involve defining the rules of competition, investments, transparency in government procurement and the trade facilitation, a code name for corruption. Europe has managed to put those issues on the WTO agenda since 1996 (Leary 1997).

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Nevertheless, due to lack of US support and the hostility of most developing countries, which perceive Europe’s attitude either as political interference or as a secondary issue, Europe has had to curb its ambitions. At the 2004 WTO Conference in Cancun, which was brutally disrupted, the European Union for the first time discovered the political reality of the G-20 countries, which for different reasons disputed the Euro-American leadership of commercial negotiations (Narlikar and Tussie 2004). Some political analysts consider that the difficulties Europe faces in imposing its regulatory, and therefore normative, agenda at the WTO explain its growing interest for bilateral commercial agreements (Evenett 2007). The lifting of the moratorium on signing new free-trade agreements – agreements that Pascal Lamy has always viewed with a certain distrust – would indicate a European political ambition to rapidly conquer new Asian markets with the aim of boosting economic growth and creating new job opportunities (Evenett 2007). But this European interest for bilateral agreements may not necessarily fit the interests of its potential partners. Some experts have argued that, in the present conditions, a Euro-Indian free-trade agreement would not be favourable to India, except if it could obtain in exchange the opening of the European labour market to its qualified workers. But this is something Europe is not ready for.6 Another example is the environmental issue: Europe is clearly trying to transform the overall question of sustainable development into an instrument of international influence, even through the leverage of its trade policy.7 In 1996, Europe raised the question of the link between trade and the environment, relying on the Rio Declaration of 1992 on sustainable development (Lightfoot and Burchell 2005). Europe’s objective was to obtain a revision of WTO article XX so that it is more favourable to the environment. The European Union has tried hard to get a revision of the WTO norms in order to prevent a possible change in WTO rules over these issues, and because it felt encouraged by certain WTO panel decisions in the 1990s. At the launching of the Doha Round, in 2001, Europe extracted from its partners a victory over the opening of an examination of the relationship between MEA (multilateral trade agreement) and WTO rules. But the success was purely symbolic, since the Doha Declaration limits the examination to the link between the MEA, signed by WTO members, and WTO agreements, thereby excluding the examination of some crucial MEAs that have not been ratified by some WTO members, such as the Kyoto Protocol.8 It is however important to remark that Europe’s preference for the environment is not purely abstract: although it reflects undeniable social preferences, it also expresses interests that lead the European Union to adopt a more ambivalent position on some occasions than its official stand may suggest. For instance, Europe has successfully claimed for the acknowledgement of the precaution principle in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, especially in order to limit the consumption of GMOs. But when certain developing countries asked for expanded international controls on the subject, they come up against the European opposition eager to regulate the use of GMO in agriculture but not in pharmaceutical industry, a distinction that seems extremely problematic but

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which is driven by the need to protect specific European trade interests (Falkner 2006: 8). The third example concerns core labour standards. What is at stake for Europe is, as explained earlier, to avoid a social race to the bottom, to support WTO legitimacy through the capacity to deal with social issues and strengthen the social image of the European Union on the world scene. In 1996, at the WTO Conference of Singapore, the principle of respecting core labour standards was accepted on condition that those norms would not be used against comparative advantages of developing countries (Tapiola 2002). In 2001, at the Doha Conference, the Europeans were left isolated when they brought up this sensitive issue again.9 They met with opposition from developing countries such as India, which threatened to walk out if the issue was raised once again in the final declaration. The question of core labour standards is highly controversial for developing countries. They see in it the remnant of a neo-colonial ideology (Chenoy and Chenoy). Actually, considerable doubt exists as to the effectiveness of core labour standards, even if European public opinion and trade unions attach great importance to them. Indeed, if the defence of labour standards is perfectly in line with a rationale of protecting human rights, it is never been proven that violating them has constituted a comparative advantage or sparked a ‘race to the bottom’. Without trade unions, Chinese wages have quadrupled in 30 years, whereas with powerful trade unions, Brazilian wages have stagnated (Galbraith 2007). In any event, Europe did not achieve significant results on the multilateral level. Europe’s call to create a joint organisation combining the ILO and WTO has not been followed by any concrete action. After the failure of Seattle conference of the WTO in 1999, the US shifted toward bilateral arrangements to impose core labour standards (Polaski 2004). As a result, developing countries stigmatise more strongly the Europeans than the Americans, since they are the ones who appear to be more demanding on the achievement of multilateral norms on environment and social rights (Disdier et al. 2007).10 We should also bear in mind that the strong European commitment on those issues relates to the fact that Europe continues to have an industrial base that is threatened by emerging countries. Europe’s specialised industry is not flexible enough. Its industrial structure is characterised by static positions, the search for sources of income and the exploitation of existing areas of specialisation. This is what distinguishes Europe from the US, which is more flexible, especially in the sectors of technology and services (Fontagné 2007: 23). As a consequence, Europe is obliged to revise its goals downward and fall back on a bilateral strategy, at least as regards core labour standards, the defence of which is now integrated into the broader framework of the fight for ‘decent work’. Europe prides itself in having sanctioned Belarus and Myanmar for their non-respect of basic social clauses. But these are isolated and largely disqualified regimes that do not constitute a threat to European interests. Europe thus gives the impression of levying sanctions only on states that can do it no harm, and the same time when it is very indulgent with fairly unsavoury regimes in economically highly attractive countries, such as Algeria or Libya (Mandelson

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2006).11 This point is much documented in Chapter 8 of this volume by Luis Martinez who concentrates on the relationship between the EU and the Maghreb. Normative power rarely resists profitable economic arrangements. Europe’s capacity to establish and export norms should not be underestimated. On the contrary, with the expansion of the European common market, Europe has adopted even stricter norms that pertain not only to its member states but also to all the economic agents that want to get into the EU market. The EU’s economic partners are forced to adapt to those norms, since the European market is one of the largest and since norms concerning environment, health and sustainable development are becoming more and more compelling. In those fields, European norms are becoming the highest in the world and therefore Europe is the norm-setter at the global level (Selin and Vandeveer 2006). A country exporting agricultural products will be very careful in introducing massive use of GMOs if it knows that Europeans will not tolerate them. This role of norm-setter was long fulfilled by the United States. Today, Europe has taken over (Selin and Vandeveer 2006). Two factors account for this: Europe is the most integrated market in the world and it is the one with the highest norms. To demonstrate this, I will provide three examples. They concern what is known as e-waste (WEEE – Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), restrictions on the use of hazardous substances (RoHS) in electrical and electronic equipment and finally the regulation, registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals (REACH). WEEE is designed to increase recovery and recycling of electrical and electronic equipment by extending producer responsibilities, since consumers can return free of charge all regulated equipment for reprocessing and recycling in exchange for incentives to produce environmentally friendly equipment. Under REACH legislation, chemical products will undergo a registration procedure followed by a safety evaluation (Selin and Vandeveer 2006). The WEEE, RoHS and REACH programmes are already influencing other actors. RoHS for example is regarded by the US as the biggest change in electronics in the past 50 years (Selin and Vandeveer 2006). REACH also constitutes a source of enormous change for US firms, which now must comply with European regulations. But at the same time, REACH is extremely influential in the sense that it has forced the United States Congress to work on national legislation on those issues drawn from the European experience. In the United States, the influence of the EU is visible in the action of the various states of the Union, as it is for the Kyoto Protocol. Many states, influenced by European laws, have adopted more compelling legislation than what federal laws require on the issue of the e-waste. Nevertheless, this has not prevented the American government from using diplomatic means to combat the realisation of REACH. They fear that such legislation constitutes an obstacle to free trade. Actually, the American position mirrors that of American business, which does not want to adapt to European constraints (Ackerman et al. 2006). The European common market is a considerable source of normative influence provided that Europe has a homogeneous rule system and an attractive market. This passive and almost mechani-

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cal influence does not exclude the development of a more active policy of norms exportation. For a long time, such a policy has been limited to the integration of the acquis communautaire by the candidate countries. But today the means of action have grown considerably, due to the diversification of the forms of interdependency (Gstöhl 2007). Among those means of influence are: •

•

•

•

Association agreements signed with developed countries which are not members of the EU but who are very integrated in its economy (for example, Switzerland). Bilateral commercial agreements with less developed partners that, as we have seen, allow Europe to impose its own norms in a more efficient way than through multilateral arrangements. Dialogues on the issue of regulation engaged with developed countries where the interest in the mutual opening of markets is substantial and significant, or dialogues with those developing countries with which the agreements on free trade are blocked for agricultural issues. Finally, encouragement to develop regional integration agreements on the model of Europe.

The perception of European soft power As a tool of international regulation able to circumvent bilateral meetings between states, the preference for norms almost automatically leads to rejecting the rules of realpolitik, based on a Schmittian interpretation of politics. According to Carl Schmitt: The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. . . . A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. (Schmitt 1996: 26, 35) This is exactly the vision of the world that Europe refuses. In the Solana report, which purported to set out Europe’s strategic doctrine following the US invasion of Iraq, the term of ‘enemy’ is totally absent (Solana 2003). The same report talks about non-identified global threats to a particular state (terrorism, nuclear proliferation, regional conflicts, defective states and organised crimes). The defence of a state’s territory from the enemy is at the core of Schmitt’s theory, which has always argued that the political order is first of all a spatial order, before being a normative one. Schmitt does not deny the relevance of norms, but he subordinates it to the defence of territoriality. He favours topia, the taking of the land, to utopia. On this point, Europe is undeniably Kantian and antiSchmittian.

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Kant, in his project for ‘Perpetual Peace’ – which is meant to lead to a cosmopolitan order – gives priority to values over territoriality. For Kant, two elements are essential: the pacific nature of the republics and the civilising power of trade. The Solana report takes up these two elements almost word for word. The reports states that ‘the quality of international society depends on the quality of governments: the best protection for our security is a world of wellgoverned democratic states’, adding that ‘trade and development policies can be powerful tools for promoting reforms’ (Solana 2003). Even more significant is the last report of the European Defence Agency on Europe and its strategic environment (EDA 2006). What is striking in it is the importance given to public opinion and to its perception of every military operation (‘the political outcome will be determined not just by the achievement of military objectives but by the manner in which operations are conducted or are perceived to be conducted’ (EDA 2006)). It is possible to understand it as a reference to the Kantian concept of public sphere as having a critical and disciplinary function in order to build ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant 1939). Nevertheless, what is even more striking in this document is the refusal to conceive of military intervention in terms of a zerosum game between friend and enemy. The political leaders of the European Commission talk about partners, not allies. And even if they talk about ‘friends’, they never mention enemies but non-cooperative states (Portela 2007). In a significant way, the EDA report states that: ‘The objective is not “victory” as traditionally understood, but moderation, balance of interests and peaceful resolution of conflicts’ (EDA 2006: 13). The European Union’s military strategy remains based on peacekeeping with very restrictive rules of engagement, privileging the contact with civilian populations and reducing recourse to force as much as possible (Wallace 2005). From the point of view of the Europeans, military force is clearly not an instrument of hard power. It is mainly intended to be used as a tool to reconcile, to pacify and not to punish. This refusal to pinpoint an enemy or to see oneself in ultimate relationship with him is naturally linked to the historical conditions of European construction. This is equally explained by the fact that the European Union is a structure of nation states that have their own, sometimes more classical, military strategies; however, the fact that Europeans are not the final guarantors of their own security is even more important in this respect. Therefore, the assumptions one might make about Europe’s military power or its conversion to hard power are meaningless if they do not integrate this basic postulate (Laïdi 2005). In the eyes of others, this fact is essential. However, its consequences are ambiguous. Because Europe is not a hard power, this makes it more tolerable, less dangerous and therefore more acceptable from the viewpoint of the rest of the world. There are not many demonstrations all over the world against Europe as such. An opinion survey conducted in 18 non-European countries shows that in nearly all of them the European Union is perceived in a positive light. But certain details of the survey warrant a closer look. In Latin America, where proEuropean sentiment is yet generally symmetrical to anti-American sentiment, there is one notable exception: Brazil, where European agricultural protection-

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ism is obviously perceived as a hindrance to its power. In Asia, pro-European sentiment stands out, but what dominates in a country like India or the Philippines is indifference toward Europe, reflected in the high rate of no-answers (World Public Opinion 2005). From indifference it is easy to slide toward a certain disdain, either because ‘norms over force’ hardly seems a credible stance, or because it is perceived as ‘a second-rank player’ the strategic choices being made by its protectors – in this case the United States – or, finally, because Europe is only seen through its member states, each having specific interests and practices far removed from the principles defended by Europe. The more one touches on questions of strategy and security, the more crucial this dimension would appear. A country such as India, for instance, has considerable trouble picturing the EU as an international actor, to such an extent that European Commissioner Mandelson has publicly expressed concerned about it: ‘Just as Europe should take India seriously, I want India to take Europe seriously . . . I read recently in a report that Indians do not think very much about the European Union. This is a shame if it is true’ (Mandelson 2005). This statement implicitly addresses a key issue: state sovereignty. India, like China, Russia and Brazil, without mentioning the United States, seem to identify power with its national expression. An Indian forecasting report drafted in 2005 imagines in 2035 a tripolar world made up of the United States, India and China. He arrives at this conclusion via a fairly simple methodology taking into account population, GDP and per capita GDP (Virmani 2005). According to Joschka Fischer, this is precisely the scenario the Americans are working from.12 What is interesting in the Indian report is to see the treatment reserved for Europe. The first is based on the abandon of half the sovereignty of European states to the benefit of the European Union and to the detriment of its member states. In this case, Europe would become the fourth pillar of the world system. The second imagines a much more moderate abandon of member state sovereignty (one-quarter). In this case, the power of the European Union in 2035 would represent 25 per cent of the American power, as opposed to 50 per cent in the first scenario (Virmani 2005). Notwithstanding any reservations one might have with regard to a quantitative approach to power, it is interesting to see that the Indians stick to an extremely classic vision of sovereignty and power, and with regard to Europe its entire dynamic is seen from the angle of a zero-sum game between member states and the Union. The question of sovereignty in fact rebounds on all aspects of Euro-Indian relations in that the Indians cannot help but be wary of a European project that seeks to erode the sovereignty of its members – and thus its partners – whereas India is striving by all possible means to enhance it its power as a nation.13 For the Indians, for instance, the notion of ‘shared sovereignty’ is simply synonymous with ‘intergovernmental cooperation’.14 This explains the patent misunderstanding about the shared European and Indian attachment to multilateralism. For the European Union, multilateralism constitutes a regulatory instrument aiming to advance ‘the common good’, whereas for the Indians, it primarily represents a resource for it to gain recognition as a full-fledged major power by the United States.

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Normative preference and political asymmetry For 15 years now, Europe has been facing the realities of a multifarious world that it could not simply ignore. Its normative ambition is thus now more than ever subject to the reality principle. This is because the more norms are applied to situations remote from the context in which they were conceived, the more they run the risk of non-compliance. Europe thus has three choices: it can either be proactively more demanding as regards respect for the norms it propagates, take liberties with the norms that it formally prescribes, or enter into a more or less muffled clash with its partners. The first possibility would involve spelling out, clarifying or toughening norms that it exports whenever it meets situations in which the dissemination of norms can no longer be taken for granted.15 This is the scenario that prevailed during enlargement towards the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) after the end of the Cold War. In 1993, at the Copenhagen Summit, the European Union agreed to CEEC membership in principle. But it attached the start of membership talks to an unprecedented formalisation of the accession criteria for joining the European Union. These accession criteria are those well-known conditions that were to become the Copenhagen Criteria, laid down as follows (European Council in Copenhagen 1993): •

• •

Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of the law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities. Membership requires the existence of a functioning market economy to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union. Membership presupposes the candidate ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political economy and monetary Union.

But in addition to these three formal conditions, there is an additional, more informal condition which states that ‘The Union capacity to absorb new members while maintaining the momentum of European integration is also an important consideration in the general interest of both the Union and the candidate countries’ (Emerson et al. 2006). At the time, this criterion was not perceived as such and most conditionality studies do not recognise it as a criterion in and of itself. But with the opening of accession talks with Turkey, it was clearly ‘reactivated’, particularly by those member states hostile to Turkey’s membership (Emerson et al. 2006). This latter criterion is interesting in the perspective examined here, because it shows to what extent a conditionality that is also a norm can give rise to extensive uses that are at odds with the European discourse claiming that norms are a codification of relations between equals. Accession talks with Turkey are no longer even a case of conditionality in which the norm-maker imposes its norm on the norm-taker. Rather, the European Union is in a rationale in which it alone estimates its

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capacity to welcome a new member state, a decision that is not open to dispute. Europe has thus embarked on a totally different logic in that it leaves itself a discretionary margin of appreciation that is totally disconnected with the partner’s performances. The criterion relative to its absorption capacity thus boils down to saying that, even assuming the applicant country fulfils all the accession criteria, membership could still be denied. The first three Copenhagen Criteria do not go that far. For even if many dispute the clarity and precision of these criteria, which are also too vague not to be open to interpretations of pure political contingency, they nevertheless fit within a contractual normative framework. If an applicant country fulfils its obligations, it is qualified to join the Union. For all that, the relative clarity in which this conditionality is exercised should not make us lose sight of its profoundly asymmetrical nature. To become a member, a country must satisfy the Copenhagen Criteria and adopt the 80,000 pages of the acquis communautaire in its entirety. This is a take-it-or-leave-it condition. What is commonly referred to as ‘talks’ is actually a process by which the European Union verifies that the applicants have indeed incorporated the acquis communautaire into their domestic legislation, chapter by chapter, page by page (Moravcsik and Vachudova 2003) In practice, the reality has turned out to be more complex. In fact, the broader and more massive the conditionalities, the more they leave room for arbitration between the various priorities, thereby creating a degree of leeway for the applicants (Hugues et al. 2004). However, neither the rigour of European conditionality nor, on the other hand, the interstices left open to the local actors by such conditionality suffice to explain the success of European enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe. It has to do with the fact that right from the start the perspective of membership exerted a considerable power of attraction over societies in which the system they were leaving – communism – had not only failed, but what’s more, restricted state sovereignty. So even before European conditionality was exercised, the elites had interiorised it, so to speak, as soon as they were assured locally of a consensus to join the European Union (Pridham 2006: 386). Thus, through electoral competition, the political forces in favour of membership won the game on the domestic checkerboard even before the opportunity to engage in accession talks was put to debate. This was thus a far cry from the zero-sum game in which an external actor attempts to impose a norm on an actor that wants nothing to do with it. This still didn’t make it a game between equals, because the conditionality was defined by the norm-maker. The context was instead one in which asymmetry was interiorised due to the tangible rewards involved in complying with it.16 When we analyse the reception of European norms, we have to distinguish between different dimensions as it is suggested in this book by Florent Parmentier (Chapter 7). He suggests very cogently to make a distinction between discourse, procedures and substance in order to understand how norms are reinterpreted, incorporated and implemented.

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Norms in the service of geopolitics Reproducing this pattern becomes problematic when Europe can no longer commit to offering a reward as substantial as accession. Its entire neighbourhood policy, the famous European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), is designed to solve this problem, which can be summarised as follows: Europe is no longer able to or no longer wants to offer membership as a perspective to its neighbours, while leading them to believe that this fundamental change will not make a big difference to them. But the distinction makes a big difference. It first makes a difference for Europe, which can no longer use the perspective of membership as a disciplinary mechanism first to discipline itself in both the bureaucratic and political monitoring of a strategy that has no specific aim. It also makes a big difference for its partners, for which the cost of compliance with European standards from both an economic and political standpoint is not apparently offset by decisive advantages. Now if membership policies have succeeded despite the initially asymmetrical nature of the relations between the Union and its candidates, it is because the trade-off in terms of costs and benefits was established from the start.17 European normativity is then confronted by new geopolitical constrains as Karoline Postel-Vinay argues in Chapter 3. From the standpoint of perceptions, we must first take into account states that refuse from the start to accept the ENP framework as an overall contractual framework for their relations with Europe. This is the case of Russia, which was initially part of the system and later withdrew from the framework due to Russian refusal. Then must be considered those who do not accept this framework but have no choice to, for lack of anything better. This is the case of Ukraine, for which the only serious political perspective with Europe is membership, and which the sees the ENP as a mechanism to delay its accession.18 Also must be taken into account the case of countries that have no problem formerly entering this framework, but don’t seem for all that to have made up their mind to accept all the modalities, especially if they contain new obligations. This is the case, for instance, of a country like Algeria which, because it constitutes a precious source of energy supply for Europe, knows perfectly well that Europe will not risk imposing on it political conditionalities or economic reforms it does not want to implement. The only potential interest Algeria has in the ENP framework is the free circulation of people. But it knows that Europe is not prepared to grant this.19 That leaves the others – countries for which there is no chance of joining the European Union in the next ten or 15 years and for which the principle advantage is to attract European resources in attempt to build viable states. The remainder is a particular set of countries that have specific expectations with regard to Europe and for which the formal framework governing relations with Europe is of little importance or even signification. All this makes it legitimate to wonder whether ENP is not mainly a political–institutional system that holds meaning first and foremost for the Union itself. Indeed, the ENP was fundamentally designed as a policy of non-membership, even if it was bureaucratically conceived by those who are responsible for

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enlargement (Kelley 2006: 30). Initially entitled Wider Europe in 2003, it was pared down to the European Neighbourhood Policy the following year, precisely to underscore the fact that being a European neighbour in no way implies being a member of Europe.20 In this perspective, the major political fact resides in the discarding of any political right to joining European Union even for states whose Europeanity is not disputed.21 Like any policy, it rests on explicits and implicits. What has been made explicit is that Europe has an interest in being surrounded by a ‘ring of friends’ that have the characteristic of being economically prosperous, politically stable and well-governed. What has been left unsaid is a desire to avoid unintentionally importing security risks into the Union from unstable or little-developed countries in the form of uncontrolled migration, Mafia-like conduct or terrorist action. This point is the most fundamental one, because deep down it is the only characteristic shared by countries as different as Moldavia, Lebanon and Tunisia. The ENP actually constitutes a very classic semiperiphery control policy that aims to set up a virtuous circle encompassing development, democracy and good governance so as not to jeopardise Europe’s security and stability. It is the very example of a milieu goal policy.22 Europe thus does geopolitics with norms. Europe does not claim to be creating this circle. But it hopes to encourage it while believing that it has neither the power nor the will to impose its own norms.23 The question should then be posed in the following terms: what can the partners find that is new or attractive enough to embark on the path offered by Europe through its ENP? The answer is probably ‘not much’, except if for some of them, the ENP is a necessary step on the road to accession. On the economic and trade level for instance, the ENP offers ‘deep trade and economic integration with the EU’ that one imagines might take the route of what is again called ‘deep and comprehensive free trade agreements’ (European Strategy Paper 2004: 4). But what is really meant by ‘deep and comprehensive free trade agreements’? The Commission’s answer is the following: ‘a deep and comprehensive FTA should cover substantially all trade in goods and services between the EU and ENP partners including those products of particular importance for our partners and should include strong legally-binding provisions on trade and regulatory issues’ (European Strategy Paper 2004: 4, author’s emphasis). In exchange for greater access to its market, Europe demands that its partners comply with its constraints in terms of technical norms and standards, industrial policy, intellectual property, rules of origin, taxation, public procurement etc. In other words, Europe is striving to wrest bilateral recognition for norms that it is unable to impose on a global scale: ‘adopt our norms and in exchange, we’ll open our markets’. But this apparently fair deal is actually deeply imbalanced and not always attractive. Imbalanced because the concessions made by the two parties are not equal in nature. When Europe, through a bilateral treaty, offers a country greater access to its market, it is apparently granting a favour with respect to other partners. But this preference is fragile. On one hand, because nothing prevents Europe from granting it to another country B in competition with country A. In addition, because nothing proves that in the event of a multilateral

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agreement, the preferences granted to A and B won’t eventually diminish, or even disappear. What’s more, the existence of a free-trade agreement does not prohibit maintaining limitations on sensitive agricultural or industrial products, not to mention the movement of people (Woolcock 2007). On the other hand, Europe will have nothing to lose. On the contrary. For in exchange for granting tenuous and relative preferences, it will have wrested from its partners lasting concessions in the regulatory areas that interest it, as we have seen, to the utmost.24 Indeed, the fact of believing that the ultimate objective of Europe is to ‘share a common regulatory basis and similar degree of market access’ confirms the potential imbalance of such agreements. Moreover, there is no evidence to show that a free-trade agreement presents truly new opportunities in terms of access to the European market. Europe’s partners are usually fettered in their export policy to Europe either by internal difficulties preventing them from increasing their exports, or by drastic EU regulatory obstacles that Europe forces them to accept precisely in the framework of free-trade agreements or preferential accords. Certainly, Europe’s partners are not required to adopt the full spectrum of the acquis communautaire. But this freedom has a price: not being allowed to fully integrate the single market, thus making the idea of access to ‘everything but the institutions’ entirely theoretical. Incidentally, this offer is ambiguous. For although, for Europe, it means ‘don’t get discouraged, because finally you can have almost everything’, this may well be interpreted by its partners as ‘even if we do everything the way they do, they’ll never accept us’. Misunderstandings notwithstanding, this approach poses a real political problem: ‘everything but the institutions’ means that these countries will never be able to take part in defining the European policies that they will have nevertheless adopted. They are thus bound to remain forever norm-takers. From that standpoint, the ENP constitutes a mechanism aimed at normalising the asymmetry between Europe and its non-community partners. Actually, in many cases, already fairly extensive and usually underutilised access to the European market is much less valuable than some form of regional integration, for instance. The ENP is built on a foundation that exacerbates bilateralism. It naturally claims to foster development of regional integration. But in actual fact, it does not give itself the means to, especially when obstacles to this integration are highly political in nature. We know, for instance, that regional integration in the Maghreb is hindered by the Algeria–Morocco rivalry and that the European Union obviously does not have the means to settle it. In fact, the ENP has given rise to no new trade initiative moving toward ‘deep integration’. The Balkans are covered by the famous Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA), the Mediterranean countries by the Euro-Med agreements. The only two free-trade agreements offered have been to countries that aren’t covered by the ENP: South Korea and India. Talks with Ukraine in view of an ‘enhanced agreement’ are underway. But this is primarily a formula aimed to mollify the Ukrainians who seem disappointed by the lack of a membership calendar. These difficulties are multiplied when shifting from the economic sphere to more sensitive areas such as those pertaining to good governance or human

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rights. In theory, the ENP is meant as a comprehensive policy in the sense that it intends to tie in the various dimensions of its cooperation with its neighbours. But in practice, this ambition is seriously belittled as soon as political questions are touched on. For the same question arises once again: what benefits do authoritarian political regimes derive from complying with the rules of good governance and democracy if the incentives to change are weak? Incentives can be understood either as the possible sanctions the European Union would apply to recalcitrant countries, or on the contrary the rewards it would offer in exchange for compliance with these norms. In view of the results obtained so far, ENP achievements are modest. To realise this, it is methodologically interesting to compare three European instruments: the 2004 Strategy Paper, the Country Reports and the ENP Actions Plans. The Strategy Paper defines a general framework of the ENP, the Country Reports its specific application, the Action Plans their implementation by both parties.25 In these three documents, the common policy reference point is that of shared values. The 2004 Strategy Paper claims to link the level of ambition of relations with its neighbours ‘to the extent to which those values are effectively shared’ (European Strategy Paper 2004: 3). But this principle is ignored in practice since the ENP does not constitute a new legal instrument able to enforce commitments taken in a framework of partnership or association agreements. Moreover, the Commission seems to interpret article 2 (pertaining to respect for human rights) of these agreements in the Euro-Mediterranean framework in a very minimalist sense (Pace 2006). Lastly, the financial instruments Europe has available with respect to the Mediterranean countries, such as the MEDA programme, make very little reference to respect for human rights (Emerson and Noutcheva 2005: 6). One first notes that no Country Report or Action Plan has been drafted for four countries integrated into the ENP. These countries are Belarus, Algeria, Libya and Syria. Although the absence of Belarus can be explained by this country’s very slim political achievements, explicitly acknowledged by the EU, the other three cases are different. These are sensitive countries with which the EU and its member states have important political or economic relations but with respect to which it hesitates to take a confrontational position, particularly as regards democracy and human rights. The lack of an Action Plan with these countries thus reflects either the European preference for stability of these three regimes, where Islamism represents a threat, or the lack of a basis for agreement between the Union and these countries, or possibly both. Even in countries that have managed to reach an agreement with the Union about Action Plans, there is a total lack of EU discussion with local NGOs dealing with human rights issues.26 Structurally, the ENP seems extremely poorly equipped to come to the aid of civil society NGOs (Raik 2006). Although it may deny this, Europe actually practices a very classic double standard. In human rights matters, the EU is much more intrusive with European countries such as Moldavia or Ukraine, that are likely to join someday in the future, than with Arab countries (Bosse 2007: 49).27 Moreover, even when critiques are directed at the same Arab countries in

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the Country Reports, which engage the EU alone, they tend to disappear in the Action Plans drafted in conjunction with the local governments. The Action Plan with Egypt for instance states that the two parties pledge to ‘strengthen the culture of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in Egypt and the EU’. This is a very vague commitment, but it has a powerful political meaning, for the Egyptians in any case. The commitment to strengthen ‘the culture of respect for human rights’ is perfectly acceptable, for who could claim that it has no improvements to be made in this regard? It is all the more acceptable since it is followed by the phrase ‘in Egypt and in the EU’, which for the Egyptians means that even the Europeans could improve their human rights record. As we can see, the normative nature of the European power raises many more questions than one might have thought. And if these issues are worth examining in order to understand Europe in the world, such analysis, in order to make sense, must now make reference to questions of reception. The next step is an in-depth reflection on the theory of reception in international relations which, applied to Europe, would enable us to consider it as a living, complex and contradictory actor, and not as an idealised actor whose preference for norms is seen as a guarantee of its good faith and disinterestedness.

Notes 1 The volume of intra-European exchanges has passed from 30 per cent to 20 per cent of the world exchanges in less than ten years. The exportations of the EU towards Switzerland are still more important than the exportations towards China. 2 It is estimated that for the year 2030, one and a half billion more people will be on the global job market (European Commission July 2006b). The differential between Chinese and European salary is one to 30, even if this gap must be revised by the productivity differential. 3 According to liberal theory of international relations, it is not possible to understand international collective action without understanding societal foundations of state actors. 4 His successor, Peter Mandelson, does not seem to have the same concern. His vision of world economic relationships is based on a very realist vision that privileges the expansion of European economic interests despite of the interests of the emerging countries. 5 At the economic level, the EU has several instruments of coercion such as the recognition of the status of market economy, which it refuses to give to China, for instance, in order to be able to use anti-dumping measures against her. The EU also disposes of a power of extra-territoriality concerning the fusion of big firms when in dominant positions. 6 There are two negative effects for India: a ‘terms of the exchange’ effect which derives from the fact that when the opening concerns a country more protected than its partner, it is the partner that takes advantage from it. A ‘diversion effect’ which derives from the fact that exchanges with Europe would generate disadvantages for other regions (interview with a Brussels-based economist). 7 ‘The EU will use its considerable influence to bring more nations behind an ambitious sustainable development agenda. It will also use its own instruments such as trade and cooperation agreements to drive change’ (Commission of the EU). 8 This is a negative result for the EU since it is in retreat according to the WTO legisla-

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9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22

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tion, which takes into account all the environmental agreements and not only the ones ratified by the member states of the WTO. Interview with a member of EU delegation. It would seem that the regulatory obstacles to European commercial exchanges have a worst impact over developing countries than over the other OECD countries. The EU attitude is ambiguous, since it gives as examples of sanctioned countries Belarus and Myanmar and at the same time it declares that EU ‘refuses the idea of negative sanctions’. ‘The United States are defining a crucial change of strategy for the XXIst century, which articulates on a trio composed by United States, China and India’ (Le Figaro 31 May 2007). Significantly, the Indian report drafted in response to the EU document ‘An EU-India strategic partnership’ writes that this partnership expresses ‘a level of relationship higher than that maintained by either side with non strategic partners, and immune from the vicissitudes of either side’s relationship with a third party’. The meaning of the message is clear: we are not a partner like all the others. I refer to the oral interventions of the Indian colleagues at the conference ‘Are European Preferences Shared by Others?’, Paris, CERI/Centre d’études européennes de Sciences Po, June 2006. It is for instance revealing to note that the Netherlands, in discussions about a simplified treaty, have requested that the Copenhagen Criteria be incorporated into the treaties. ‘The rewards of membership were so substantial that eventually all plausible candidates in the region come around to electing a pro-EU government and get to work on fulfilling the membership requirements’ (Vachudova 2001). ‘A state adopts EU rules if the benefits of EU rewards exceed the domestic adoption costs’ (Schimmellfennig and Sedelmeier 2004: 664). ‘We do not accept any substitute for European policy like the one proposed by the concept of Europe Neighbourhood Policy’, Ukrainian ambassador’s statement before the Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, 15 February 2007 Cf. the Algerian ambassador’s remarks to the EU: ‘The most important market liberty for Algeria, the free circulation of people, has been withdrawn from the EU’s offer and cannot be found in the Action Plan’ in The Greening of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Online, available at: assets.panda.org/downloads/enpandtheenvironment.pdf. The 13 March 2003 document was entitled Wider Europe: Neighbourhood: A New Framework for Relations with Our Eastern and Southern Neighbours. A year later, Wider Europe vanished behind the European Neighbourhood Policy in the Strategy Paper. The Strategy Paper talks about offering a different perspective from membership, whereas the 2003 edition confines itself to saying this new policy ‘would not in the mid term include a perspective of membership’, p. 5. ‘For European ENP partners, the ENP does not in any way prejudge the possible future development of their relationship with the EU’, Strategy Paper. European Neighbourhood Policy. 2004, p. 13. Online, available at: ec.europa.eu/world/ enp/pdf/com06_726_en.pdf. Arnold Wolfers contrasts milieu goals and possession goals: Milieu goals are out not to defend or increase possessions they hold to the exclusion of others, but aim instead at shaping conditions beyond their national boundaries . . . It is one thing to be in good physical of financial condition within an orderly and prosperous community, but quite another thing to be privileged by the wealth of one’s possessions in surroundings of misery, ill health, lack of public order and widespread resentment. (Wolfers 1962)

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23 European Neighbourhood Policy, Strategy Paper, op. cit. 24 Often European discourse on reciprocity is belied by European practices. For instance, certain agreements mention mutual recognition of rules and standards but in practice the European Union expects its partners to conform to European standards (Woolcock 2007: 8). 25 But the essential point is that the Country Reports come out of the Commission alone, whereas the Action Plans express an agreement between the Commission and the partner countries. Pinpointing the differences between the two documents is thus a means of measuring the gaps between European expectations and what the Union can really wrest from the countries involved in the ENP. 26 ‘It is unfortunate that the actions plans agreed between the EU are negotiated behind closed doors without consultation of NGO’s, especially those involved in the question of human rights’, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. Available at: ec.europe.eu/world/enp/pdf/com06_726_en.pdf. 27 This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that the Action Plans for countries like Ukraine are, from the standpoint of political conditionality, very close to the Accession Partnerships signed with the applicant countries (Baracani 2006). The Commission has already admitted as much in a document put out in 2006 on the ENP, that indicates ‘Moldova and Ukraine have already undertaken more substantial commitments in the human rights and governance field than have other ENP partners’ (Commission Staff Working Document. Accompanying the Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament on Strengthening the ENP 2006: 2).

Part I

Norms and preferences History and principles

2

The normative power of the European Union in a globalised world Ian Manners

EU partnership and dialogue with third countries will promote common values of: respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms, peace, democracy, good governance, gender equality, the rule of law, solidarity and justice. The EU is strongly committed to effective multilateralism whereby all the world’s nations share responsibility for development. (European Consensus on Development 1996)

To what extent is the European Union (EU) a normative power with the ability to define what passes for ‘normal’ in a globalised world? As the statement from the European Consensus on Development illustrates, in the post-Cold War era the EU has increasingly claimed that its relations with the rest of the world are informed by the normative principles of peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, rule of law, equality, social solidarity, sustainable development and good governance (see also the Treaty of Lisbon 2007: articles 1a and 10a). Assessing the extent to which the EU is willing and able to act as a normative power in just one chapter is an almost impossible task because of its polycentric polity and policy breadth, as well as the increasingly transnational nature of the globalised world in which the EU is trying to act. In order to overcome these problems and address the volume’s aim of analysing the EU’s social preferences and normative power, the chapter will look at just three areas of social preferences, each with a case study in the practice of normative power. Hence the cases of EU development aid, EU promotion of core labour standards (CLS), and EU crisis management will be the focus of this chapter. In each case study I shall first engage with secondary scholarship that seeks to analyse the chosen policy field in relation to EU normative power. Second, I shall try to assess from a more empirical perspective the extent to which the EU is acting as a normative power in each case study. The empirical aspect is particularly difficult because of the mixture of normative ethics that shape the EU’s relations with the globalised world, including virtue, deontological and consequentialist normative ethics. The chapter looks first at European preferences for economic solidarity through an examination of the EU’s normative principle of solidarity in development policy. Second, the chapter turns to European preferences for social

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solidarity by analysing the EU’s normative principle of equality in the promotion of core labour standards. Third, European preferences for sustainable peace and the role of the EU crisis management operations will be looked at. Finally, the chapter will briefly conclude by arguing that a norms-based international system will only be achieved through normative power that persuades others of the universality of such norms.

European economic preferences – economic solidarity European economic preferences are often characterised by a belief in a social market economy typified by income redistribution, government intervention and stakeholder capitalism (Stjernø 2005). On the basis of empirical observation, European economic preferences are for more economic solidarity in comparison to most of the world. As previous comparisons have illustrated, over the past three decades average levels of EU inequality have remained significantly lower than most of the world, in particular China, Russia and the US. Clearly there are divergences within Europe for this preference, with relatively higher inequality found in the UK and Italy compared to Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In comparison to most of the world, European preferences for economic equality are broadly shared with developed countries such as Japan and Canada, as well as developing countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. A number of economists have recently pointed out that this discrepancy between Europe and Japan compared to the US and China is largely due to the income growth of the super-rich – the top 1 per cent (Piketty and Saez 2006; The Economist 2006). For example, Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon argue that US median real wage and salary income has barely grown at all since 1966 (DewBecker and Gordon 2005). Such comparative data on inequality and relative poverty indicates that EU members share a relative preference for economic solidarity, particularly in comparison to China, the US and Russia. The normative principle of solidarity in development policy The normative principle of solidarity is based on a commitment to promote a more social economy, social partnership and social justice within the EU, and in relations with the developing world. Alongside the principles of democracy, rule of law and respect for human rights, social solidarity has been emphasised in the 1973 Copenhagen Declaration, 1986 Foreign Ministers Declaration, 1991 Council Resolution, 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union, and the Treaty of Lisbon. The Charter of Fundamental Rights makes these principles explicit with its Title IV on solidarity, including workers’ rights, family, health and social security rights. The particular EU interpretation of this normative principle is solidarity. The extensive understanding of solidarity became clear as the objectives of article 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon referred to ‘balanced economic growth, [and] a social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress’, combating

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‘social exclusion’, as well as promoting ‘social justice and protection’, intergenerational solidarity, and social solidarity among (and between) member states. The principle of solidarity goes beyond inner-EU relations to inform and shape EU development and trade policies as article 2 also illustrates when it refers to the Union’s contribution to ‘solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty’. But to what extent do these economic preferences and normative principles within the EU translate into relations and policies with the developing world? As suggested at the beginning of the chapter, this is extremely difficult to evaluate as EU development policy largely consists of 15 EU members and the EC Commission working through the OECD DAC (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – Development Assistance Committee). Similarly, the EU is not the only actor in the field of development assistance, with a wide variety of state, international and non-governmental organisations active. Finally, there is the highly charged question of whether trade (i.e. freer market access), aid (i.e. greater financial aid), or good governance (i.e. better instruments of government) is the best way to promote development. A number of scholars have examined EU development policy in relation to EU normative power, including issues such as the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) in the 2000 Cotonou Agreement; the 2001 ‘Everything but Arms’ (EBA) initiative; the 2002 Monterrey process; and the European Commission’s idea of a development ‘policy of solidarity’. In a critical review of EU development policy, Andy Storey makes the point that ‘there may be some reality in the idea that Normative Power Europe is in action in the EPA negotiations’, but that the EU promotion of good governance is too narrowly focused on liberal democracy and market economies which ‘may not correspond to the developmental needs of African economies’ (Storey 2006: 343). In other words, Storey suggests that the EU is a normative power, but that in development policy it has a preference for promoting norms of freedom and good governance at the expense of social solidarity. Peter Hilpold has argued the importance of the principle of good governance in the Cotonou Agreement for promoting human rights and democracy through a preference for positive measures and a recoupling of developmental assistance with its normative foundations (Hilpold 2002: 66–7, 71). In his studies of the EBA initiative and the Monterrey process, Jan Orbie argues that ‘EU trade policy discourse . . . shows a normative bias towards the achievement of [goals such as] sustainable development and global rules’ (Orbie 2004: 4). He suggests that EBA trade policy ‘may well be an important EU instrument for achieving the . . . goal of development of the South’ (ibid.). Orbie discusses the way in which EU self-perceptions ‘as a leading and benevolent actor played a role in the EU decisions towards Monterrey [including] a remarkable shift towards more integration in European development policy’ (Orbie 2003: 1). Orbie shares Storey’s concerns for the (neo)liberal promotion of multilateralism and the extent to which the EU is unable or unwilling to resist US hegemony (Orbie 2003: 26; 2004: 415).

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The movement from the Lomé Convention’s emphasis on privileged partnership to the Cotonou Agreement’s focus on conditionality, differentiation and regionalisation has been criticised by Storey, Orbie and others. The Lomé and the ACP relationship prior to 2000 was motivated by the desire to promote social solidarity and discourse ethics through unconditional and undifferentiated aid and dialogue while being selective in excluding developing societies in the rest of the world. In the post-Cold War world such ‘paternalistic, neo-colonial attitudes undermined the principle of equality’ (Lethinen 1997 in Bonaglia et al. 2006: 172) and were criticised for ‘the poor results of EU development cooperation’ (Arts and Dickson 2004: 2). Since 1990, the EU’s development policy has increasingly moved in a less privileging but more holistic direction, placing an emphasis on conditional and differentiated aid encouraging regionalisation, together with greater overall funding. This changed direction is motivated by the aim of promoting more holistic normative principles (such as good governance, human rights, democracy and rule of law) reflecting a greater emphasis on the results-orientated consequentialist ethics increasingly witnessed in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which question the centrality of the Commission’s policy of solidarity. Empirical perspectives on development aid It is difficult to confirm or deny conclusively the normative practices and consequences of rapidly evolving EU development aid for the reasons discussed in the introduction. However, it is possible to provide a few empirical perspectives on the EU’s development aid policies. It is unquestionably the case that the majority of the world’s poor have seen their quality of life improve dramatically over the past 30 years, largely because of the rising levels of development in China and India (UN HDR 2006), but little of this is due to the development aid policies of the OECD DAC members. While the world’s least developed countries of Africa have also seen some improvements over the past 30 years, a significant number (Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Lesotho) have seen decreases in human development in the same period (UN HDR 2006: 290–1). In comparison, average EU development assistance has recently (2005) returned to 1990 levels of about 0.4 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI), just over half the UN target of 0.7 per cent GNI but amongst the highest in the world (UN HDR 2006: 343; OECD 2006). There are concerns within the OECD that such exceptional development aid during 2005–6 is the result of one-off debt cancellation by the Paris Club, in particular for Iraq and Nigeria (OECD 2006: 15). Bilateral aid, excluding exceptional debt cancellation, has also risen over the past few years, although largely accounted for by large increases to Iraq and Afghanistan (ibid.). The 1996 IMF/World Bank Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative and the 2005 G-8 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) appear to have helped those countries that have reached completion point criteria, although this is still uneven. However, it is more the case that pre-

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viously high-debt countries such as Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, Russia and Indonesia have managed to reduce their foreign debt through a combination of high commodity prices (in particular oil) and debt forgiveness. Within the EU there appears to be a division between those countries that count debt relief as development aid led by the UK, with other G-8 members making dubious claims, and those that have publicly argued against the practice such as the Netherlands and non-EU Norway. Similarly, the large increases in EU member state bilateral aid to Iraq and Afghanistan appears to be driven by security concerns rather than the needs of developmental assistance. Ngaire Woods, Jörg Faust and Dirk Messner, amongst others, have raised concerns about allowing security issues to drive development policies in the EU (Woods 2005; Faust and Messner 2005). Interestingly, the EuropeAid Annual Report 2005 illustrates the way in which normative concerns within the European Commission still place human security at the centre of development aid, as Benito Ferrero-Waldner argues, ‘promoting human security is central to our approach. We must respond to the full range of threats afflicting the most vulnerable in societies across the world – hunger, deadly diseases, environmental degradation and physical insecurity’ (European Commission 2005a). However, the OECD Development Cooperation Report 2006 suggests that while debt forgiveness and bilateral aid to Iraq and Afghanistan have made up most of the jump in development aid since 2003, there is a slight rise in underlying official development assistance (ODA) (OECD 2006: 15). In conclusion it is suggested that the changing foci of EU development aid, away from old patterns towards the agenda of debt relief and goal-driven poverty reduction have provoked concerned responses from interested stakeholders. It has also been suggested that the now dense multilateral agenda of EU development aid, including the Millennium Development Goals, the Rio and Johannesburg sustainable development goals, the post-11 September security concerns, the Doha development agenda, the Monterrey Consensus and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness increasingly makes polycentric development policy difficult, if not impossible (Manners 2007). On the positive side, if EU aid donors live up to the pledges made by the G-8 in Gleneagles in 2005 to increase aid by C38 billion by 2010, then the EU would be well on its way to hitting the UN’s 0.7 per cent GNI target. OECD estimates based on 2005 pledges indicate EU commitments to moving from the 0.4 per cent GNI of 2005 to 0.6 per cent GNI by 2010 (OECD 2006). In addition, the increasing participation and contribution of emerging donors such as Spain, Ireland, Greece and Portugal, as well as nine new EU members, might increase EU-donated development aid from C42 billion in 2005 to possibly C63 billion by 2010 (which would represent 64 per cent of all OECD DAC aid). On the negative side, most commentators suggest that it would be extremely difficult for EU member states to double their aid contributions in just five years and so far no concrete plans for doing so have been announced. The reality is increasingly that three differing degrees of commitment to the normative principle of solidarity in development aid appear to have emerged within the EU.

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First, there is the group of DAC members who have hit the UN target of giving more than 0.7 per cent GNI and do not claim large debt cancellations as aid – Sweden, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark. There is a second group of DAC members who are above the EU average of 0.4 per cent GNI but some of which appear to claim debt cancellations as aid – Belgium, Austria, France, the UK, Finland and Ireland. Finally, there is a third group of DAC members who are below the EU average of 0.4 per cent GNI, including Germany, Italy and emerging donors Spain, Portugal and Greece, as well as Japan and the US. In addition, there is the potential problem of industrialising states such as China using Western-style strategic loans and FDI to secure oil and raw materials in developing countries, particularly if these same target states have just experienced debt relief. Despite these positive and negative aspects, even the average levels of 0.4 per cent GNI for DAC EU donors compare favourably with the OECD average of 0.33 per cent GNI, as well as with the Japanese and US levels below 0.3 per cent GNI. Second, while there are clearly differences between groups of EU members, the best practices of the leading group, together with the role of Brussels-based NGOs (such as the 51 NGOs in Eurodad, the European Network on Debt and Development) and activist movements such as Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt, Make Poverty History, DATA One campaign and Product Red, can and do shape policy in the EU, albeit slowly. At the nexus of the EU member states, NGOs and activists is the European Commission which appears more responsive to concerns such as commitment to the MDGs, the aid effectiveness agenda, and trying to promote policy coherence between the 15 DAC members and among the EU’s multitude of policies (Eurodad Briefing 2007; European Commission 2007b).

Normative social preferences – ‘social solidarity’ European social preferences are regularly characterised by a belief in a social model encompassing social legislation, social welfare and social infrastructure investment (Michalski 2006; Manners 2006a: 23–4). At the international level a question arises as to the extent to which other parts of the world share such normative preferences for a more socially sustainable model than extreme neoliberalism seems to support. Looking at comparative empirical data, European social preferences are for more social solidarity in comparison to most of the world. As previous comparisons illustrate, public social expenditure data from 1990 and 2001 give an indication of much stronger European preferences for social welfare in contrast to other parts of the world. EU governments have the largest social support systems in the developed (OECD) world, alongside Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. There are obvious divergences within Europe on this preference, with relatively low public social expenditure in Ireland and Slovakia compared to Sweden and Denmark. In comparison to the OECD world, average EU social expenditure is not really shared with other countries, with New Zealand, Australia and Canada the closest on social welfare. What is

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equally interesting is the extent to which average public social expenditure has increased in the EU during the 1990s, alongside Switzerland, Turkey and Japan. These figures appear to give some indication of the inroads which neo-liberalism has made in societies such as the Netherlands and New Zealand. Comparative data on social, education, and health expenditure indicates that EU members share a relative preference for social solidarity, particularly in comparison to the non-European world (Manners 2006a: 23–4). The normative principle of equality in core labour standards The normative principle of equality is based on a commitment to the legal prohibition of discrimination together with proactive policies to promote equality, both within the EU and in relations with the rest of the world. Within the EU equality has become one of the most promoted constitutive principles discussed here, moving from a relatively narrow focus on preventing discrimination based on nationality to the far broader and prominent value of equality in article 1a of the Treaty of Lisbon. In the 1990s, the focus of equality expanded beyond nationality to include equality between men and women (TEC article 2), protection of minorities (Copenhagen Criteria), and ‘action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’ (TEC article 13). The particular EU interpretation of this normative principle is a more inclusive, open-ended and uninhibited understanding of which groups are particularly subject to discrimination. Hence, the Treaty of Lisbon included references to the prohibition of discrimination ‘based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation’ in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union (emphasis added). One weakness with the implementation of this principle is the extent to which discrimination based on nationality is still widespread in a majority of member states. This is particularly true of employment practices in consensual societies that promote homosociality. Of particular interest here is the question of whether these social preferences and normative principles within the EU are promoted in international institutions to deal with issues such as human rights, as well as discrimination against indigenous and minority groups. Given the competition between trade, development and human rights promotion within the EU, as well as the resistant agendas of other states and international organisations, this is an extremely difficult question to answer. In the case of core labour standards (CLS), the EU has no treatybased competence to promote these, nor can it easily do so as a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Very few scholars have looked at the EU’s promotion of core labour standards, although these are closely associated with the EU’s normative power. Most writers argue that while CLS are higher in the EU than, for example, the US, it lacks the legal competence in this area due to continued application of

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subsidiarity by its member states (Block et al. 2003: 464; Novitz 2003: 170). Some have gone further to argue that CLS should not be internationalised or brought under the WTO, particularly as most developing countries see them as a form of protectionism (Rollo and Winters 2000: 562; Novitz 2003: 167; Bretherton and Vogler 2006: 86). In contrast to this body of work is the argument by Jan Orbie, that while ‘the rise of the normative power Europe [NPE] argument with academics and policy-makers should at least be considered an important political and social fact . . . The NPE hypothesis cannot be confirmed’ (Orbie 2006: 3 and 26). Certainly EU member states can be criticised for not allowing CLS competence to be developed within the EU, despite leading the world in setting CLS – ‘there does seem to be a consensus within the Union that the right to strike is a “core labour standard” and a “fundamental right” . . . In this sense, the EU acts as an external enforcer of labour standards, even if it refuses to legislate on these internally’ (Novitz 2003: 149). Marise Cremona argues that ‘the most distinctive contribution made by the EU is . . . in promoting “just processes of governance at all levels” which are informed by the principles of inclusiveness, transparency and participation’ (Cremona 2004: 557–8). Sophie Meunier and Kalypso Nicolaïdis suggest that partly by design, partly by necessity, the EU entertains a very different relationship to power [seeing] itself as . . . a normative power, apt at using non-military tools to achieve its goals in the rest of the world . . . Increasingly, it uses market access as a bargaining power to obtain changes in the domestic arena of its trading partners, from labour standards to development policies’ (Meunier and Nicolaïdis 2005: 248 and 266). Bretherton and Vogler see the promotion of CLS ‘as a counterpart to these liberalising moves [‘Singapore issues’], EU policy at the WTO has also reflected a concern with labour standards and the links between trade and environmental degradation’ (Bretherton and Vogler 2006: 85–6). In making clear his argument that the EU promotes ‘regulatory capitalism’, Adrian van den Hoven states that ‘the EU market is far more “regulated” than “liberal”, in the classic sense of non-intervention. This spillover of EU regulatory approach to capitalism on to the multi-lateral trading system could fundamentally alter its functioning’ (van den Hoven 2006: 187–8). Ultimately, as Novitz reasons, ‘the EC seems to have taken matters into its own hands . . . constituting an exception under the GATT’ introducing social conditionality, and ‘acting unilaterally to protect core labour standards, including freedom of association’ (Novitz 2003: 168). Empirical perspectives on core labour standards The normative practices and consequences of very recent EU attempts to promote core labour standards are particularly difficult to confirm or deny conclusively because of the extremely short timescale. However, while the ‘GSP+’ scheme for the promotion of CLS was only announced in June 2005, there is some empirical evidence of previous activity by the EU going back ten years earlier. As mentioned in the introduction, it is a little difficult to disaggregate the

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extent to which implementation of CLS are the result of ILO, EU or the activism of other national or transnational actors. However, recent work by the ILO, Tonia Novitz, Ailish Johnson, and in particular Lisa Tortell and Jan Orbie, provides some empirical verification of the EU’s activism in promoting CLS. Tortell and Orbie suggest that there has been some congruence of ILO standards and EU CLS promotion over the past ten years. In particular they analyse the GSP+ additional tariff reductions granted by the EU to Sri Lanka and Moldova in 2003, and to Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, El Salvador and Venezuela in 2005 (see Council of Ministers 2005a and European Commission 2005b). They identify the way in which the ILO and the EU have become more consistent in applying EU GSP sanctions and instigating ILO Commissions of Inquiry in only two cases since 1990 – Burma and Belarus. By comparing the cases of Burma 1996–7 with Belarus 2003–7, Tortell and Orbie suggest that ILO concerns have become increasingly important in EU practices and policy-making, with recent evidence of cooperation, conditioned by some inconsistencies. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that the EU GSP+ incentives scheme has played a role in encouraging Bolivia (ILO 29), Colombia (ILO 182), Costa Rica (ILO 182), Mongolia (ILO 29 and 105), El Salvador (ILO 87 and 98) and Venezuela (ILO 182) to ratify the CLS in 2005 and 2006 (ILOLEX 2006; European Parliament 2006). A number of critics, including Tortell and Orbie, have suggested that the question of effective implementation of ILO conventions is often overlooked by the EU, as in the case of El Salvador (European Parliament 2006). Similar concerns have been raised about the GSP+ preferences and their beneficiaries, particularly by the WTO. As discussed in the previous section, it is undoubtedly the case that the EU is isolated on the promotion of CLS in the WTO and its Doha agenda, but in contrast it is increasingly working in cooperation with the ILO (Council of Ministers 2003; Lamy 2003; Mandelson 2006; ILO 2006). In conclusion it can be suggested that since the 1995 Copenhagen World Summit for Social Development and the 1998 ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, the EU has increasingly promoted the ILO’s ‘decent work’ agenda through membership, accession, the European Neighbourhood Policy and the GSP+ scheme (see European Commission 1994, 1995, 2000).

Normative conflict preferences – ‘sustainable peace’ European preferences for resolving conflict can be described as a commitment to a more ‘sustainable peace’ – resolving both the structural causes and violent symptoms of conflict. As discussed above, the above-average levels of OECD DAC development assistance disbursed by EU member states is just one part of addressing the structural causes of conflict. It is worth noting that preferences for sustainable peace reach beyond development assistance and peacekeeping to

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include global institution-building in areas such as human security and the right to protect (R2P); landmine, small arms and conflict diamonds conventions, and the International Criminal Court. This chapter will focus on just one of these many examples of sustainable peace – the role of the EU in crisis management. The normative principle of sustainable peace in crisis management The prime EU normative principle of sustainable peace is to be found throughout the history of European integration. Robert Schuman’s opening words on 9 May 1950 provided the historical raison d’être for European integration; ‘world peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it’. Reiterated again in the preambles of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the Treaty establishing the European Community (TEC), and the Treaty on European Union, article 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon was to establish peace as the EU’s primary objective: ‘1. The Union’s aim is to promote peace, its values and the wellbeing of its peoples’. As discussed above, the particular EU interpretation of this normative principle is sustainable peace (see Manners 2006b). As discussed under EU conflict preferences above, the EU approach to conflict prevention emphasises addressing the roots or causes of conflict, mirroring the European experience of ensuring that war ‘becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’. The EU policy emphasis is placed on development aid, trade, interregional cooperation, political dialogue and enlargement as part of a more holistic approach to conflict prevention. However, the EU’s growing civil and military operational capacity also has a sustainable peace mission with its focus on ‘peace-keeping, conflict prevention and strengthening international security in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter’ (article 10a, Treaty of Lisbon). The question arises over where the balance of emphasis is to be found between addressing the causes of conflict in a peaceful way, and the ability to use force in peacekeeping and genocidal situations. Similarly, there is the associated question of whether this is best done through international cooperation, regional peacekeeping operations, or a UN-authorised force. In addressing these questions of the balance between conflict prevention and conflict management, a number of scholars have looked at the EU in the context of the exercise of normative power. Annika Björkdahl and Ana Juncos have both emphasised the normative power of the EU in southeastern Europe, where there is an ‘asymmetrical relationship between the EU as a norm-maker and Macedonia as a potential norm-taker’ and arguing that ‘a parallel process has taken place in the last decade facilitating the (re)integration of [Bosnia] in the European mainstream and the (re)invention of the EU as a regional normative power’ (Björkdahl 2005: 277–8; Juncos 2005: 89). Sonia Lucarelli and Roberto Menotti suggest that such normative power currently excludes certain forms of coercive actions, such as punishment and ‘pre-emption’, but must be seen as part of a distinctive political

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dynamic that is leading towards a greater acceptance of a wider notion of intervention in the EU (Lucarelli and Menotti 2006: 162–3). As Diez et al. illustrate in the case of border conflicts, the EU is able to exercise normative power through membership and association negotiations, which in some cases has led to ‘a long-term socialisation of policymakers into European normative discourses’ (Diez et al. 2006: 572–3 and 586–7). The notion of the EU’s Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) representing a cosmopolitan military force willing to promote human security is a common representation of normative power (Terriff 2004; Matlary 2006; Liotta and Owen 2006). For the European Commission, human security means a concern for individuals, not states, and encompasses both freedom from fear (for example conflict and human rights abuses) and freedom from want (for example poverty and disease) (European Commission 2005a: 2; Ferrero-Waldner 2006: 103–7). Interestingly, the origins of the 2003 European Security Strategy are informed by this understanding of human security, in particular with its references to the ‘complex causes’ of terrorism including ‘the pressures of modernisation, cultural, social and political crises’ (Council of Ministers 2003: 3; Glasius and Kaldor 2004; Liotta and Owen 2006: 97). Marlies Glasius and Mary Kaldor argue that: there are different versions of the ‘peace project’ including the notion of Europe as a new type of cosmopolitan polity, a ‘civil space’ or a ‘normative power’. . . . What this means is that [member states] exercise their sovereignty through the multilateral institutions and they agree to constraints on the use of force. . . . A human security strategy derives from this conception of Europe. (Glasius and Kaldor 2005: 79) Empirical perspectives on crisis management As discussed in the two previous case studies, the normative practices and consequences of EU crisis management are difficult to confirm or deny, particularly as such attempts may have considerable merit even if they fail. Following the agreement at the June 1999 European Council meeting in Cologne, the EU has been increasingly involved in crisis management and peacekeeping operations. Since March 2003 the EU has launched 21 crisis management operations with an emphasis on southeastern Europe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Palestine. In addition, and largely unnoticed, since May 2001 the EU supported 52 civilian crisis management operations using the Rapid Reaction Mechanism (now Stability Instrument). The RRM supported missions have tended to be much more widely spread, covering southeastern Europe, central and south Asia, the Middle East, as well as west, central and east Africa. On top of the 21 crisis management operations under the Council’s ESDP and the 52 civilian crisis management operations under the Commission’s RRM, are the hundreds of humanitarian operations led by the Commission’s DG for Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) since its creation in 1992.

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It is this combination of ESDP, RRM and ECHO operations that is often missed in attempts to empirically assess the EU’s crisis management activities. To provide an empirical perspective on EU crisis management I will briefly look at three examples of how ESDP, RRM and ECHO are involved in crisis management in three complex conflict situations – Aceh, Palestine and Darfur. EU crisis management in Aceh began with the RRM being used by the Commission in support of the agreement on cessation of hostilities between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian Government in December 2002 (European Commission 2002). The Indian Ocean tsunami on the 26 December 2004 killed an estimated 170,000 people in Aceh and brought back together the GAM separatists and the Indonesian Government. ECHO operations in Aceh involved C3.5 million in December 2004 and C123 million by the second tsunami in March 2005, with an emphasis on linking relief, rehabilitation and development (ECHO 2005: 17; 2006: 8). The launching of three RRM activities during March and April 2005 helped post-tsunami recovery in Aceh and sowed the seeds for peace negotiations (European Commission 2005c, d, e). The signing of a memorandum of understanding in Helsinki between the GAM and the Indonesian government in August 2005 led to the Commission’s RRM action on demobilisation and the Council’s joint action launching an Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM) in September 2005 (European Commission 2005f; Council of Ministers 2005b). The EU’s crisis management involvement in Aceh ended with the deployment of a EU Election Observation Mission and the successful first-ever direct local elections on 11 December 2006 (EU Election Observation Mission 2007a; International Crisis Group 2007a). In contrast to the relatively straightforward success of the EU in Aceh, crisis management in Palestine is part of a much longer-term commitment to addressing one of the most difficult conflicts in the world (Soetendorp 2002; Aoun 2003). EU crisis management in Palestine accelerated following the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 and the launching of ECHO funding to address the ensuing humanitarian crises (European Commission 2001: 26–7). By 2001 the EU was providing C30 million to Palestinians to address the consequences of the uprising, in particular healthcare, water supplies, food and shelter (ECHO 2002: 17). The March 2002 operation by the Israeli army in the West Bank targeted the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Jenin refugee camps, prompting an expansion of ECHO annual humanitarian aid to C35 million to provide for basic health and medical support for Palestinians in Jenin and Ramallah, as well as a RRM to help rebuild the PA infrastructure in June 2002 (ECHO 2003: 16–17; European Commission 2002b). The continued consequences of conflict in Palestine worsened throughout 2003, exasperated by the building of an illegal concrete barrier dividing communities, with an annual ECHO humanitarian funding of C35 million (ECHO 2004: 17 and 26–7). The dire state of the Palestinians and the complete collapse of the peace process led the EU to use the RRM to support local civil society initiatives in October 2003 and March 2004, by which time annual ECHO humanitarian aid was C37 million (European Commission 2003a,; 2004a; ECHO 2005: 18). Between the Israeli reoccupation of Gaza

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and the West Bank in March 2002–August 2005 and the July–September 2006 Israeli–Lebanon conflict, the EU launched two ESDP civilian missions in November 2005 – an EU police mission to train Palestinian police (EUPOL COPPS) and an EU border policing mission at Rafah (Council of Ministers 2005c, d). The combined effects of the second Intifada, the Israeli military campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and finally the election of a Hamas government in January 2006 have considerably challenged EU crisis management. The February 2007 Mecca agreement between Fatah and Hamas to share power in Palestinian government may provide the basis for more sustainable EU support for the PA, as well as Israeli engagement, particularly as the EU is the largest provider of finance for the PA and humanitarian support for Palestinian people. In contrast to the direct involvement of the EU in crisis management in Aceh and Palestine, the third example of Darfur illustrates how the EU can work without direct contact. EU crisis management in Sudan from 1993 to 2003 had largely taken place through an average of C20 million in annual ECHO support for humanitarian operations such as ECHO Flights, the UN’s Operation Lifeline Sudan and World Food Programme. However, all of the EU and UN operations have been constantly compromised by insecurity caused by the long-running second civil war between the Sudanese government in the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the south which began in 1983 (ECHO 2000: 28; 2001: 19; 2002: 19; 2003: 19; International Crisis Group 2004). The Sudanese crisis worsened from February 2003 when conflict in Darfur led to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis involving almost two million displaced persons with EU humanitarian resources increased to C91 million (ECHO 2004: 17). An African Union-brokered peace agreement between the government and rebel forces in April 2004 was accompanied by the European Commission’s use of the RRM to provide support for the peace process, including C1.5 million support for the peace secretariat and the verification and monitoring team (European Commission 2004b). Despite the peace process, the more complex conflict in Darfur worsened, leading the African Union to create the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) with AU and EU ceasefire monitors deployed in July 2004 (ECHO 2005: 16). Throughout 2004 and 2005 the situation in Darfur led to international disputes over the extent to which the actions of the government-backed ‘Janjaweed’ militia could be described as genocide, while the UN tried unsuccessfully to deploy a major force of international peacekeepers to support the smaller AU force (International Crisis Group 2006). EU support for peacekeeping initiatives in Sudan and Darfur included a Council joint action enabling an ESDP civilian mission (EU support for AMIS II) and the appointment of special representative Pekka Haavisto in July 2005, as well as using its 2004 Africa Peace Facility (APF) to fund these activities (Council of Ministers 2005e; International Crisis Group 2005). A longer-lasting EU approach to Darfur may be found in the November 2006 decisions to strengthen support for AU crisis management capabilities through much closer cooperation and more sustainable funding through the APF, as well as the 2007 Joint EU–Africa Strategy (Council of Ministers 2006; ECDPM 2007).

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In conclusion these three brief empirical examples of crisis management say something interesting about the EU’s normative conflict preference for sustainable peace. First, it is noticeable that the EU is often engaging in crisis management operations through ECHO and the RRM long before the headline-grabbing conflicts break out. Second, the EU seems committed to attempting some sort of crisis management even under difficult local and international conditions, as the insecure situations and UN Security Council deadlocks in Palestine and Darfur illustrate. Third, the EU institutions themselves seem to be learning rapidly from their own experiences and trying to change their structures and practices to best match need, despite the reluctance of member states and treaty reform to achieve more practical means.

Conclusion: normative power and social preferences in a globalised world Throughout this chapter I have examined the extent to which the EU has normative power to define what passes for normal in a globalised world. As I stated at the outset, assessing the normative power in terms of its normative principles, actions and impact is an almost impossible task within such narrow confines. However, I made a first attempt by briefly considering the secondary literature and empirical evidence in three tentative case studies. In each case I looked at EU normative power by considering the way in which social preferences shaped empirical policies. It should be noted that this two-step approach to social preferences and normative power is an interesting means of examining the EU, but it tends to overlook and undervalue the most important element of normative power – the question of the EU’s normative principles or what the EU is, rather than does. I still consider this the greatest normative power of ‘contagion diffusion’ or ‘living by example’, but have not addressed this here (Manners 2006c: 76–7). As the chapter has explored, there is variation in social preferences for solidarity, core labour standards and crisis management which informs EU external promotion. The mix of neutral, interventionist and more passive crisis management preferences in the EU currently leads to greater divergence than the other cases, as was seen in Aceh, Palestine and Darfur. The EU’s competence in all the cases is low, with member states retaining control of most of development aid, the internal enforcement of labour standards, control of crisis forces and the signing of international treaties. For the EU, sustainable development and international rule of law are currently major normative principles and are promoted accordingly. While social solidarity and equality unfortunately remain minor normative principles, the strategies to promote them are changing rapidly and may yet emerge as major principles. Understandably, the emerging area of crisis management is still promoted in a minor way, largely because of the fairly recent development of competence and need for greater commitment from member states in order to overcome divergences. Finally, all three case studies illustrated the difficulties the EU faces in trying to promote these normative

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principles. In the cases of development policy and CLS, the EU and its member states face resistance from partner countries who feel discriminated against and are hostile to principles such as good governance, equality, human and social rights. In the case of sustainable peace and crisis management the relatively new emergence of competence, together with uncertainty over the merits of crisis and peacekeeping missions, are some of the greatest problems, although the extent to which the EU is the largest international funder of humanitarian and peace efforts in Aceh, Palestine and Darfur is often overlooked. In conclusion, the divergences of social preferences, discrepancies over competence, and questions of promotion and implementation in all three case studies suggest that the EU is a committed yet troubled normative power in the globalised world. As repeated in numerous policy documents such as ‘The European Consensus on Development’ or ‘The European Union and the United Nations: The Choice of Multilateralism’ (European Commission 2003b) illustrate, the EU appears committed to becoming and exercising normative power: The EU should adopt a determined ‘front-runner’ approach to the negotiation and implementation of important UN initiatives in the field of sustainable development, poverty reduction and international security, taking a more proactive approach to the development of international instruments and specific EU implementing actions. (European Commission 2003b: 9) Despite such commitments, as the case studies illustrate, the EU appears troubled in achieving such ambitious goals of becoming a ‘front-runner’. Four factors are at work in restricting the EU’s promotion of such goals. Most important is the question of time – in most cases it is simply too early to assess the EU’s normative power. The diffusion of ideas in a normatively sustainable way works like water on stone, not like napalm in the morning. Second is the changed international climate of the Bush/Bin Laden world which makes the EU promotion of a normatively acceptable norms-based international system particularly difficult. Third is the increasing resistance of the ‘axis of ego’ to the sharing of sovereignty in international law. By the ‘axis of ego’, I mean the permanent members of the UN Security Council (here the US, Russia and China) who consider themselves exceptional or superpowers, and above international norms and law (Manners 2007). Finally there is the argument that a norms-based international system will only be achieved through normative power that persuades others of the universality of such norms. It is only through understanding and coming to terms with these four factors that an alignment of social preferences, normative power and EU foreign policy will contribute in a meaningful way to planetary politics.

3

The historicity of European normative power Karoline Postel-Vinay

It is generally acknowledged that, since the spring of 2005, the European Union (EU) has entered a form of crisis. The nature and scope of it still need to be defined. One could argue, at the very least, that the French and Dutch rejection of the European constitutional treaty, closely followed by the failure of the June 2005 EU budget talks, signalled a return of Euro-pessimism. This trend will probably redefine the landscape of EU studies – echoing the quake that struck the integration theory field in the 1970s (Haas 1975) – even though the European integration process itself will go on. From the more general point of view of International Relations (IR) analysis, this yet to-be-defined crisis highlights the problem of defining Europe’s international identity as well as its actual impact on world politics. From François Duchêne’s characterization of Europe as a civilian power (Duchêne 1972) to Ian Manners’ concept of normative power Europe (Manners 2002), there has been a growing consensus around the idea of both the singularity and the novelty of Europe’s presence on the international scene. The why and how of this presence have, however, constituted an object of debate among EU scholars (Howse and Nicolaidis 2002; Diez 2005; Smith 2005; Telo 2005; Sjursen 2006). But as Thomas Diez has pointed out (Diez 2005), the discussion around the notion of normative power in itself, which defines for the time being Europe’s special presence in world affairs, has been so closely associated with the EU’s political trajectory that it tends to loose sight of the larger, i.e. larger than Europe, meaning of this notion. The notion of normative power as it has been defined within the framework of the normative power Europe idea is indeed a coherent one – although not a closed one, as the ontological debate around it illustrates – but this coherence does appear intrinsically bounded by the contours of the European experience. How does this normative power work in the larger world, and what is the significance of the specific European legacy in this regard? What is the relation between normative power Europe and normative power as it can be understood through the IR literature, including, but not limited to, that on international norms? Can we consider, as Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford do from the perspective of regional security issues, that the normative power (Europe) idea constitutes a model for the regulation of international relations (Adler and Crawford 2004), or should we instead look at this idea as the product of a unique

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political system, as defined by Simon Hix (Hix 1999), which makes its globalization essentially problematic? The purpose of this chapter is to approach this set of questions by underlining the historicity of normative power in general and of Europe’s normative power in particular. The relation between norms and power, as well as the constitution of international normative power, are situated in time and space. Norms might have a universal significance – such as the will to eradicate violence or the respect for the environment – but that does not mean they are universally formulated. Mankind shares the same yearning for political freedom, but it was in a specific space – the Western world – at a specific time – the later part of the twentieth century – that liberal democracy was elaborated as an international norm. That specific space and time defined a transformation of the international scene, which has been analysed as the expansion of international society (Bull and Watson 1984), and which also corresponded to the climax of European colonialism. Ultimately, the shape of the EU’s normative power, as much as other forms of norm-conferring power, depend on the spatiotemporal configuration of the world order. As this chapter sets out to demonstrate, the spatiotemporal condition of the production of international norms has had a paradoxical consequence for the European continent. This paradox appears in the ambiguous identity relation between Europe and the EU. Pre-1945 Europe, as an aggregation of individual powers, was clearly a global norm-setter that created the first worldwide international organizations and promoted and/or imposed norms through those institutions as well as through the processes that established them. European integration, and therefore the European Union, although defining itself as a normative power rather than a power per se, has had a much more geopolitically limited influence in that regard. This has been due both to the post-1945 rise of American power, notably through the establishment of new international organizations, and more recently to the emergence of non-Western counterpowers in Asia and South America. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe’s international influence has been de facto decentred and provincialized. The EU, however, still tends to define its international identity in reference to an a-temporal and a-territorial European being, a sort of Europe as such, which indeed would be taken for granted under the pre-1945 world order, but is now becoming increasingly less sustainable as a vehicle for normative power.

Time, space and normative power The normative power debate in the field of EU studies usually refers, implicitly or explicitly, to the notion of norm as defined by the IR literature on norms that emerged in the 1990s (Nadelman 1990; Klotz 1995; Katzenstein 1996; Checkel 1997; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). The empirical discussion of both literatures evolves around the core principle of justice, whether it is ethical, political or social justice. Although there is still an open debate about the formation, constitution and functioning of international norms, there is also, as Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink remarked, a consensus on the definition of norm as ‘a

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standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998: 891). This appropriateness of behaviour is not a fixed given: it evolves, according to the same authors, along with political change, producing a norm cycle (ibid.). Indeed, what was deemed acceptable at a certain time, e.g. slavery, is no longer so today. One could add that norm life cycle is also determined by place. International norms have overwhelmingly been produced within a space that is self-defined as the West. The reason for that has of course less to do with some improbable superior quality of Western values as such, than with straightforward power politics. International norms, as well as the normative power that convey them, are neither a-temporal nor a-spatial. The early twentieth-century transformation of the United States into an international actor that had both the power and the ambition to produce and promote (sometimes impose) global norms happened within a particular time–space framework. The emergence of American normative power in the global scene is usually equated with America’s falling into the world (Stephanson 1995) at the outbreak of the Great War. In other words, the US made its first appearance as a political actor of worldwide importance – moving beyond the limits of the Monroe Doctrine-defined continental sphere – in the shape of a normative power. Woodrow Wilson’s famous pledge of April 1917 to enter the conflict in order not to satisfy any territorial greed, in sharp contrast with the European imperial powers of the time, but to make the world safe for democracy, inaugurated a US foreign policy tradition of promulgating and institutionalizing American values at the global level. This tradition, it should be noted, does not by itself represent the United States international identity but does constitute one major dimension of what Walter Russell Mead described as the kaleidoscope of American foreign policy (Mead 2001). That dimension, commonly called Wilsonianism, is time-defined because of the specific historical moment it is rooted in, but it is also time–space-defined because it developed alongside the production of a particular geopolitical narrative, i.e. a representation of the international stage and the drama unfolding on it (Postel-Vinay 2005). Wilsonian normative power cannot be dissociated from the fundamental idea of the fight of Good vs. Evil, whether it is Freedom vs. Tyranny, or Democracy vs. Totalitarianism. This idea is sustained by the missionary vision of America’s role in the world: an international projection of its national manifest destiny (Stephanson 1995). It furthermore implies that the conflict is not only dichotomous, leaving no room for neutrality, but it is also literally global: it is supposed to involve all nations on earth, compelling each of them to take sides. One could speculatively argue that the particular form of norms-conferring power to which the normative power Europe’s idea refers, is also bound up with a specific time–space framework. The geopolitical narrative that underlies European normative power is one that combines globalism and regionalism, producing the representation of a world that is no longer shaped by a dichotomous conflict but a globalized world in which regional entities are the main actors on the international scene. Both the normative power debate within EU studies and the ideational turn of the IR literature (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998) started in

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the 1990s, during the post-Cold War period. This is not entirely surprising since the end of the bipolar world order paved the way to make global governance possible, which itself allowed room to reflect on globally shared norms. Incidentally, this does not mean that normative power per se could not be exercised during the Cold War. American normative power, as mentioned above, is precisely linked to the notion of world conflict, and as Knutsen has argued, this power constituted one of the US’s major assets over the Soviet Union (Knutsen 1999). European normative power was also exercised during that period, as the official establishment of the notion of acquis communautaire in 1972 illustrated. The first enlargement discussion – concerning the entry of Denmark, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom – indeed led to the definition of a normative commitment to the Community requiring respect of both the spirit and the letter of European legal arrangements, i.e. the treaties themselves as well as their political aims and corollary norms. Coming back to the post-Cold War period, and more precisely the 1990s, it is significant that both EU and IR scholars, although tackling the same object – international norms – approached the normative debate through different paths that never actually crossed. That can be explained, at least in part, by a certain lack in both cases of geopolitical contextualization, leading to mutually exclusive discussions. IR debate on international norms does take into account the historicity of norms themselves, as does the sociological one in the same sub-field (Boli and Thomas 1999), but somehow de-contextualizes normative power. By taking a bird’s eye view of the process of norm-production and empowerment, it mostly leaves aside the problematic issue of where and when, and within which geopolitical configuration, normative power is actually exercised. All cultures at any time in history produce norms: how come some become global and others not? How come most of what we call international norms are in fact genealogically constituted Western norms, and therefore global normative power is intrinsically linked to Western power? This problem is absent from EU studies discussion on normative power for the obvious reason that its starting point is explicitly located in Europe, either post-Cold War Europe or post-Second World War Europe. It has been argued that the EU was sui generis (Rosamond 2005), putting it out of the realm of comparison, let alone that of reproducibility. But alongside this somewhat self-introspecting trend, the discussion on the EU’s international identity usually implied, again from Duchêne to Manners, that its purpose was universal in essence. This paradox underscores an ambiguity about the geopolitical framework within which the European normative power is supposed to take place. It actually precedes the emergence of the normative power idea, and can be sought in the historically, and geographically, ambivalent relationship between Europe and the European Union.

Europe, the European Union and normative power Europe is not the European Union, and vice versa. How much does this apparently very simple statement help us to define the scope of European normative

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power? And from a more general perspective, what does it tell us about the EU’s international identity, whether it is or not defined by normative power? Those questions point out to what the simple statement, almost a truism, above does not say rather than what it does say. The Europe/European Union distinction refers to the obvious fact that pre-1945 Europe was an ensemble of sovereign entities, functioning at times as an effective concert of nations with an extremely strong influence on the shaping of world affairs, whereas the European Union is clearly not that. The question of whether this supranational entity that is the EU can be called an international actor or not has been the object of some debate. Ian Manners has argued that this debate is not entirely helpful if one wants to understand the EU’s actual impact on world affairs (Manners 2002): one should instead consider the EU’s international influence as a tangible fact and shift the focus of one’s analysis on the modus operandi of that influence. Focusing on the concrete manifestations of the European Union’s power, i.e. how the EU exercises its power is indeed useful for defining the EU’s international identity and therefore emphasizing its singular civilian dimension. But this approach tends to elude the very question of power; it does not explain the reason for the existence of this power and, more specifically, whether the EU’s international power has anything to do with Europe. Zaki Laïdi has shown how the de-linking of the concept of power from the idea of European normative power reflects in fact an avoidance altogether of the practical notions of power and leadership (Laïdi 2005). This reflection also helps to explain the de-linking of the EU studies debate on normative power from the IR debate on international norms or, in the field of political theory, from discussions such as Steven Lukes’ on ideological power (Lukes 1974), which put forward, if not used as a starting point, power-related notions such as prominence, leadership and hegemony. From a constructivist perspective, Thomas Diez has argued that the political discourse on normative power is actually an essential dimension of the EU’s strategy to assert its power on the international scene (Diez 2005). This strategy leads to a specific identity-building process, defining both the EU’s self and its relation with others. Although the inclusion/exclusion pattern described by Thomas Diez does refer to a plurality of others, it does not offer a very detailed characterization of that plurality. The history of European enlargement reveals at least one major distinction between what could be called, in reference to the old imperial Russian terminology, the Near Other and the Far Other. Would-be members or would-be partners of the EU, such as Ukraine, Turkey or North African countries, in fact have a very different understanding of European normative power than countries such as Brazil or China, whose relations with the EU are defined by more global parameters. This distinction points not only to an identity issue but also to questions of international power and influence. From a European point of view, the problem of enlargement is expressed in mostly normative terms, evolving around the us/them nexus. Seen from the non-European side, this problem is either as much, or more, about interests than it is about values and identity. The Ukrainian and Turkish internal debates about EU membership, or even conflict in the case of Ukraine, have provided one illustration of that.

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When bringing to the fore the issue of power in his discussion of European normative power, Zaki Laïdi logically puts forward a non-European perspective more concerned with the reality of that power than with its qualitative singularity (Laïdi 2005). Following that logic, one could ask what, from a non-European point of view, makes the EU’s power convincing. Is it because it is normative or because it is powerful? Of course, as Jeffrey Checkel has demonstrated, there is no absolute divide between rationalism and constructivism, nor is there one between interests and values (Checkel 1997). But the case of Japan shows that the need to refocus the European normative power debate on power is still relevant. On a number of international norms issues, such as democracy and human rights, Japan’s position is closer to the United States than it is to the EU’s; but on other issues, such as the environment and social welfare, and on implementation, the preference for diplomacy over force, Japan is actually closer to the EU. Yet Japan’s political alliance with the US is far more important than the one it has with the EU. The reason for that is power politics: the decades-old exclusive US–Japan security treaty is vital for the maintenance of Japan’s interests in its region. That would still be the case even if Tokyo were to renounce its unique civilian power status and change its pacifist constitution. The fact that both the US and Japan are liberal democracies represents a fundamental dimension of their alliance but it is not, however, the only one. The interests/values balance of that alliance is, in a sense, inversely proportional to that of the early twentiethcentury Anglo-Japanese agreement in effect from January 1902 to August 1923. Japan was the first non-Western country to sign a treaty, on supposedly equal footing, with a Western one, Great Britain, which was then the major world power. Realpolitik played a decisive role in the establishment of the treaty (Great Britain effectively allowed Japan to annex Korea), but normative considerations were nonetheless present in the process. Europe, for Japan, was at the time not only the centre of international power but a model of political modernity that inspired it to be the first Asian nation, in 1889, to promulgate a constitution, institute limited suffrage (in 1890), and later, in 1925, universal male suffrage. The case of Japan’s historical experiment with normative power also highlights some problematic aspects of the geopolitical narrative that underlies the present EU’s avoidance of power as such. As argued above, the idea of the EU as a normative power is linked to a representation of the world that is shaped by both globalism and regionalism. Obviously, this representation could only be formed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when globalization became a reality on the ground and globalism a dominant worldview. However, the vision of the EU’s specific international identity, i.e. the continuum from civilian to normative power, rests on a narrative that is formulated in yet different terms. The general notion of the EU’s singular presence in world affairs refers to a story that starts in 1945 and whose main plot is the search for a viable peace. Until 1989, the location of that story was a continental space the borders of which were prosaically defined by the Atlantic Ocean on the one side, and the Cold War order on the other. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the matter of borders

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became more problematic and the enlargement discussion became likewise complex. The complexity of the ongoing debate about EU enlargement underscores in retrospect the overly simplified spatial dimension of the European project’s geopolitical narrative. That narrative was indeed based on the assumption that there was an entity called Europe whose self-evidence put it beyond the need of territorial definition. The post-Cold War controversy among EU countries over Turkey’s application for membership has revealed how much the acritical notion of Europe is in fact powerfully normative. The political idea expressed by such phrases as the ‘uniting of Europe’ (Haas 1958) is much older than the actual European integration process as we know it. When Winston Churchill, in September 1946, called for the building of a kind of United States of Europe, he was reopening one of the major public debates that were taking place in Europe during the interwar years (Pegg 1993). From the point of view of the history of ideas, the notion of a somehow united Europe goes back to the eighteenth century (Pegg 1993, Zorgbibe 1993). This idea as it was discussed in the interwar years and re-emerged after 1945, is linked to the axiomatic perception that the European continent or European civilization provides the natural framework for defining the modes of a specific regulation process, if not for building an actual polity. As Lewis and Wigen have demonstrated (Lewis and Wigen 1997), the very concepts of continent and civilization are socio-historically defined and located in the European geographical repertoire (which includes the European-produced notions of America, Asia, Africa), thereby making the notion of European continent or civilization problematic. The reference to that notion has been implicitly present in the geopolitical narrative underlying the European integration project, whether it was supposed to be civilian or normative.

From global to provincial norm-setter For all the distinctions that can undoubtedly be made between pre-Second World War Europe and the EU of today, there is however, one major, and intrinsic, feature that these entities share: the belief in the existence of a European civilization/continent whose historical and geographical definition remains elusive. This assumption is in itself normative, and has impacted the way European countries have exercised their influence before and after 1945. The common characterization of the EU’s international identity as non-military or European normative (i.e. normative both in its means and ends), rarely takes into account this element, or at least not from a critical perspective. Yet the assumption about Europe as such, precisely because it is a-temporal and only loosely territorially defined, does not have the same effectiveness in today’s international context as it had, in particular, at the turn of last century. As Furio Cerutti has suggested, the crisis that the EU has entered since mid-2005 can be characterized as a political identity crisis (Cerutti 2005). From the viewpoint of the promoters of the European constitutional project, the May 2005 referenda fiasco is a case of failed narrative. Even if this failure can probably be explained

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in immediate strategic terms, one should also look at its deeper roots. In other words, one should take into consideration the evolution of the idea of Europe, and more specifically examine the political relevance of Europe as such, an assumption that is still being conveyed by the EU-promoting rhetoric. Although there is no specific literature on Europe’s pre-1945 normative power, a general description of how this power was shaped and exercised can be drawn from a number of works, in particular those of the English School of International Relations on international society (Bull and Watson 1984; Keene 2002). Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s analysis of the expansion process of international society is also an account of the globalization of European norms between the late nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth (Bull and Watson 1984). Gerrit Gong has more precisely described the standard of civilization (Gong 1984) that the European imperial powers produced and imposed as an essential instrument for the regulation of international relations on a global scale. The implementation of that standard of civilization had far-reaching consequences as it implied a complete reform of the would-be members of the expanding international society, countries such as Ottoman Turkey, China, Japan or Siam, that were neither Western nor fully colonized. Indeed, the adoption of the new standard of civilization not only meant, as the Japanese case mentioned above showed, a change of those countries’ foreign policy apparatus, but structural domestic reforms as well, including transformations that were novel even for the European societies of the time, such as the institutionalization of public education or public healthcare (Gluck 1985; Postel-Vinay 2005). The notion of civilized and civilizing Europe, as expressed by the French idea of mission civilisatrice, was of course absolutely non-reflexive, and so was the belief in the existence of a Europe as such. The confusion between what was called European civilization and universalism was part and parcel of the dynamics of Europe’s normative power at the turn of the twentieth century. Since 1945, alongside decolonization, any notion resembling ‘the white man’s burden’ and hence the ‘standard of civilization’ have become internationally unacceptable. Such notions are precisely not what the IR literature would define as international norms. But although the Europe of the EU does not purport to have a civilizing mission anything like America’s international manifest destiny, the EU’s discourse on its global role and purpose remains ambiguously linked to an essentialist definition of European identity. The boundary between the implicit reference to a Europe as such and the EU’s universal ambition is still not clear. The ontological argument of the ‘normative power Europe’ concept – ‘the EU is not what it does or what it says, but what it is’ (Manners 2002: 252) – does clarify its historical situation but is problematically evasive as to its geographical one. The trauma of the Second World War is commonly evoked to explain the advent of the European Community project, but the discussion about what are or should be the territorial limits of that project appears to be slippery ground, both academically and politically. Charles Maier has argued that the EU should reinvent itself as a non-geographically referenced and a-territorial entity (Maier 2002), eluding altogether the European enlargement

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quagmire. Since the autumn of 2005, the European Commission has been using the rather un-normative concept of ‘absorption capacity’ as an argument to explain the slowdown in the enlargement process. This avoidance of a head-on discussion of the European project’s geographical limits also reflects a reluctance to look at what actually is not sui generis about the EU and what could be called the European legacy of the new entity. In the early days of European integration, the global significance of Europe’s raison d’être was still taken for granted. The introductory sentence of the May 1950 Schuman Declaration stressed that the grand vision behind its call for small concrete achievements, was the safeguarding of world peace. Europe was a core being which needed to be pacified for the benefit of the whole planet. As Charles Zorgbibe explained: ‘For a long time, the idea of Europe has been confused with that of the organization of the world: Europe was equated with, if not the known world, at least the “useful” world’ (Zorgbibe 1993: 1). Such a representation would not be politically viable today. But the present EU uneasiness with border and membership issues can be seen as a legacy of that representation, as a nostalgia for the a-territoriality and a-historicity of Europe as such. During the Cold War, the European governmental elite, and more generally the European integration entrepreneurs and promoters, had to come to terms with the fact that their geopolitical stage was no longer the defining centre of world order. That fact became inescapably evident after 1989. But it has proven difficult to translate into a new international identity discourse. One of the well-known claims of the postcolonial literature is the need for a social science that provincializes Europe: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concern here is not with power politics but the global intellectual repertoire through which social transformation is interpreted and analysed (Chakrabarty 2000). Yet, this and other postcolonial claims would not have taken shape without the actual decentring of Europe in world politics. In other words, the revisiting of the European legacy in the widest definition of this term – from aesthetics to politics – became conceivable with the relative decrease of Europe’s international power and, concomitantly, the re-centring of world influence in the United States, and now the emergence of non-Western international powers. This does not mean that postcolonialism is solely a reflection of the transformation of the international balance of power. The postcolonial project is in effect still relevant as Europe, as Chakrabarty and others define it (i.e. a specific intellectual repertoire with a claim to universality), continues to dominate the global architecture of social sciences, even in America where the progress of multiculturalism has considerably transformed the conceptual hardware with which societies and relations between societies are being understood. It is rather the de facto permanence of this legacy that confirms EU promoters in their vision of an ahistorical and a-territorial European entity, a sort of free-floating political given that ultimately justifies and legitimizes the long-term community-building process. Although European integration, as both a project and an evolving reality, is very different from, almost the opposite of, the pre-1945 political assemblage constituted by the European powers, the EU’s identity, or rather the

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EU’s search for an international identity, is still embedded in the latter’s conception of a political given (Europe) described in civilization/continent terms and whose universality exempts it from defining its spatial and temporal borders. Neither the normative power argument, which lacks spatial precision – what exactly is European about European normative power? – nor the absorption capacity, of which the seemingly physical logic makes it hardly an argument at all, can fully address the identity problem that lies at the heart of the ongoing EU crisis. The EU still needs to confront the reality of Europe’s provincialization in world politics and to admit in articulated terms that it constitutes a bordered international site. The EU’s avoidance of the debate on power, as revealed by the Europe as normative power argument, is linked to an avoidance of the reflection on borders, as the absorption capacity argument all too clearly illustrates. This double avoidance constitutes two sides of the same problem. Europe was a global norm-setter that became a provincial norm-setter after engendering the European Community: it has not yet adjusted itself to this historical change of scale.

Part II

The reception of democracy

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Democratization by extension Seeking reinsurance Anne-Marie Le Gloannec and Jacques Rupnik

The European Union, unlike the United States, does not have an explicit, elaborate doctrine of ‘democracy promotion’ let alone a ‘democratic mission’. Yet it may be considered over the last decade as possibly the most successful democracy promoter of an entire array of international actors involved. The EU’s most successful democracy promotion programme is otherwise known as the EU ‘enlargement process’. Between 2004 and 2007 most of post-communist EastCentral Europe joined the Union, a success for which it has received little credit from the citizens of old member states or from the political elites of the new members who are the main beneficiaries of the process. It therefore raises several related questions about the nature of the EU’s contribution to democratization. How has the EU’s democratic conditionality developed and what are the costs and benefits for the Union as well as for its prospective members? How effective is conditionality in the post-accession phase? And can an approach that has worked successfully in Central Europe be replicated in the Balkans or elsewhere? Can democracy promotion via enlargement be pursued in the future in spite of reluctant public opinions in the older member states and even in a new candidate country such as Turkey? Is the EU’s role as an external democratizer designed merely for its immediate periphery and can it work without the perspective of EU accession? In trying to address these questions, we shall distinguish between two main approaches to the ‘Europeanization’ of what used to be known as post-communist Eastern Europe: the transformative power associated with the consolidation of democracy in the Central European process of EU accession; the democratization in post-conflict Balkans under the conditions of weak states or ‘Europeanized’ protectorates. We shall conclude with some reflections about the limits of conditionality and the impact of democratization of the periphery on the EU itself.

The costs and benefits of democratization through enlargement Democratization involves costs and benefits which are obviously related to those of the EU enlargement process itself (Moravcsik and Vachudova 2003). It involves economic, political and social costs to the countries where

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democratization is taking place: reforms have to be carried out, the country may suffer from temporary disruptions, cards are reshuffled between winners and losers – and if democratization fails or suffers setbacks, the overall losses can be severe and lasting. Democratization may also entail costs for those countries which foster a democratization process from the outside (economic to some extent and certainly political), whether they trigger it or whether they support an indigenous democratization process – if one adopts here the distinction Laurence Whitehead made between democratization by control and democratization by consent (Whitehead 2001: 8) or again democratization by export or democratization by extension. Both may result in success or failure and even successful cases entail costs. While the United States has more often than not a history of imposing democracy by control – though it has also supported and still supports, mainly through its NGOs, the attempts of civil societies to further democracy and human rights from the inside – the European Union has mostly fostered democracy through extension. To be sure, it has not entirely abstained from exporting democracy, as the case of Western Balkans suggests. Together with other actors, mainly the United States, the United Nations and other international organizations including NGOs, it has been involved in ‘democracy by control’ in former Yugoslavia. Still, the European Community/European Union has on the whole chosen to employ another method of promoting democracy abroad: ever since it offered membership to the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, it has promoted democracy in neighbouring countries by extending its area of peace and stability, of prosperity and well-being – and since the peace was settled in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, it has been pursuing a similar path of supporting democracy there by devising for the successor states a future in the EU, the benefits and costs of which are very different from those entailed by a democratization process through exportation. Enlargement has proven to be one of the most powerful instruments in the hands of the European Union: this tool has influenced the internal dynamics of the fledgling democracies that wanted to join the European Community/Union, it has helped reshape the European continent and changed its geopolitical dynamics. Last but not least, enlargement has altered the Union itself. It has certainly turned out to be the most effective foreign policy the European Union has ever pursued. Yet at the same time, it has been extremely intrusive both in fostering democracy in countries at its margins and by promoting it through the enlargement process which in turn is changing its own make-up. It has been extremely intrusive in democratizing countries in so far as it has imposed a number of conditions for them to join the European Union while it has changed its own makeup by opening its market and its decision-making organization to the newcomers, once the conditions were met. Both elements are linked by a kind of quid pro quo: the higher the price – opening up the European Union for full membership – the more stringent the conditions – the so-called policy of conditionality known as the ‘Copenhagen Criteria’. This is indeed a very peculiar form of democracy promotion, entailing very high benefits as well as high costs. The benefits of democratization via enlargement lie in both the support and

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the guarantee that the EC/EU offers to the newcomers. As a number of analysts have underlined, the main contribution of European institutions to the nascent democracies of Southern and Central Europe has been to underwrite democracy, to guarantee it, both by offering for the short and medium term ‘an elaborate structure of economic and social incentives for changes in group and national behaviour that are beneficial to the prospects for democracy and, in the mid- and long-term, by setting a European framework which would permanently entrench democratic institutions’ (Whitehead 2001: 316, 338). In other words, joining the Common Market and taking part in the decision-making process of the EC/EU was the long-term prize while financial and technical assistance helped the new democracies to meet the costs of the transition period. Both short-term rewards and long-term guarantees matter. Rewards are necessary to enhance the legitimacy of the democratization process through efficiency: the EU thus influences the redistribution pattern, allowing broader groups of the population to reap benefits and to support the democratization process. The guarantee of access to both common market and institutions meanwhile stresses the durability of the transformation process. This high price may account for what is now being called ‘enlargement fatigue’, which in a sense runs parallel to the ‘democratization fatigue’ that has come over the United States in the wake of the Iraq war. However, just as democratization by extension is very different from democratization by export, enlargement fatigue entails a dimension absent from democratization fatigue – though both may be summed up by the same word: overreach. While the EU has often chosen to intervene fairly late in the democratization process of neighbouring countries, in the case of Central Europe, it seems to be intervening increasingly earlier on, such as in the South-Eastern Europe; it is now refraining from intervening early on in Eastern Europe. An early intervention threatens indeed to destabilize the very basis on which the quid pro quo of the enlargement policy is based on, i.e. the exchange of mutual guarantees: while the newcomers vow to stick to a certain number of principles – or conditions – the EU extends its permanent guarantee as a framework for these new democracies. As democratization seems to intervene earlier on in increasingly unstable areas, the prospect for democratization on the part of would-be newcomers to the EU appears more elusive and the EU less eager to extend a commitment to inclusion. Both parties are seeking reinsurance.1 This very innovative policy has been over the years extended to various parts of the continent, from Portugal to Poland. It was not only gradually applied but it was also gradually designed. Though the aim and to some extent the instruments that were applied to the second and fourth generations of newcomers (South and East) were the same, some other instruments were invented for the latter for whom rather strict conditions were set, the so-called Copenhagen Criteria. In the latest wave of enlargement, the EU leverage relied on the close connection between the unfinished agenda of the post-1989 transition and the prospective agenda of EU integration: the shaping of democratic governance of would-be member states through the promotion of EU norms and institutions

54 A.-M. Le Gloannec and J. Rupnik capable of implementing them. In this the process involves key institutions of the state such as the judiciary, public administration and decentralization through the building of regional institutions as key recipients of EU structural funds.

Europeanization and democratization in Central and Eastern Europe The whole process relies on acceptance and assimilation by the candidate country of the terms that are set by the EU. This is asymmetrical integration by any other name. The main motive rests on the promise of membership. The ultimate threat is not invasion but the threat of non-inclusion. The crucial cases to assess its effectiveness were less the Czechs than the Slovaks (Rupnik and Zielonka 2003), less Hungary than Romania, less Slovenia than Croatia. The process has worked on the ‘illiberal democracies’ of the 1990s (Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria) with delayed democratic consolidation and half-hearted economic reform. Vladimir Meciar, Ion Iliescu, the Bulgarian Socialists or the Croatian HDZ after Tudjman have discovered that the economic and political costs of their failure to meet the EU enlargement criteria can alter the domestic balance of power and help create conditions for democratic change. Slovakia will remain the classic example where the EU factor helped to tip the balance on two occasions (Harris 2004; Fischer 2006): first in the formation of the ‘proEuropean’/anti-Meciar coalition in the aftermath of Slovakia’s exclusion of the first circle of enlargement in July 1997; second, in the political sequence leading from the general election at the end of September 2002 to the Prague Summit on NATO enlargement in November followed by the EU enlargement Copenhagen Summit in December of the same year: rarely has domestic electoral choice been so explicitly influenced by external actors. Thus the real test of the EU’s transformative power is precisely this second circle of hybrid regimes with, on the one hand, pressure on powerful illiberal elites and, on the other hand, help for opposition forces to overcome their collective action handicap. Such a general assessment of the interaction between ‘Europeanization’ and democratization begs several caveats and the post-transition and post-accession fatigue is obviously not unrelated to costs entailed in both processes (transition and EU accession). By this we do not only mean the necessary transformation that the new democracies as well as certain economic sectors or social groups have undergone. Certainly, these conditions may be welcomed by the ruling elites, at least some of them in so far as they help to underwrite the transformation process in the new democracy. Some of these economic, social and political costs may be quantifiable in terms economic performance or electoral results. Other kinds of costs, however, lie in the misunderstandings that the very notion and nature of the Copenhagen Criteria creates. Three sources of such misunderstandings deserve to be mentioned here. First, the European Council Summit in Copenhagen in June 1993 was an attempt to define criteria for membership that amounted to a belated exercise in self-definition.2 Not only did the

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Copenhagen Criteria heavily borrow from international evolutions – from the paradigm set by the CSCE process in the 1970s and later, from the policy of conditionality that the Carter and the Reagan Administrations in particular pursued, from the policy of conditionality that the international financial organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank devised, or again from the policy which the EC itself started to further in Africa after the Ugandan disaster. These criteria were also further elaborated after the 1993 Copenhagen Summit: the political conditions in particular were developed by a European Commission avis of 1997 and later in the reports which were drawn up on each individual candidate country (Pridham 2002; Dimitrova and Pridham 2004). Second, as a number of analysts have pointed out, these criteria are vague and, on the whole, difficult to translate into practice (Lippert 2005: 123; Cremona 2005: 30; Pridham 2002). This elusiveness has led to some confusion: the criteria were, and are, neither entirely technical nor entirely political. In particular, the signals that were sent to those countries which made up the fifth – or ‘fourth and a half’ – enlargement, Romania and Bulgaria, were political indeed: though not all economic conditions were fulfilled, the Commission recommended the opening of negotiations for political reasons, in the wake of the war in Kosovo (Cremona 2005: 16). It certainly did not depend only on who was deciding, the Council or the Commission – the Council decides the broad agenda, yet the Commission may to some extent stray away from its main lines. No less importantly, as Barbara Lippert points out, both the Commission and some of the main countries devised a policy which was later sold under the guise of small, technical packages.3 Hence both history and nature of the criteria lead the candidate countries to believe that membership in the EU is a moving target, a remark that Central European or Turkish authorities have made: the apparent technicality of the Copenhagen Criteria is contradicted by political decisions, some of them perfectly legitimate while others may be less so. In any case, this is misleading in many ways, stirring confusion and even frustration in the candidate countries. Last but not least, the so-called Copenhagen Criteria are not playing into the hands of those who devised them either. Compliance is not guaranteed for a number of reasons: it is the internal dynamics and power relations in the democratizing country that determine the issue while the EU has only a relatively limited number of tools at its disposal. Studying the impact of conditionality on Latvia, Slovakia and Turkey, Frank Schimmelfennig stresses that ‘its efficacy depends on the candidate governments’ domestic political costs of compliance’ (Engert et al. 2003). It was the Slovak population who voted Meciar out of office, knowing well the costs his government entailed in terms of possible exclusion from the EU accession process. Meciar himself did not gracefully bow out. In other words, the efficiency of conditionality depends on internal dynamics and on a balance of forces that the EC/EU cannot stricto sensu control. It can at the utmost promise durable rewards to those political and social forces that will meet its requirements but it is not in its power to steer the political process. Of course, governments may be enticed, cajoled and persuaded but compliance

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eventually lies in their hands – and in those of their electorates who may vote them out. EU leverage only works with those political elites who want to make or cannot avoid making access to the benefits of EU membership a priority. Milosevic in Serbia or Lukasenko in Belarus remained perfectly immune to such lure. EU conditionality works best with relatively small and weak states: it would be much more difficult with countries such as Turkey or Ukraine. This process establishes a hierarchy of compliance with international/EU requirements the legitimacy of which depends on cognitive and behavioural change: adopting institutions or norms without a change in the political culture and behaviour would eventually undermine the EU from within. Recent developments among the new member states reveal an interesting contrast: contrary to what some observers had predicted, their inclusion, despite the failure of the constitutional reform, did not obstruct the modus operandi of EU institutions (Dehousse et al. 2006). However, there is concern about the way some of them implement democratic norms internally. The post-enlargement nationalist and populist backlash in Central Europe thrives on the challenge to the pro-European consensus of the elites that dominated the transition politics of the past decade and the institutions associated with constitutionalism and the rule of law (Rupnik 2006; Kolarska-Bobinska 2007). According to Adam Michnik, the former dissident intellectual and director of Poland’s main daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, the Poland of the Kaczynski twins is: a peculiar mix of the conservative rhetoric of George W. Bush and the authoritarian political practice of Vladimir Putin. In their attack on the independent press, curtailment of civil society, centralization power, and exaggeration of external dangers, the political styles of today’s leaders of Poland and Russia are very similar. (Michnik 2007) From this perspective it could be argued that Poland would under such circumstances have some difficulty getting into the EU. In other words, once a candidate country has been given the green light to join the EU, democratic conditionality is watered down and there are few incentives to spur its government to further reforms. Negotiations have rarely been suspended – as in the case of Turkey. Suspension is considered in a way as the ultimate weapon, difficult to handle, but the start of negotiations has been delayed in a number of cases. Once they have been completed, the EU so far has refrained from suspension or sanctions. The policy of conditionality which is at the very basis of European democracy promotion is tied with a time limit beyond which it loses its efficiency. The Commission has at times tried to extend the time limit within which the policy of conditionality is effective. Thus it declared that Bulgaria and Romania would join the European Union with a year delay if their governments did not fight firmly enough against corruption. Yet there was not actually much uncertainty about the two countries joining the

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EU and though the Romanian government for instance stepped up its fight against corruption before accession on 1 January 2007, since then it seems to have abandoned not only efforts and but even a pretence to do so. The latest Eastward enlargements of the EU thus raise a more general problem: the EU leverage as an external democratizer loses its effectiveness after the country’s inclusion in the Union. Austria in 2000 was the test case of EU post-accession power. When Haider’s xenophobic extreme right party won the election and joined in a coalition Schüssel’s Christian-Democrats (OVP) the EU first put Austria under quarantine, then appointed a committee of wise men to assess the state of Austrian democracy and finally gave up on ‘democratic interference’ in a member state. Haider eventually committed political suicide, thus vindicating Schüssel’s approach: mainstream conservatives can handle nationalist populists. EU ostracism showed its limits and absorption proved more effective. The implicit lesson for the new East European members was that nationalist populism is a trans-European phenomenon that can erode or even dissolve thanks to a soft EU constraint. This is possible because the populist Eurosceptics have a dubious practice of democracy, but do not advocate an alternative to it. They also know that the popularity of anti-elite discourse cannot be considered as tantamount to an anti-European one in a population which still sees the EU as a constraint on its elites and derives great benefits from its new membership. Indeed the most striking thing about the Polish electorate (with similar if milder versions in other Central European countries) is that the majority of its citizens consider EU institutions as honest and efficient while only 7 per cent consider that state institutions in Poland care for the interests of ordinary citizens and 83 per cent (down from 89 per cent in 2003) consider they ‘care first of all for the interests of those in power’ (www.cbos.pl). The populists thrive on identity politics and sovereignty discourse, but have no support in their electorates for challenging their country’s membership in the EU.

The pitfalls of democratization from above After democracy induced through the promise of inclusion, over the last decade the EU has been involved in democracy introduced and supported through the protectorates in the Balkans. The explicit goal of the international protectorates established in post-intervention former Yugoslavia is to help solve unsettled territorial questions and bring about a much delayed democratic transition. This is not democracy promotion per se but an investment in democratic security. The main lesson from the Balkans was that the two above-mentioned issues, democracy-building and nation-state building are closely related: a democratic transition has little chance of success unless there is a consensus on the territorial framework. Hence the European Union’s entirely new paradigm in the Western Balkans. Conditionality has traditionally worked with established and functioning states taking on the obligations entailed in the EU accession process. In the Balkans, the EU is now for the first time actually involved in nation-state building: in Bosnia, a provisional state in search of a post-Dayton constitution;

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Macedonia, a fragile new state whose viability rests on the implementation of the EU-brokered Ohrid constitution; Kosovo, a new state waiting for recognition; Montenegro, a new-born micro-state recently separated from Serbia; and, finally, Serbia itself, which still does not know what its borders will be. This reluctant EU involvement in nation-state building has specific features in each case. It has established the EU as the most prominent international actor in an effort combining a supranational ‘coalition of the willing’ ranging from NATO in the field of security to the OSCE as co-organizer and monitor of elections and the UN providing the international legitimacy for external involvement. In Bosnia, the EU factor has been a major (if insufficient) argument in the international attempt to move beyond the Dayton constitution imposed on the warring parties in November 1995. Dayton made peace through separation. Ten years after, the EU backed an attempt to move towards a more integrated polity with a single army, single police and a simplified and accountable decisionmaking process. After a constitution was imposed from abroad, this was supposed to be a constitution adopted by deliberation from within. The attempt was narrowly defeated, revealing the limits of both reliance on internal deliberation and external tutorship when conflicting hidden agendas concerning the future of the state still divide the three main communities involved. The Dayton constitution will enter history books as one that managed to avoid mentioning ‘the people’ and referred to the three communities: a state without a subject and a democracy without demos. That is an indication of the magnitude of EU’s challenge in Bosnia. In Macedonia, unlike in Bosnia, the EU was involved in a preventive intervention in 2000, which avoided a large-scale conflict between the Slav majority and the Albanian-speaking minority. No less importantly, it has become involved as a broker in the redrafting of the Macedonian constitution. If Dayton was peace through separation, the Ohrid constitution was meant as peace through inclusion. With direct EU involvement4 both parts accepted steps in that direction: the Macedonians to open genuinely the institutions of the state to the Albanian-speaking institutions; the Albanians to commit themselves to a common state. Neither would have been possible without the prospect of EU accession for both parties (and conversely, the shared responsibility for the consequences of failure). Serbia-Montenegro had been dubbed in Podgorica as ‘Solania’. This is because the EU representative Javier Solana was instrumental in negotiating the February 2003 compromise on a deferred path to independence of Montenegro and later for the conditions of a referendum held in May 2006 (which required 55 per cent in favour, at the EU’s insistence). In this way the EU assisted the birth of its smallest would-be member. In Kosovo, the EU has no doubt established itself as the most important international actor in the aftermath of the NATO military intervention in the Spring of 1999. It has been the main provider of external assistance for economic recovery and institution-building. Now it is a major backer of the Ahtisaari plan which proposed ‘supervised independence’ as the basis for its new mission

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(police and rule of law) which is supposed to pave the way for an exit strategy from the protectorate.5 This brief overview highlights the present European dilemmas. First, over the last decade the ‘Europeanized’ protectorates in the Balkans have been trying to encourage the building of democratic institutions and the rule of law; but how can it build ‘good governance’ and functioning state institutions if it doesn’t know which state it is building? Second: When the protagonists of the break-up of Yugoslavia embarked on belated nation-state building, they thought they were, in their way, ‘catching up’ with Europe. They were told this was ‘balkanization’ or fragmentation, the very opposite of European integration. Now both sides are discovering that the successful and peaceful completion of nation-state building processes actually depends on a joint EU membership prospect. Nationalist agendas can be overcome and contested new borders reluctantly accepted only if compensated by something more important for the future: EU accession. Hence the Union’s new task: to provide a common roof for the completion of future member statebuilding. Along with state-building, a related issue is democracy-building under protectorate. The politics of ethnic nationalism in the 1990s fostered or reinforced authoritarian regimes: instead of individual citizenship and the separation of powers, the nationalist political elites successfully invoked the primacy of collective bonds and the imperatives of national unity against an external foe. Such an environment was obviously hardly conducive to the emergence of political pluralism or a political system with checks and balances. The postwar protectorates or semi-protectorates imposed a new framework with the explicit aim to embark on a delayed democratic transition. This seemed to work in the early stages after intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo (‘free and fair’ elections and cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal on former Yugoslavia became part of EU conditionality for the inclusion of countries of the Western Balkans in the Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAA)). After a decade of imposed and then controlled democratization, the process is revealing its contradictions. In February 2007, the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council, the body in charge of the international protectorate in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has extended the mandate of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia until June 2008. Just as the international protectorate has in recent years been largely ‘Europeanized’, so the office of OHR has systematically been in the hands of EU members starting with Carl Bildt (former Swedish Prime Minister), the first appointee after Dayton, all the way to Paddy Ashdown who was supposed to be the last European proconsul and will certainly be remembered for his robust style of ‘democracy promotion’. His decision in August 2005 to dismiss some 70 Serbian MPs, based on an intelligence report from one embassy, brought into the open conflicting dynamics of supervised democratization from above and the domestic political forces. Instead of winding down the protectorate, the OHR mandate has been extended until the summer of 2008 at the very moment when the Constitutional

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Court made public its July 2006 ruling stating that the absence of the right of appeal by individuals sacked by the OHR in the past has deprived them of their civic rights (including the right to stand in elections or to work for public companies). The Court observed that this amounted to a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights which, according to the Bosnian Constitution, is the highest law in the land (Knaus 2007). The Constitutional Court noted that Bosnia’s obligation to respect the OHR’s decisions does not preclude the primary obligation of Bosnian officials and institutions to obey their constitution. The clash of two logics (Europeanized protectorate vs. domestic political constraints) has now been exposed as the central contradiction of internationally imposed constitutionalism. The court asks the government of Bosnia to implement its ruling, but the government can only do what is acceptable to the OHR. The democracy question for the protectorate is simple: either certain individuals are considered as ‘criminals’ and sent to ICTY in the Hague, or they are allowed to run for office, but then the consequences of free and fair elections must be accepted. The clash of two democratic legitimacies, elections and EU protectorate, is not sustainable for long. This dilemma of democratization from above had been pointed out by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission which in 2005 stated that it is ‘certainly not a normal situation that an unelected foreigner exercises such powers in a Council of Europe state’. The report did accept that emergency powers were originally justified, but that ‘such an arrangement is fundamentally incompatible with the democratic character of the state and the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The longer it stays in place the more questionable it becomes’ (European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) 2005). A similar issue appeared on the democratization agenda in Kosovo. Once basic security – the prime condition without which democratic development is impossible – had been established, the representative of the international community SRSG Hans Hakkerup issued the Constitutional Framework for Provisional Self-Government in May 2001, which also paved the way for the general election in November. The document lists the creation of an elected assembly and a prime minister and government chosen by the president of Kosovo. But the authority of the latter was from the outset very limited compared to the wide-ranging powers of the SRSG who could dissolve the assembly and call a new election, set ‘financial and policy parameters’ for the budget, appoint and remove judges and prosecutors, appoint the director of customs, the police (Kosovo Protection Force) and the Housing and Property Directorate (Independent International Commission on Kosovo 2000). If one of the most concise definitions of democracy is ‘no taxation without representation’ then Kosovo, under the new post-Milosevic Constitution, did not qualify. Since that early period of the protectorate there has been a slow but steady shift of power from the Europeanized protectorate to the local government with the aim of adopting the UN benchmarks (Papadimitriou et al. 2007). ‘Standards for Kosovo’ were presented as the pre-condition for discussing status. Now even

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those in charge of the protectorate accept that further progress on standards is unlikely till the question of status is not clarified. In other words, it is back to ‘no democratization and institution-building without statehood’. Despite a significant shift of powers from the international administration to the Kosovo government, much progress has yet to be made. ‘Conditional independence’ is perceived by the local actors as a decisive step in the direction of assimilating the institution-building process. European and more generally international presence will not disappear with the settlement of a ‘final status’ for Kosovo, but it will shift from decision-making control to the supervision of ‘standards’; i.e. the implementation of conditionality for independence which, in due course, would overlap with conditionality for EU accession. In the Western Balkans democracies and states are being built from above, with the EU as both an actor and a goal. An election is as much about domestic legitimacy as it is about international legitimacy. The prime aim of an election is to create an environment in which international (mainly European) actors can operate and local actors conform to the European agenda (Woodward 2005). In such a context, the only protectorate useful for democracy is one that seeks systematically to do itself out of business. The dilemma for the EU is the following: the only ‘exit strategy’ from the logic of protectorate is one of entry in the EU; from an imposed polity that risks emptying the democratic process of its substance to an external constraint that is accepted and legitimate.

Time and space: too early, too far away? Democratization by extension necessarily raises the questions of when to intervene, when to support actors involved in democratic change and when to offer the rewards and guarantees linked with EU membership. Are the answers primarily a matter of subjective interpretation, a political decision taken by the Council? Or do the seemingly objective criteria provide well-founded indications about when to intervene? This question of when to intervene cannot be answered in a definite and clear way. Different rationales may be at work. As suggested earlier the Commission advocated the opening of negotiations with the Eastern Balkans for essentially political reasons though the two countries were not actually ready for membership. Too many parameters come in to play: economic requirements and political ones may be at loggerheads, as the examples of Romania and Bulgaria as well as Poland epitomize. Political considerations may require early membership while economic circumstances would call for delayed membership. Or again one might advocate early membership for some particular political reasons while others would point at a later inclusion. As far as the Western Balkans are concerned, an early accession to the European Union might guarantee borders, foster local assimilation of institutions and entrench democracy and thus consolidate the South-Eastern flank of an enlarged EU. At the same time, enlargement to the Western Balkans might also lead to the importation of instability in the EU, were democracy and ‘stateness’ insufficiently consolidated.

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Democratization, and particularly democratization via enlargement, involves different timetables and different logics. On the one hand, time is necessary for reforms to be introduced and to bear fruit, all the more so as the democratization process is protracted and convoluted and the outcome of battles between various constituencies uncertain. On the other hand, time may be a scarce commodity for reformers in countries that are undergoing a democratization process. Poles and Hungarians or Turks were or are growing impatient as reformers need to deliver the benefits and uphold the promise of joining the EU. A momentum must be sustained to press on reforms and secure support, otherwise political costs for reformers may increase. This seems to be the case in Turkey: while the impact of conditionality is resented in the country itself, some European governments have openly displayed their reluctance to engage Turkey, even after the start of negotiations and at a time when a fierce though somewhat confused battle is opposing conservative reformers and secularist nationalists. As a result, a growing imbalance is being perceived in Turkey between conditionality and incentives, between benefits and costs; Turkish politicians are increasingly deeming it a political liability to claim Europe as a goal; and barely a majority of Turkish citizens currently favour their country’s membership in the EU. In other words, there are competing timeframes just as there are competing logics. A gnawing question inserts itself in these different time warps: how and when do we know that a country is firmly embarked on the way to a consolidated democracy? After all, was democracy so firmly anchored in the Iberian Peninsula when Spain and Portugal approached the European Community? Is it less firmly anchored in Turkey than it was just after these countries had shaken off their repressive regimes? Nevertheless, democratizing the periphery of the EU obviously raises the question of its limits. It comes with a geopolitical twist: the further East and South-East the European Union extends, the poorer and more unstable the territories it encounters. Some of the candidate or would-be candidate countries are poor. Some of them have ill-defined borders and sometimes, as in the case of Turkey, they border on dangerous and certainly not democratic countries, such as Iraq, Iran and Syria. Some of them have fledgling institutions, corruption flourishes and illicit traffic of all sorts abounds. In some of these countries, from Ukraine and Moldova to areas of the South-Western Balkans democratic changes are fairly recent and far from stable. The European Union expanded so far further South and further East to enlarge its area of stability, peace and prosperity. It actually embraced ten new states that had just freed themselves from communism so that no new Berlin Wall would arise further East, along the German–Polish border. This was the main concern of successive German governments that advocated enlargement to avoid the emergence or at least the institutionalization of an economic and social divide between Poland and Germany. Since the late 1990s and even more vigorously since the ‘Orange Revolution’ of December 2003, successive Polish governments have strongly favoured Ukraine’s membership in the EU for the same reasons German governments were advocating Poland’s membership in the EU. Yet in doing so, the EU

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increasingly reaches towards unstable frontiers where EU influence remains defused. More than an irony it is an unsustainable dilemma. The European Union runs the risk of importing instability while trying to export stability. Competition is thus taking place between the exportation of stability and the importation of instability, between the difficult promotion of norms and murky geopolitical requirements. The Union has very few means at its disposal to overcome this dilemma. One would be to erect a wall – as in Ceuta and Melilla – a paltry and, worse, unworthy attempt at ‘driving off the invaders’. Another one is to draw the curtain and stop enlargement while heeding the commitments that have more or less been already made and to create beyond the supposedly final borders of Europe ‘this area of well-governed democratic states’ which both the European Security Strategy and the European Neighbourhood Policy attempted to devise in 2003. This policy, however, is flawed in two ways: first, the ENP is lacking in persuasion so long as the ultimate prize of joining the European Union remains beyond reach. As a result, the EU can only exercise a limited influence on the governments and the actors of democratization concerned. Second, were the EU to intervene at an early stage of democratization, it might find itself embarked in a very murky process both because it would find itself involved in political engineering of a very difficult kind – as the case of the Western Balkans epitomizes – and because it might foster resentment and backlashes in the recipient country. Though one can hardly compare the cases of Ukraine and Turkey, which underwent a bumpy process of democratization for half a century – and though one is a candidate country and the other one is not considered as such – intervention in both countries should be closely looked at. Intervening in Turkey may be counter-productive. The country is experiencing intense in-fightings with no overlapping dividing lines between secularists and a so-called moderate Islam, between democrats, the army and those who would like to re-establish religion as the defining principle of public life, between reformers and the corrupt and weak parties of the old guard. The current battles pit the old Kemalist elites, which neglected to introduce reforms and co-opt new members from the new Muslim middle-class, against the new, moderate Muslim elite which wants to reap the benefits of the democratic reforms it introduced and the economic development it fostered. They further pit the democrats of all shades against the army, which might intervene in order to tighten the rules of the game and draw red lines if not in a soft manner, at least in a ‘post-modern’ one – by reference to the ‘electronic memorandum’ the military published on its website on 22 April 2007. Last but not least, they pit a vibrant, modernized, though deeply polarized society against political parties that have been unable to modernize – including the AK party, which finds itself emulating the stale, authoritarian parties of the Kemalist brand. This turmoil fosters at the same time a nationalist sentiment that all, Kemalists and AKP supporters alike, suddenly brandish as the sole common recourse available to all, the only language that might unite Turks of all shades. As Olli Rehn, the Commissioner for Enlargement, recently declared, an intervention on the part of the EU might be unwelcome and entail disastrous

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consequences. The French President nonetheless intervened in the run-up to the 22 July 2007 election when he reiterated his opposition to Turkey’s membership and the opening of the financial chapter. This raises a twin question: should the European Union stick to its commitments of opening chapters and divide the whole process into technical sequences, or should the political process always guide the negotiations? Should one take heed of political sensitivities in Turkey or never lose touch with public opinion in France or in other countries of the European Union? Just like the ‘Turkish question’, the recent wave of ‘colour revolutions’ on the periphery of Russia confronts the EU with new geopolitical dimensions of democratization. From the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Tbilisi to Kiev’s ‘Orange Revolution’ (leaving out the more dubious imitations in Central Asia) the pattern combined American-backed support for civil society actors involved in mobilizing youth activists against election fraud with European-backed support for a negotiated solution among the elites: European ‘soft power’ has proved effective.6 The Orange Revolution was not provoked by the EU, but it was influenced by it. On the other hand, the results of the March 2006 elections in both Ukraine and Belarus also clearly showed the limits of the influence on its ‘near abroad’ (Peel 2006). No less importantly, the Europeans remain divided on the implications of democratic change on the periphery of Russia, which also happens to be EU’s new neighbourhood. Its democratization and support for democratic forces there involves two major divisive issues. First: what are the implications of support for democracy in Ukraine, Moldova or the Caucasus for relations with Russia and what should be the priorities (democracy, energy supply, security) within the quest for an overall EU partnership with Russia? And second: should the European Union, in order to foster its democratizing role on its outskirts, think strategically and keep open the prospect of membership? Or should it seek to redefine its post-enlargement project, establish its own limits first and then see how far and how deep its neighbourhood policy should stretch? In other words, beyond the merits of democratizing the periphery through enlargement, the EU’s own ‘integration capacity’ and political identity are also at stake. The only policy that the EU can safely pursue – and which is far from inventive, innovative, let alone glorious – is the quest for reinsurance. This is what it has done in an unsystematic, almost haphazard manner, in particular in the wake of the fourth enlargement. It has sought to do so in three ways, first in devising possible blockages in the pre-accession phase, during the negotiation and eventually in the post-accession process; second, in multiplying the criteria or hurdles that the candidate countries have to meet; and last, in avoiding setting any firm time limit for accession – all three processes being linked. The opening of negotiations have sometimes been delayed and, in the case of Turkey, negotiations have been suspended, though there is no precedent of a negotiation opened and not completed. Criteria have multiplied as the history, one would almost say the archaeology, of conditionality briefly described above suggests. Successive waves of enlargement brought to light new difficulties and complexi-

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ties and with them new requirements, be it the fight against corruption, cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the settlement of borders and the establishment of good neighbourly relations – which was completely mismanaged by the Council and the Commission when both accepted the integration of Cyprus in the EU without pressing for a prior solution of the conflict (Phinnemore 2006; Tocci 2004). Cyprus will remain an example (and a warning for the future) of incompetent and inept squandering of EU’s leverage. Last but not least, no firm date for accession will be set in the future. In that regard, the accession of Romania and Bulgaria provided an example of what should not be done: The Commission turned out to be compromising enough to gloss over Romania’s and Bulgaria’s credentials and to accept them in the European Union on 1 January 2007 – or 2008 – as if that later date had made a difference (Condon et al. 2007). In other words, it pretended to delay without actually doing so, thus depriving the EU from exercising any effective pressure on Sofia or Bucharest to further reforms.

Conclusion: absorption as the last frontier In any case, the multiplication of hurdles is nothing more than an attempt to devise safeguards at various stages and under various guises. They are attempts by the insurer – the Union – to obtain reinsurance from its would-be members. Will they however suffice to soothe the mood inside the EU and entice its members to keep the door open? In the aftermath of Eastern enlargement and of the failure of the European Constitution a new criteria, that of the so-called ‘absorption capacity’, has surfaced, although it had been mentioned in the wake of the Copenhagen Criteria and put forth by the Delors Commission to justify its rejection of Turkey’s application for membership, partly because Turkey was not ready but also because the Community had a number of other problems to tackle first (Lippert 2005: 121–122). The ‘integration capacity’ criterion offers characteristics which distinguish it from the conventional Copenhagen Criteria. The main difference is that it concerns the Union rather than the candidate countries: it is not a prerequisite the candidate countries have to fulfil but a condition that the Union itself has to meet. In that regard, it seems profoundly asymmetrical: no matter what the candidate countries do or try to do, they may never reach an ever receding goal which the sole members of the Union are entitled to define. To be sure, the conventional criteria have to be met, not really negotiated. Yet the candidate countries either do or do not have the capacity to meet them, and they have the capacity to convince the Union that they have. The ‘integration capacity’, however, lies well beyond the candidates’ reach. In essence, the concept is about the make-up of the European Union, both objective and subjective. Here again this differs from the other Copenhagen Criteria. Though ‘absorption capacity’ as a criterion may be broken into technical, i.e. seemingly objective sequences such as the capacity of goods, service or labour markets, finances or institutions to absorb new member states, it entails a

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more political dimension (Aydin et al. 2006).7 It is essentially a statement about the identity of the European Union. Even though the EU has never ceased to function rather well in spite of successive waves of enlargement and unfinished institutional reforms, a growing degree of heterogeneity is introduced with successive enlargements, all the more so when it has taken place while several candidates had not met all the requirements. Solidarity as a link between old and new members has been stretched and some new members, such as the current Polish government, are criticized for their reluctant socialization into the EU. In other words, the ‘integration capacity’ refers to the identity that the members of the Union are supposed to share or hope to develop in the future. The forgotten Copenhagen criterion is about closure and borders that remain – for some time – to be drawn. These are not as much geographical borders – since there is no such thing as natural borders – as they are a political construct entailing a certain degree of arbitrariness.8 All borders are both objective and subjective, they encompass territories, structures and peoples that share elements the commonality of which is stressed rather than ignored (Eder 2006; Sundhaussen 1999). To that extent, the last Copenhagen criterion is a ‘norm’ that differs from the others spelled out in June 1993. Democracy is not at its core, rather identity in the sense of commonality, compatibility and a ‘community of fate’. This need not be essentialist, it can be moulded and shaped; it can indeed be minimalist, as Klaus Eder put it. Instead of being aimed at the outside world, at shaping the world beyond Europe’s borders, the ‘absorption capacity’ refers to a Europe looking inward. Thus two competing logics are at work: one is about projecting democracy through enlargement, a logic which seems to be losing its efficiency – partly because the further the EU reaches, the more difficult it is, and partly because neither the Commission nor the member states have deliberately sought to maximize its usefulness. The other is the logic of entrenchment, which seeks to counterbalance extension by consolidation inside the EU. Yet, just as the ‘enlargement vs. deepening’ debate of the early 1990s had shown, the two logics need not be mutually exclusive. Stability at the margins of the EU – and thus in the EU itself – will remain unlikely without the perspective of European integration, as the case of the Western Balkans shows. The only way to turn illiberal democracies into liberal ones is for the EU to help the peoples of the region take their fate into their own hands and become citizens of their own country while becoming citizens of the EU. Only by anchoring democracy through a credible guarantee of membership will these areas of instability and would-be democracy fully develop. However, democratization through enlargement cannot be pursued without the backing of citizens within the EU, who so far have been largely excluded from the process. Certainly there is a contradiction between two aspects of the EU as a union of states and as a union of peoples. As a union of states, the EU negotiates treaties that should be respected. As a union of peoples, its citizens should be involved and consulted if the legitimacy of the process is to be sustained. Yet consulting the citizens of the EU member states by referenda, once negotiations have been completed, is politically risky and irresponsible on the part of member states. The political

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consensus-building process involving debates within and between states should therefore take place much earlier and involve non-state, civil society actors. A trans-European debate is a pre-condition for public opinion acceptance of the process. Otherwise, frustration and backlashes will poison the whole process and deprive the EU from the best tool it has devised to ensure stability and democracy at its periphery.

Notes 1 By reference to the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 in which Bismark sought to ensure Russia’s continued alliance. 2 It had not been made explicit from the very inception of the EEC in 1957 that only democratic European states could join the European institutions, an element which the Birkelbach Report explicitly stressed in 1962 at the time when Franco’s Spain sought to apply for association. 3 Lippert (2005: 126): As far as the enlargement towards Eastern Europe was concerned, both the Commission and some member states pressed for the project and wrapped up this historical decision in a series of small packages which often sounded very technical and which in any case increased the pressure on the European Union. 4 Alain Leroy, a French diplomat, was the EU representative and Robert Badinter a key advisor to the drafters of the new constitution. 5 For a detailed discussion of the question, see International Crisis Group 2007. A unified position within the EU on Kosovo’s independence ‘supervised’ by the EU was by no means a self-evident proposition. Greece and Cyprus tend to back the Serb position. Countries with important Hungarian minorities such as Slovakia and Romania expressed strong reservations. Spain, confronted with the Basque and Catalan questions, was no less prudent. Nobody wanted the EU to endorse a separatist precedent. 6 Even Robert Kagan, a neo-conservative critic of European reluctance to support the ‘democratization’ of Iraq, praised the EU’s role in the Ukrainian crisis (5 December 2004). 7 Apparently the concept smacks of subjectivity as it refers to the ability of the Union ‘to function politically, financially and institutionally as it enlarges . . .’ (European Council June 2006). 8 Curiously enough Michael Emerson and his colleagues (Aydin et al. 2006: 10) imply that the question of Europe’s borders is not an open one, as they contend that ‘In both official and practical terms, “Europe” can be defined as the membership map of the Council of Europe’.

5

The EU’s promotion of democracy in the Balkans David Chandler

This chapter follows Baudrillard’s view that the ‘dissolution of the political subject’, i.e. the end of political projects of Left and Right, has created a crisis of representation and that the location of power is no longer clear, that in fact, political elites can no longer generate and externally project power, only simulate it (see, for example, Baudrillard 1987).1 In the absence of any connection with the masses, with their own society, elites are unable to give policy-making a broader social meaning, enabling them to engage and mobilize social support for a political programme.2 Baudrillard’s framework enables the articulation of a critique of traditional Realist or Critical understandings of democracy export as dissimulation, feigning ‘not to have what one has’, i.e. as a pretence that policy is not driven by self-interest or the needs of capital accumulation,3 through an understanding of policy practice in terms of simulation, which ‘is to feign to have what one hasn’t’: i.e. the pretence that there are clear instrumental interests and ideological values being asserted by the EU (1983b: 5). For Baudrillard, the framework of theoretical understanding is therefore radically different, based on the importance, not of a presence (of interests, of representation) but of an absence (a lack of social connection between elites and society and therefore of a lack of social power). The key point that Baudrillard makes is that the framework of grasping reality as dissimulation – the Critical or Realist critique of claims of ‘value-based’ policy-making alleged to be concerned with the promotion of democracy, human rights and good governance – ‘leaves the reality principle intact, the difference [between the real and the illusory] is always clear, it is only masked’. However, ‘simulation threatens the difference between “true” and “false”, between “real” and “imaginary” ’ because ‘the simulator produces “true” symptoms’ or effects (1983b: 5). According to Baudrillard, ‘the spectre raised by simulation’ is that the effects of power may exist but that ‘truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist’ (1983b: 5). This would seem to suggest an exercise of power which lacked strategic direction and the traditional attributes of the political subject or agent of power, including those of instrumental rationality and clear self-interest. Baudrillard suggests that what drives power is less political self-interest (the product of the politics of representation) and more the politics of simulation: the attempt to

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hide power’s inability to cohere and project self-interest. Simulation is the attempt to overcome, bypass or evade political elites’ lack of connection with their own societies. Baudrillard suggests a double technique of simulation, first the denial of the reality of the power of elites (‘the simulation of death’) and second the exaggeration of the power of others or of events in and of themselves (the construction of the ‘hyperreal’). First, Baudrillard argues that: ‘Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy’ (1983b: 37). This chapter will argue that the EU itself is a product of power’s attempt to deny itself – in this case, the attempt to deny the power that exists at the level of the national governments of EU member states (for example, Heartfield 2007). The EU by necessity enacts, in an exaggerated form, the techniques of simulation of its member states, whose ‘crisis of representation’ – or inability to present and project a socially-rooted ‘idea of the state’ or clear political project or purpose4 – it magnifies. In effect, the EU is a gigantic simulacrum as the product of the denial of power and reproducer of this process of denial through the politics of simulation. Second, Baudrillard argues that power hides its incapacity through the exaggeration of the problems which it confronts, through the production of the hyperreal: The only weapon of power, its only strategy against [its collapse], is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis. (1983b: 42) He argues that ‘hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective’ because policy is no longer organized around objective social threats and social problems. The response to power’s disappearance in the play of simulation is the reliance on crisis, ‘it [power] gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, political stakes’ (1983b: 43–44). It will be suggested here that the construction of the hyperreal has been central to the dynamic of policy-making in the EU, where alleged crises in the Balkans have continually necessitated new EU activity and mandates and institutional developments on the grounds that ‘European values’, ‘European identity’, or ‘European security’ are at stake in these developments. The EU exaggerates the forms of simulation apparent in member states’ own attempts to use foreign policy to develop ‘ethical identities’5 – making foreign policy the centre of its ideological and institutional attempts to constitute itself as a substitute symbol of political community to the nation state. For the EU, every external measure, from trade regulations to foreign aid, to the sending of troops abroad,6 comes attached with the necessity of expressing the EU’s alleged shared ‘identity’ and ‘values’ in the increasingly shrill and desperate simulation of these absent factors.

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Baudrillard suggests that a framework of simulation throws light on the reality of power and its practices. The understanding of political practices and policies as simulation enables them to be grasped more deeply in their material relationship to the ‘crisis of representation’ than a Critical or Realist perspective which would understand the discourses of the ‘export of democracy’ as a conscious fiction which seeks to dissemble reality (i.e. to lie about deeper economic and political motives and interests).7 Of particular concern for my argument is the difference between simulated ‘truth effects’ of political power and traditional acts of political power. It could well be suggested that the effects of simulation are the same as if they were traditional assertions of interest-based power.8 What difference does it make, for example, to the people of Bosnia, whether the EU is pursuing ‘real’ interests or simulating its political existence and its policymaking? How can very real protectorate powers to export democracy be understood in terms of simulacra and simulation? Baudrillard appears to argue that the policies of political simulation would be little different, despite the fact that the political stakes are illusory (hence, simulation as threatening the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’). For example, he states that: ‘war is not any less heinous for being a mere simulacrum – the flesh suffers just the same, and the dead ex-combatants count as much there as in other wars’ (1983b: 70). It will be suggested here that, in fact, there is a difference between simulation and interest-based policy-making and that simulation, precisely because it stems from the weakness of the political actor, (while no less real) can be seen to be a much more arbitrary and ad hoc process of policy-making. This is a process with little real relationship to either the policy object (in this case, the Balkans) or the simulator (the EU) itself. This lack of coherence or social grounding in either the object or subject of policy-making is reflected in the apparent autonomy manifested by the bureaucracy of the EU itself. This autonomy of the bureaucracy, brought into sharp focus by Baudrillard’s framework, reveals the ‘truth’ of the mechanisms of power at play, and the way in which the practice of democracy promotion in Balkans reveals the lack of ‘reality’ of both the EU (as a coherent actor) and of the Bosnian state as a constructed fiction (a simulacra). This autonomy is particularly highlighted where the power of the EU is most overt, in the position of the EU Special Representatives, which wield executive power over Bosnia and (with the impending settlement) Kosovo.

Enlargement: the ‘mission’ of the EU? Europe’s ‘mission’ to bring democracy, peace, human rights and good governance to the Balkans reveals its lack of mission. The mission to transform and save the Balkans relies on the techniques of simulation, not just the simulation of the EU itself as a political actor bearing the trappings of a sovereign state, but also the denial of the EU’s power, or rather the denial of the power of the EU member states, and the construction of a hyperreality of Balkan crisis.

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According to the April 2005 report of the International Commission on the Balkans, chaired by Guiliano Amato, former Italian prime minister, The Balkans in Europe’s Future: If the EU does not devise a bold strategy for accession that could encompass all Balkan countries as new members within the next decade, then it will become mired instead as a neo-colonial power in places like Kosovo, Bosnia and even Macedonia. Such an anachronism would be hard to manage and would be in contradiction with the very nature of the European Union. The real choice the EU is facing in the Balkans is: Enlargement or Empire. (ICB 2005: 11) This quote sharply sums up the dilemma facing Western Europe, or the EU, with the end of the Cold War – how to relate to and manage its new eastern ‘empire’. The response of the EU has been to engage in external regulation and relationship management interventions but at the same time deny that it is exercising its authority over the region. It is entirely appropriate for the international commission to pose the EU’s policy choices as ‘state-building’ or ‘empire’ and it is this dilemma, this denial of power, which has driven the enlargement process. This denial of the new West/East hierarchy of European power, and the EU’s de facto ‘empire’ to the east, has taken the form of democracy-promotion and statebuilding and the rapid extension and drawing out of the enlargement process to the Balkans. Where the international commission is slightly out of step with reality is in the assertion that the question of ‘Enlargement or Empire’ was one being posed in 2005. In fact, it was essentially resolved in 1999 when, with the end of the Kosovo war in April, the European Union headed the beginning of an ambitious international experiment in state-building and democracy promotion in the Balkan region. State-building has enabled the EU to project its power in the therapeutic framework of the liberal peace, of the capacity-building and empowerment of its eastern neighbours, rather than posing the questions of political responsibility which are raised with empire. Instead of posing the question of Europe’s imperial mission – in concrete terms, what Europe stands for and what Europe represents in relation to a Balkan reality – state-building and democracy promotion shifts the focus to the governing regime of the potential candidates. State-building through democracy promotion involves no less expenditure of resources than empire, in fact, if anything, state-building is more invasive and regulatory. The EU has not been hesitant to intervene, merely reluctant to assume political responsibility for intervention. The state-building process of EU enlargement has been able to be highly regulatory precisely on the basis that the regulatory mechanisms invest political responsibility in the candidate countries while denying the EU’s domination. In the process of enlargement, the two drives of simulation – internally, with regard to the EU’s purpose and coherence, and externally, with regard to the

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Balkans – intervention in the hyperreal (creation of the hyperreal) and denial of power (denial of the real) come together in a particularly forceful way. The EU’s experiments in shifting the political responsibilities of power away from Brussels have been described as implying no less than the ‘reforming and reinventing [of] the state in South Eastern Europe’. As the European Stability Initiative observed: A new consensus is emerging among both regional and international actors that the most fundamental obstacle to the advance of democracy and security in South Eastern Europe is the lack of effective and accountable state institutions. Strengthening domestic institutions is increasingly viewed as the key priority across the diverse sectors of international assistance, as relevant to human rights and social inclusion as it is to economic development and democratisation. (ESI 2001: 18) This is argued to be the special mission of the EU. The Commission argued that its focus on exporting democracy to the region through building the capacity of state institutions and civil society development reflected not only the importance of this question and the clear needs it had identified, ‘but also the comparative advantage of the European Community in providing real added value in this area’. It would appear that the Balkan states were fortunate in that their wealthy neighbours to the west had not only identified their central problems but also happened to have the solutions to them already at hand (EC 2001a: 9). The result of the EU’s simulation of its ‘mission’ is the problematization of the Balkans, of both the states and the societies which it exercises power over. It is important to note from the start the artificial and somewhat forced nature of the justifications for the EU’s state-building project. The problems identified in the governance sphere were not with the formal mechanisms of democratic government or the electoral accountability of government representatives but were concerns that went beyond procedural questions of ‘free and fair elections’ to the administrative practices and policy choices of governments and the attitude, culture and participation levels of their citizens. Regarding institutionbuilding, the European Commission asserted that: The lack of effective and accountable state institutions hampers the ability of each country to co-operate with its neighbours and to move towards the goal of closer integration with the EU. Without a solid institutional framework for the exercise of public power, free and fair elections will not lead to representative or accountable government. Without strong institutions to implement the rule of law, there is little prospect that states will either provide effective protection of human and minority rights or tackle international crime and corruption. (EC 2001a: 9)

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Where, only a few years previously, free and fair elections were seen to be the main indicator of representative and accountable government, institution-building was now held to be the key to democratic development. According to the Commission, strengthening state institutions was vital for ‘assuring the region’s future, being as relevant to human rights and social inclusion as it is to economic development and democratisation’ (EC 2001a: 9). While the Balkan states met the traditional democratic criteria, necessary for the incorporation of new members, such as Spain and Portugal, into Europe-wide mechanisms in the past, they were now held to fail to meet the new, more exacting, standards which are being laid down for membership of European bodies at present (Storey 1995). Regarding the second aspect of governance, civil society, the Commission was even more forthright in its condemnation of the aspiring members involved in the Stabilization and Association process: none of the countries can yet claim to have the level of vibrant and critical media and civil society that is necessary to safeguard democratic advances. For example, public and media access to information, public participation in policy debate and accountability of government and its agencies are aspects of civil society which are still largely undeveloped in all five of the countries. (EC 2001b: 10–11) In this case, the applicant states from the Balkan region could apparently not even make a ‘claim’ that they could safeguard ‘democracy’ in their states without external assistance in the form of democracy promotion and capacitybuilding. In fact, the Commission was clearly concerned by society in the region as much as by government, arguing that the aim of its new programmatic development was necessarily broad in order ‘to entrench a culture . . . which makes forward momentum towards the EU irreversible’ (EC 2002: 8). The process of constructing a Balkan hyperreality in order to construct the EU’s mission is that of simulation. The precondition for the EU’s ‘member state building’ in the Balkans is the formal and informal subsumption and subordination of the region. The Balkans are already integrated into the EU and this is precisely the problem posed by the region: its ‘real’ regional subordination to the EU. It is the dependency of the Balkan states on EU policy-makers and EU policy that makes the process of ‘integration’ necessarily an exercise in simulation and makes simulation necessary. The simulation of policy-making creates a hyperreality of Bosnia and Kosovo where the discursive language of choice is that of crisis (Baudrillard 1983b: 42). The EU actively seeks to deny its political subjectivity not by taking responsibility for policy but by denying its power to make policy and in so doing reveals its ‘real’ lack of political subjective capacity. The EU’s ‘inability to produce the real’ is reflected in its creation of the Balkan threat – the hyperreal – simulating the EU’s incapacity to take political responsibility for its power at the same time as multiplying its ‘truth effects’, its interventionist impact in the region.

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The politics of emergency and the discourse of crisis is a simulation, but a real and necessary one. Europe’s ‘big challenge’ in another context, where power was confident of its capacity and its project, would be no challenge at all. The former international High Representative and EU Special Representative from 2002 to 2006, Paddy Ashdown argues that the Balkans are a ‘relatively tiny morsel’ for the EU to swallow, with their tiny populations and tiny economies (Ashdown 2007: 118). The EU has already spent two billion euro in Kosovo since 1999 and will provide a further 1.5 billion euro to finance its proposed office of the International Civilian Representative. The EU’s formal assumption of the management of Kosovo is being described as ‘the moment of Europe’. Kosovo is a re-run of Bosnia as declarations are made of Europe’s mission. This is simulation as the values and purpose of the EU are not at stake in Bosnia and Kosovo. In fact, this is a double simulation, first, evading where the EU’s values and purpose are in question – i.e. within the member states of the EU whose populations are unlikely to be able to vote on any new version of the European Constitution – and, second, evading the ‘real’ political power and responsibility exercised over the Balkans and recreating the Balkans as a ‘hyperreal’ foreign and external challenge to the EU. Kosovo, ‘crisis what crisis’ argues the Russian ambassador to the UK, who states that there are plenty of de facto states without de jure recognition.9 What is the lurking dark threat of ‘inaction’ over Kosovo? The EU is in a rush to give Kosovo its ‘independence’ to legitimize its regulation and integration of Kosovo through the process of denying its own power and simulating its ‘death’ as an imperial actor through Kosovo’s ‘emancipation’. Within this framework, the process of hoops of ‘integration’ for Balkan states to jump through, such as the Stabilization and Association process, can be seen not so much as about integrating the Balkans as attempts to distance the Balkans from the EU; in other words, attempts to avoid the questions of the capacity of the EU to represent reality, to assert real power and responsibility over the region. Bosnia is a new type of state, being built through this process of simulation. Bosnia is a powerful example of the reality of the effects of simulation, of the EU’s need to simulate the exercise of power by distancing power and political responsibility. To all intents and purposes Bosnia is a member of the European Union; in fact more than this, Bosnia is the first genuine EU state where sovereignty has in effect been transferred to Brussels (no other state is as integrated as this one). The EU provides its government; the international High Representative is an EU employee and the EU’s Special Representative in Bosnia. The EU administrator has the power to directly impose legislation and to dismiss elected government officials and civil servants. EU policy and ‘European Partnership’ priorities are imposed directly through the European Directorate for Integration. The EU also runs the police force (having taken over from the United Nations at the end of 2002) and the military (taken over from NATO at the end of 2004) and manages Bosnia’s negotiations with the World Bank. One look at the Bosnian flag – with the stars of the EU on a yellow and blue background chosen to be in exactly the

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same colours as used in the EU flag – demonstrates the Bosnia is more EUorientated than any current member state. However, the EU has distanced itself from any responsibility for the power it exercises over Bosnia; formally Bosnia is an independent state and member of the United Nations and a long way off meeting the requirements of EU membership. After over ten years of state-building in Bosnia there is now a complete separation between power and accountability. This clearly suits the EU which is in a position of making policy with regard to the tiny state without either admitting it into membership of the EU or presenting its policy regime in strict terms of external conditionality. Bosnia is neither an EU member nor does it appear to be a colonial protectorate. The relationship does not appear to be one of formal equality or one of formal inequality – in fact, the relationship between the two (and their separation as separate entities) is hard to locate. Power seems to have no location, to have disappeared, through this process of denial and simulation.

Promoting ‘independence’ and ‘democracy’ in the Balkans? The EU works best when it is in denial of its power and of political responsibility – this denial is the source of its legitimacy (as the simulated state of ‘Europe’ – post-sovereign, post-national, post-interest-driven).10 The EU needs Kosovo to have ‘independence’ and sovereignty (as Bosnia does), so the exercise of power can be presented as ‘empowering’ – as facilitation, as ‘statebuilding’, as capacity-building, increasing the independence, autonomy, democratic accountability, human rights, rule of law, etc. in the Balkans. But the EU has portrayed the Balkans as alien and problematic; as hyperreal, as ‘in crisis’. The export of the solutions of freedom, autonomy, democracy, self-determination only reveal the simulation involved in denying power and simulating the existence of Balkan crisis. The simulation of executive and legislative powers under EU control as ‘democracy-promotion’ flows from the simulation of the Balkans as alien and crisis-ridden. The mission of simulation results in the dialectic of distancing and domination. This dialectic of simulation was revealed in the initial 1995 settlement where the Bosnian parties formally invited the external powers to develop their own mandates, creating the simulation of sovereignty rather than the ‘reality’ of a protectorate.11 As Baudrillard writes in ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ in terms of the external export of democracy to Bosnia: From now on, it is impossible to ask the famous question: ‘From what position do you speak?’ – ‘How do you know?’ – ‘From where do you get the power?’, without immediately getting the reply: ‘But it is of (from) you that I speak’ – meaning, it is you who speaks, it is you who knows, power is you. (1983b: 77–78) This process of external power imposed on the basis of the will of the Bosnian people as manifested not through representation but simulation (through the will

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of the EU Special Representative) was clearly articulated in EU SR Paddy Ashdown’s inaugural speech of May 2002: I have concluded that there are two ways I can make my decisions. One is with a tape measure, measuring the precise equidistant position between three sides. The other is by doing what I think is right for the country as a whole. I prefer the second of these. So when I act, I shall seek to do so in defence of the interests of all the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, putting their priorities first. (Ashdown 2002) Here representation – the representation of Bosnian voters through the ballot box and expressed in the electoral support for three ethnic parties – is explicitly seen to be a problem for Bosnian society, as preventing the will of the people from being collectively manifested.12 In order for Bosnian people to be truly represented ‘as a whole’, Ashdown argues it is necessary that he acts as their representative against the political parties (held to be unrepresentative). The Bosnian electorate and their will are simulated by Ashdown and at the same time the alien and external power of the EU SR is denied; he is not imposing his or the EU’s will, but merely the will of the people.13 This denial of power was taken even further in the shift (under Ashdown’s rule) from the power of the Office of the High Representative to that of the EU Special Representative, which was dressed up in the emancipatory language of democratization, away from the ‘push’ of the Bonn powers to the ‘pull’ of Brussels. Here the imposition of EU policy proposals is reposed as a voluntary choice deriving from the desire to ‘join’ Europe, rather than the imposed external oversight of the Dayton settlement. This simulation now means that Bosnian politicians are forced to ‘freely’ choose to implement EU programmes rather than having them imposed by edict. In 2006, Ashdown was interviewed on whether the shift from ‘Bonn to Brussels’ made any difference from the point of view of Bosnian representatives and citizens: Yes, it makes a huge difference. If it is imposed with a stick then the consequence is dependency . . . It takes a great deal of strength to be able to say: ‘No, we are not going to do this. You have to do it yourself.’ We have to be patient enough for the country to set back a bit when this happens . . . They have more independence because they are no longer supported by the use of the High Representative’s powers. Europe has said that if reforms are imposed via the High Representative’s powers then Bosnia cannot join . . . Is Europe acting in a quasi-imperialist fashion? Yes, but the difference is that it is up to people to say no if they want to. This is still persuasion, it is not coercion. I think it is perfectly legitimate for Brussels to say: ‘Guys here are the rules, if you want to join the club you have to conform to the standards. If you conform to them fine, but if you do not want to you do not have to join.’ It was very difficult for the Republika Srpska parliamentary assembly

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to agree to abolish their army and put it at the disposal of state institutions, but they did it, not me. It was a free vote in the Bosnian Serb parliament, I did not impose it. I may have told them it would be a good thing and that if you want to get into NATO you have to, but it was they who took the final decision. (Ashdown 2007: 113–115) Here, Ashdown forwards a subtle distinction between direct imposition, where the EU potentially bears direct policy responsibility and the policy of indirect imposition, where Bosnia’s elected representatives are held to be freely choosing certain policy prescriptions. The difference between these approaches may be important for the EU but makes little difference to Bosnian representatives or to the Bosnian public who are confronted with proposals drawn up by external actors. In neither framework is there any genuine debate between Bosnian parties or any role for local actors in the development of policy-making. In fact, in the case of imposition by the High Representative there is at least the clarification of power relations between the EU and the Bosnian state, even if there is the practice of simulation in the assertion that the external bureaucrat is merely ruling in the interests of the Bosnian people themselves. Bosnia’s formal international legal sovereignty gives the appearance that it is an independent entity, voluntarily engaged in hosting its state capacity-building guests. Questions of aligning domestic law with the large raft of regulations forming the EU aquis appear as ones of domestic politics. There is no international forum in which the contradictions between Bosnian social and economic demands and the external pressures of Brussels’ policy prescriptions can be raised. However, these questions are not ones of domestic politics. The Bosnian state has no independent or autonomous existence outside of the EU ‘partnership’. There are no independent structures capable of articulating alternative policies. Politicians are subordinate to international institutions through the mechanisms of governance established which give EU bureaucrats and administrators the final say over policy-making. The Bosnian state is a phantom state (a simulacra); but it is definitely not a fictional creation. The Bosnian state plays a central role in the transmission of EU policy priorities in their most intricate detail. The state here is an inversion of the sovereign state. Rather than representing a collective political expression of Bosnian interests – expressing selfgovernment and autonomy – ‘Westphalian sovereignty’ in the terminology of state-builders – the Bosnian state is an expression of an externally-driven agenda. The more Bosnia has been the subject of external state-building and democracy promotion, the less like a traditional state it has become. Here, the state is a mediating link between the ‘inside’ of domestic politics and the ‘outside’ of international relations, but rather than clarifying the distinction it removes the distinction completely. The imposition of an international agenda of capacitybuilding and good governance appears internationally as a domestic question and appears domestically as an external, international matter. Where the

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representative sovereign state clearly demarcated lines of policy accountability, the state without sovereignty blurs them. In fact, ‘the politics of the real’ – political responsibility for policy-making – disappears with the removal of sovereignty.14 Democracy, in so far as it can be said to exist in the form of elections etc., has no relationship to policy-making. The simulation of representation in Bosnia and Kosovo could now be said to be complete under the reign of the EU democracy exporters and state-builders. The EU’s exercise of its power creates simulated states in its own image, where the death of representation, disappearance of power and the existence of bureaucracy isolated from society, takes its most grotesque forms.

Arbitrary power: the EU ‘Special Representatives’ In the Balkans the EU Special Representative in Bosnia, who also holds the Office of the High Representative, and the EU’s Special Representative in Kosovo, who will assume the position of the International Civilian Representative, represent the tendency towards arbitrary power. Their powers are potentially arbitrary both vis-à-vis the EU and vis-à-vis Balkan society.15 The EU Special Representatives operate (there are nine at present, ten with the finalization of the post-status arrangements in Kosovo) under the direction of the EU’s ‘High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy’ (CFSP). Javier Solana is currently the High Representative for CFSP. The post is often termed the EU’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (a post which is alleged to have failed to become a ‘reality’ with the failure of the Constitutional treaty). Solana’s post highlights the process of reproduction of simulacra within the EU framework. The planned post of Minister for Foreign Affairs would itself have been a simulation. The EU planned no other ‘ministerial’ positions. (The Council of Ministers is composed of national government ministers, its rotating Presidency is held by national prime-ministers. It is only the Secretary-General of the Council, the head of the Council Secretariat – the High Representative for CFSP – who holds a simulated ministerial post, neither representative of a national government, nor elected as a European representative, as are the members of the European Parliament.) The EU’s Special Representatives are the simulation of government representatives of the EU, which lacks a genuine government of its own. While in the realm of internal EU politics there is little clarity where political responsibility lies, whether at the level of member states or in EU forums, it seems that the further EU power stretches away from Brussels, the more it appears capable of simulating itself as an independent political entity (not a composite of member nation states). It is only in the international arena that the EU comes into its own, where its representatives take on political power which is separated from the national governments comprising the EU. In fact, it is only in the international arena – where the EU is most free to simulate state-like attributes – that individuals have the authority to represent the EU as an

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independent political entity (and reveal the hollowness/truth of this simulation to its full extent). Nowhere is the power of the EU as an independent actor standing independently and above its member governments, felt more powerfully than in the Balkans, where the HR and prospective ICR have executive authority to make legislation and sack elected local political representatives. In one way, the EU’s Special Representatives clearly symbolize the end of representation. The EU is the embodiment of the rejection of sovereignty, yet its ‘representatives’ represent sovereign power in Bosnia and Kosovo. They represent sovereign power precisely because the relations of state sovereignty are not present in EU–Balkan relations. The Special Representatives represent neither the citizens of Bosnia and Kosovo nor the citizens of the EU. Rather, the simulated nature of both the EU as a policy actor and the Balkan states as objects of democratization and empowerment produces a relationship of ad hoc and arbitrary power. This power is arbitrary in the sense of having no fixed or cohered relationship to society. This flexibility has been exemplified by the extension of the powers of the High Representative since Dayton, one incumbent explaining that this process was one which has no fixed limits: ‘if you read Dayton very carefully . . . Annex 10 even gives me the possibility to interpret my own authorities and powers’ (cited in Chandler 2000: 65). The pattern of ad hoc and arbitrary extensions of international regulatory authority was initially set by the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) itself as it rewrote its own powers and those of the High Representative at successive meetings. The most important of these were the initial strategic six-monthly review conferences: at Florence, in June 1996; Paris, in November 1996; Sintra, in May 1997; Bonn, in December 1997; and Luxembourg, in June 1998. In Bosnia the EU SR clearly manifests the imploding nature of the continual play of simulations, where every issue is held to manifest the ‘values’ of the EU and the crisis of Bosnia. In fact, the tying of reform to EU membership has made nearly every policy issue one of crisis for both parties. This was clearly manifest in the regular crises over cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) where negotiations on membership for several states were suspended over allegations of a failure to cooperate and the bureaucratic imperative of cooperation meant that many alleged war criminals voluntarily surrendered and were waved off to The Hague with full military and political honours, seen as heroes, not so much for their role in the war, but for their willingness to sacrifice their freedom for the country’s entry to the EU (see Chandler 2005). Ashdown, in particular, has been held to have overplayed his hand in seeking to use the EU (and NATO) to support his reform plans by seeking to make policy reform a pre-condition for progress towards membership. This was highlighted, in particular, with the issue of police reform that dominated the last years of Ashdown’s term. Ashdown wanted the abolition of entity-based police forces and the centralization of police authority. However, he was on a very weak footing in linking his plans with EU membership, overpoliticizing the

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issue of reform, and perpetuating the hyperreality of crisis over the reform process. While Ashdown invoked the leverage of the ‘pull of Brussels’ to impose these major reform proposals, it was clear that he was acting independently of Brussels and the wishes of the European Commission. The Commission viewed Ashdown’s actions as destabilizing Bosnia’s relations with the EU and considered the EU Special Representative to be on weak ground politically, as the Swiss, German and Belgian models, which had been specifically looked at in more detail, definitely did not follow the centralized approach intended for Bosnia. The European Commission were reluctant for Ashdown to use the issue for a political showdown and gave the Bosnian representatives evasive signals, encouraging opposition to the proposals, and were pleased to see Ashdown’s radical plans eventually watered down (Muehlmann 2008). The political reflections of this are manifest in local political ‘representatives’ who do not need to (and cannot) take responsibility for policy-making, knowing either that the EU will impose its will by diktat or back down and change it’s policy proposals so as not to risk the enlargement process. Because all that remains of the domestic political process is simulation, so-called ‘policymaking’ – the assent to external will – becomes a simulation exercise and therefore either a crisis in the relationship between Bosnian representatives and the Special Representative or between Bosnia and the EU. Therefore, this process is much more problematized than a ‘real’ exercise of political decision-making (one of representation) which necessarily involves compromise and negotiation around problems arising from and related to that society. The simulation of the EU’s power and purpose results in the operation of power relations which are continually in contradiction with ‘reality’, continually confronting reality with simulation and the creation of hyperreality. Thus one self-creating ‘emergency’ follows another, as the fictional hyperreal portrayal of Bosnia and Kosovo – of ‘resistance’, of ‘parallel structures’, of the power of nationalists – are held to confront the fictional portrayals of the mission of the EU – of the need to reform to meet EU standards, of the implementation of the acquis, of empowerment, capacity-building and greater ‘ownership’. These recurring crises are real not despite the fact that they are simulated, but precisely because they are simulations. The inevitable crises of EU policy-making in the Balkans reveal the truth of the inability of the EU to regulate and integrate the region through long-term strategic policy-making.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and hyperreality are useful to provide insights into the European Union’s policy-making process with regard to democracy promotion and state-building in the Balkans. The use of this framework suggests that the EU, as a simulacra, lacks the capacity to coherently assert the power of its member states. It further suggests that the EU’s domination of the Balkans takes the form of a denial of power and

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exaggeration and overpoliticization of the relations between the EU and the Balkan potential members, through the hyperreal construction of the problems of enlargement. It further suggests that the outcome of the process of simulation is less the export of democracy than the export of power in an ad hoc and arbitrary manner and in the creation of states which are simulated – which are ciphers for external power rather than linked to their own societies.

Notes 1 See, for example, Baudrillard (1987) and the accompanying interview with Sylvere Lotringer. 2 These points are made in Baudrillard (1983a), where he clarifies that without political engagement, ‘without this minimal participation in meaning, power is nothing but an empty simulacrum’ because ‘Quite simply, there is no longer any social signified to give force to a political signifier’ (1983a: 27, 19). 3 See, for example, Rita Abrahamsen (2000), Barry Gills (2000) or Steve Smith (2000). For useful critiques of traditional IR theorizing, using Baudrillard’s framework, see, for example, Cynthia Weber (1995) and François Debrix (1999: 9–15). 4 For Barry Buzan’s concept of the ‘idea of the state’, see Buzan (1991: 69–82). 5 This can be seen in the focus on a wide range of ‘other’-orientated foreign policy frameworks, from the ‘first great war of interdependence, the struggle for climate security’ (Margaret Beckett, UK Foreign Secretary, ‘Climate Change: The Gathering Storm’, Annual Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture, British American Business Inc., New York, 16 April 2007), to the concern with threats from failed states, to humanitarian crises, to the war on terror. See, for example, David Chandler (2006a), especially ‘The Ethics of Empire in Denial’, Chapter 4. 6 The extent to which every external expression of EU ‘concern’ rapidly degenerates into a question of (crisis of) EU values was only too adequately demonstrated in the EU’s assumption of the leading role in the UN peace mission following the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006. The EU’s attempt to simulate shared values led to the dispatch of troops as an exercise in simulation (there was no intention of using them to constrain either the Israeli forces or Hezbollah and therefore no idea what equipment if any was required); see further, Chandler 2006b). 7 As Baudrillard states in the fictional quote from Ecclesiastes at the opening of ‘The Precession of Simulacra’: ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true’ (1983b: 1). 8 I would like to thank Zaki Laïdi for raising this question after reading the formative thoughts for this essay. 9 Yury Fedotov, speaking on BBC Radio 4, 3 April 2007. See also, Russian President, Vladimir Putin’s remarks, regarding Kosovo: ‘We hear only one answer. That we need to hurry. But hurry where? What is happening that requires us to be in such a rush?’ cited in Luke Harding (2007). 10 As Zaki Laïdi argues: Power – understood in its widest sense – is conceived and experienced less and less as a process of taking over responsibilities, and more as a game of avoidance . . . Social actors avoid taking on their own responsibilities . . . because, in the absence of a project of meaning, responsibilities are measured only in cost terms. (1998: 13) For Baudrillard, ‘We are at the point where no one exercises power or wants it anymore’, therefore the practice of power is simulation, the defence of elites is to

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D. Chandler allege that power is ‘being democratized, liberalized, vulgarized, and, more recently, decentralized and deterritorialized, etc.’ (1987: 55). Bosnia is probably a better and clearer example of what Cynthia Weber describes as the end of sovereignty as a meaningful referent and the exchangeability of the signifiers ‘sovereignty’ and ‘intervention’ (1995: 126–127) than her studies of US intervention in Grenada and Panama. From the beginning of the Dayton process, there was an assumption by international interveners that the Bosnian people could never be constituted on the basis of representation. The marginalization of the people of Bosnia from their own political system by external powers was summed up in the first High Representative, Carl Bildt’s observation that: ‘No-one thought it wise to submit the constitution to any sort of parliamentary or other similar proceeding. It was to be a constitution by international decree’ (Bildt 1998: 139). This process of simulation could also be observed in the July 2007 United Nations Development Project Bosnia survey, The Silent Majority Speaks (UNDP 2007). As Cynthia Weber notes, this understanding is problematic within the ‘logic of representation’, where ‘a boundary “truly” exists between sovereignty and intervention, and this boundary insures the distinction between these two terms’ (1995: 127). This puts EU democracy promotion in a different light to that of national governments who are at least accountable to their electorate. For example, George W. Bush’s defeat in the 2006 mid-term elections was largely on account of the public perception of his failed policies with regard to Iraq. In the EU there is much less oversight over the policy actions and no direct electoral accountability for policy failings. I am grateful to Christopher J. Bickerton for this point.

6

A missed opportunity? The EU and the reform of the UN human rights architecture Franziska Brantner and Richard Gowan

The promotion of democracy and human rights is very high on the EU–UN agenda,1 reflecting the widespread belief among European citizens that the EU should promote human rights and democracy worldwide.2 Since the end of the Cold War, EU members have been active in putting rights issues on the UN’s agenda. Acting as a bloc, the EU has introduced over 200 resolutions on specific rights situations in UN forums since 1991. EU members have also been instrumental to promoting elements of a normative revolution at the UN in the 1990s, including the approval of the International Criminal Court and the Responsibility to Protect. But Europe is not the only power which aims to promote global norms through the UN – and, contrary to what is generally believed, European preferences might clash with those of other active blocs, such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference. For instance, in the summer of 2007, the EU had to go as far as threatening its withdrawal from the nascent Human Rights Council (HRC) in order to maintain the Council’s prerogative to address country-specific situations. While the EU finds itself opposed to members of the global south on rights issues, it does so at a time in which relations between the United States and the south at the UN have deteriorated even more dramatically (Benner 2006). This has confronted the EU with a dual challenge. Its members want to ensure that the US does not give up on the UN and at the same time that rising powers such as China and India remain invested in the system. Javier Solana has warned that “in 20 years time, it will be harder to convince giants like China, India and others that a rules-based international system is in their interest too.”3 In this context, three types of strategy have been proposed for EU behavior at the UN. The first is to speak with “one voice” so as to assert a clear European identity in the world body, the second to be the “bridge” between the US and its opponents (to be the soft middle power) and third to be a change-maker, to use its leverage proactively by building new alliances. The first strategy entails acting as a coherent and consistent voting bloc. In that light, existing investigations on EU–UN relations focus on internal EU coordination mechanisms at the UN and EU–UN cooperation mechanisms (Laatikainen and Smith 2006; Wouters et al. 2006).4 But this analytical focus has obvious weaknesses: it prioritizes the existence of common EU positions

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over their substance. Also, unity alone is not enough to ensure European influence. The EU and its consistent allies do not add up to a numerical match for the G77, southern states coalition. This chapter demonstrates in its first section that the achievement of a high level of coherence by the EU on rights in UN votes has been paralleled by declining support for its positions among the wider membership. Second, since the Iraqi debacle, there have been recommendations for the EU to draw the US back into the UN system – effectively acting as a political bridge between the Americans and the global south. This strategy has flaws though: it can leave the EU looking weak on policy, as it once again apparently prioritizes consensus over substance. Furthermore, while it has proved relatively easy to identify common concerns for the US and EU on security issues at the UN, it has been harder to set out any new vision for EU–US cooperation on rights. One otherwise highly concrete set of recommendations to Washington and the EU could only suggest a “searching transatlantic conversation” on rights questions (Benner and Luck 2007: 21). The third potential strategy for the EU is to focus neither solely on itself nor excessively on the US, but to take a “change-maker” role in making the UN system more effective. Some advocates have argued that the EU should be robust in its use of influence and leverage to try to make the UN more “positive” in its approach to human rights and security (Leonard and Gowan 2004). Conversely, it has been proposed that the EU should focus on well-regulated global governance – and by extension the UN – as a good in its own right, especially as both the EU and UN have an existential interest in maintaining the credibility of international law (Fassbender 2004; Ortega 2007). Attempting to bring these two positions together, it has been proposed that the EU should link its faith into the UN to a new doctrine of promoting Global Public Goods (Biscop 2005). This chapter argues that the EU’s most promising role is that of an alternative change-maker, understood as a power that advances universal human rights by reaching out to new allies and using reflectively, but nonetheless assertively, European leverage. We do not argue for the EU to become the next bullying power, but neither for the spreading of “European norms without force” (Laidi 2005). This begs the central question of what the EU profoundly wants to be (Laidi 2005: 12): a catalyst for improved and enhanced international cooperation on human rights or rather the exporter of EU preferences and influence beyond its borders? Even if the two are obviously linked, equating the two amounts to equating EU preferences to “interests of the world.” This is closely linked to the central question of this volume, namely if EU normative power expresses “a sort of European virtue claiming universal validity or is it a weapon in the hands of Europe to promote its own interests?”.

Tracking European unity and influence on human rights at the UN The analysis of inter-governmental politics on human rights in UN forums needs to be understood in terms of a growing political polarization within the UN

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system as a whole that does not necessarily stem from rights questions. Although UN members realistically recognize that political power is concentrated in the Security Council, other forums – including the Economic and Social Council and both the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) and HRC – have become, in the eyes of many southern missions, centers of symbolic resistance to the West. To critics from the south, the Security Council (on which the US and five European members can usually predominate when united) appears ready to ride rough-shod over the concerns of countries outside it. In 2006, South Africa’s ambassador to the UN complained that the Council’s members tended to treat the UN as “Fortune 500 Company,” in which they held “Class A stocks” while all others had “common stock” (Rizvi 2006). The depth of the ill-feeling around these issues was underlined in April 2006 when an important package of management reform proposals set out by SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan were subjected to a highly unusual vote in the Fifth Committee – its first for two decades. It members decided by 108–50 against going forward with the reforms. The EU’s members were united, but on the losing side with the US, and the British Ambassador (representing the EU presidency) decried a “chronically inefficient” process that had “comprehensively failed to incorporate the views, on many essential issues, of the European Union” (Better World Campaign: 2). This episode highlighted the persistence of the North–South divide, and the effectiveness of well-established voting blocs in the UN system – the EU, US and their allies were soundly defeated by a united G77. The resulting polarization not only disadvantages the EU (less well-represented in these forums than in the Security Council as Table 6.1 shows) but also means that rights votes are treated as ammunition in a struggle over how the UN is run, distracting attention from their substantive merits. Given these tensions, and given the potential use of human rights as ammunition, we would expect to see a decline in support for European positions on rights at the UN. Previous studies have tended to focus on the EU’s unity at the UN, rather than its correlation with its influence, although Karen Smith noted in 2006 that support for EU positions on human rights appeared to be declining in the General Assembly (Smith 2006a: 132). Recent research carried out by the authors has shown this expectation to be broadly correct (Brantner and Gowan 2007). European unity at the UN can be a good in its own right. As Paul Luif showed in a 2003 study of voting in the General Assembly, a convergence between current and future member states in the run-up to enlargement was symptomatic of the Union’s expansion to take in Eastern Europe. And European splits can also signal real political woes – Luif published his findings shortly after the Iraq war had sundered European unity at the UN (Luif 2003). To examine voting patterns, the authors drew on a computation method used by the US State Department in its annual report to Congress on voting in the General Assembly.5 It is based on a calculation of “voting coincidence”: a percentage figure that indicates the frequency with which other Assembly members vote with the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the figures show a massive decline in

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support for US positions over the last decade. It reached a high of 50.6 percent in 1995. By 2006, it had fallen to 23.6 percent. This decline began in the Clinton era, as Washington distanced itself from the UN over Bosnia and Kosovo – but it has intensified during the Bush presidency, as the US has voted alone (or with small numbers of allies) against majorities at the UN as a matter of habit. Applying the same method to EU voting in the Assembly must come with a caveat: there are still cases in which the EU does not vote as a bloc. The number of EU splits has diminished over the last decade. In the later 1990s, the EU could not find consensus on roughly one-fifth of General Assembly resolutions (although in many cases this reflected only one or two countries, most often Britain and France, distancing themselves from the European majority). This figure jumped to just over one-third of all votes in the 2003–2004 session of the General Assembly, suggesting coordination problems following the diplomatic disturbances over Iraq (see Figure 6.1). However, it is striking that enlargement did not create greater disunity in the EU – it grew more coherent in 2004. Turning to the EU’s influence, the authors used a more detailed version of “voting coincidence” than that employed by the State Department. It is based on all General Assembly votes in which the Europeans achieved consensus. The table represents the overall level of support by non-European members of the General Assembly for EU positions during each session (a 75 percent score would mean that, on average, members of the General Assembly had voted with the EU three-quarters of the time in a given session).6 Overall, the results looked good for the EU. An examination of voting patterns reveals that, in those votes on which it achieves consensus, the majority and the EU defended the same 40 35

Percentage

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Figure 6.1 Number of EU splits in General Assembly, 1997–2007 (source: www.un.org/Debts/dhl/resguide/gares1.htm).

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Figure 6.2 Voting coincidence in General Assembly, in cases of EU consensus, 1997–2007 (source: www.un.org/Debts/dhl/resguide/gares1.htm).

position in General Assembly votes far more often than not – with a voting coincidence score of just under 80 percent. It has moved a long way from the US (which, using this methodology, scores below 20 percent). This means that, on average, members of the General Assembly adopted positions aligned with EU in four-fifths of the votes in the 2006–2007 session, while aligning with the US in fewer than one-fifth of the cases. Yet these figures do not reflect the EU’s performance on sensitive topics voted on by the General Assembly, especially human rights. While EU coherence on human rights issues had reached 100 percent by 2005–2006, e.g. the 25 always voted together, the number of non-EU countries voting with the Europeans on human rights has declined. This graph shows that the EU has gone from managing consensus in threefifths to four-fifths of human rights votes for most of the last decade to achieving total consensus in the 2005–2006 and 2006–2007 sessions. But the number of non-EU countries aligning themselves with European consensus positions has followed a downward trend. In 1997–1998, the level of support among non-EU members of the Assembly for EU positions stood at 75 percent – by 2006, this figure had fallen to 53 percent (meaning that on average, states only cast their vote with the EU in a bare majority of cases). A striking feature of this downwards trend is that the decline of EU influence appears to have coincided with the resurgence of China and Russia as voices on rights issues. In the late 1990s, both the EU and US (with a 77 percent voting coincidence score) enjoyed higher support than China (50 percent), India (62 percent) and Russia (67 percent). This has been reversed, with the US (scoring just 22 percent) suffering a worse decline than the EU, while China’s score is up to 81 percent and India and Russia’s to 83 percent.

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Figure 6.3 EU splits on General Assembly human rights votes, and voting coincidence with EU consensus positions, 1997–2007 (source: www.un.org/ Debts/dhl/resguide/gares1.htm).

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Figure 6.4 Voting coincidence with China, EU, India, Russia and US on human rights votes in General Assembly, 1997–2007 (in cases of EU consensus) (source: www.un.org/Debts/dhl/resguide/gares1.htm).

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0 52 (1997–1998)

Average number of votes

The steepness of the American decline reflects the fact that the US has voted against many human rights resolutions – sometimes on its own – that the EU supports. These include issues such as the right to food and the rights of the child. The US Administration’s suspicion of apparently uncontroversial rights resolutions is a major obstacle to the EU acting as an effective political bridge between the US and G77. One area where the US and EU still agree, however, is on General Assembly resolutions addressing rights situations in specific countries. In the 1990s, Europe and the US built very large majorities in the General Assembly for votes on the former Yugoslavia. In 1999, 122 states backed a resolution on Kosovo. The EU and US continue to back such resolutions. Recent examples include votes on Belarus, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Myanmar, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. But the majorities in favor of these country-specific resolutions have declined since a peak in the late 1990s. Whereas the average number of countries voting in favor of country-specific resolutions peaked at over 100 in 1998–1999, it has fallen to the low 80s in recent years. Although most states not voting in favor still tend to abstain, the average number of votes against these resolutions has crept upwards from an average of below 20 in the late 1990s to the mid-30s. Thus on both general and on specific country cases, the General Assembly has become an increasingly challenging forum for the EU to advance rights issues. It is not all bad news. The EU’s solid voting group – one-fifth of the UN’s membership – can still count on the reasonably regular support of another fifth.7 This includes the US and its own circle of consistent allies, middle powers such as Japan and Canada, and a significant number of Latin American

General assembly session In favor

Against

Abstain

Figure 6.5 Support for country-specific rights resolutions in General Assembly, 1997–2007 (EU supporting resolutions in all cases; excludes votes on Palestine) (source: www.un.org/Debts/dhl/resguide/gares1.htm).

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democracies.8 But this coalition has obvious limitations: it contains virtually no states from Africa (bar Burundi and Tanzania) and its Asian members are mainly small American allies. The Latin American democracies that frequently support the EU on rights are balanced by another group of Latin American countries that oppose it (although large states in the region, including Brazil, Chile and Argentina, are in the former group). Those countries that typically oppose EU positions can be roughly divided between “frequent opponents” (those with a voting coincidence with the EU of between 30 percent and 50 percent) and “hard opponents” (those with a voting coincidence score of less than 30 percent). The “frequent opponents” of the EU on rights add up to 91 states – another 40 percent of the Assembly. Meanwhile, the “hard opponents” only number 16, but include significant players including China and Russia.9 While the hardest opponents tend to be autocracies, frequent opponents of European positions on rights include many democracies, including India and South Africa. A correlation between political freedom and proximity to the EU on rights issues is obvious in Europe, but varies significantly across other regional groupings.10 There is no link between (non-European) countries’ formalized relations with the EU and their votes on rights – neither countries included in the EU Neighbourhood Policy nor countries covered by the Cotonou agreement have a higher tendency to follow the EU’s lead on rights issues at the General Assembly. Only a minority of those states that have signed Association Agreements under the Neighborhood Policy – four of 12 – act as part of the European bloc.11 Of the 77 states the Cotonou agreement covers, just over one-quarter (20) are among the EU’s frequent allies. On human rights, therefore, the EU can genuinely boast to be an effective voting bloc in the General Assembly. But the coalitions it helps create have shrunk over the last decade. This experience appears to confirm the supposition that the current polarization of the UN has negatively impacted on the EU’s influence in the system – but our figures only provide a rough indication of a gradual decline in this influence. The creation of the HRC, by contrast, permits us to take a more detailed snapshot of EU actions and effects on rights issues – in a case that put both structural and substantive issues at stake.

HRC creation story On March 15th 2006, the General Assembly approved, 170 to four votes (US, Israel, Marshall Islands and Palau against) with three abstentions (Belarus, Iran and Venezuela), the new Human Rights Council. The HRC replaced the Commission on Human Rights, which had come under heavy criticism from the human rights community for being an extremely politicized and rather ineffective body. This was especially so after countries with despicable human rights records gained membership and Libya had been elected for the chairmanship of the Commission. The HRC is now a subsidiary body of the General Assembly with a review

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Table 6.1 Distribution of seats on CHR and HRC Region

CHR

HRC

Africa Asia Eastern Europe Latin America WEOG and US

15 (28%) 12 (23%) 5 (9%) 11 (21%) 10 (19%)

13 (28%) 13 (28%) 6 (13%) 8 (17%) 7 (15%)

Total

53

47

Source: www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/membership.htm; www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/. Notes WEOG = Western European and other states group.

clause and the possibility of becoming a principal organ of the United Nations,12 it meets regularly,13 its members are elected directly and individually by secret ballot by the majority of the members of the General Assembly (not just of the votes cast) – instead of regional groups choosing their representatives – and, “when electing members of the Council, Member States shall take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto.”14 The new Council is marginally smaller (47 instead of 53 members). As the principle of “equitable geographic representation” was applied, the EU has now proportionally fewer votes in the HRC than it did in the CHR. The Latin American countries accepted doing the same. This redistribution was not huge, but has given Asia and Africa a de facto majority in the HRC. EU positions The EU supported from early on the strengthening of the UN human rights machinery. The presidencies, speaking for the EU, advocated for a different status of the HRC – a standing body, possibly treaty body – with increased meeting time and new membership rules.15 Regarding the latter, the EU wanted to establish membership criteria (such as “abiding by the highest human rights standards”) and to have the HRC elected by a two-thirds instead of simple majority. Its position on the size of the HRC was ambiguous due to internal controversies. It did not support the US call for a very small, Security Council-size body. Smaller EU member states refused this proposal, just as much as smaller non-EU states did, out of the awareness that a smaller forum would decrease their likelihood of becoming member. The EU took a status quo defensive position on many other aspects, such as maintaining the CHR’s mandate to address country specific situations, the status of NGOs or the CHR’s relation to the High Commissioner for Human Rights. In professional EU “speak,” the EU’s general statement on UN reform on April 6th 2005 read: “The establishment of such a body [the Human Rights Council] must

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take into account the valuable aspects of the acquis in the field of human rights.”16 The EU and the US Most members agreed on the importance of concluding negotiations before the still existing, but by now discredited, CHR would open its 2006 session. Approaching that deadline, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson decided to take a courageous step. After having consulted all groups and relevant actors and having collected their “dark-red lines,” he produced a compromise text that did not leave anybody winning and nobody losing totally. Eliasson chose a “take it or leave it” approach, asking the membership not to open the text again for negotiations. Relatively quickly, the US came out in opposition and declared that it would vote against the text. The US argued that Eliasson’s proposal neither significantly reduced the size of the body, nor established a two-thirds majority election mechanism nor binding membership criteria. Singapore came out first in its support, then the African group, the Latin Americans – the EU did not immediately react. It left doubt regarding its support due to internal squabbles. Some smaller EU countries had only then realized that the new HRC gave the EU fewer seats, which meant fewer chances for them being elected. They believed that the deal received was not worth losing seats for the EU. Finally, after having solved its internal squabbles, the EU came out in support. In the end, the fear was that some of the “like-minded” states would introduce amendments, thereby reopening negotiations. The strongest opposition still came from some members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), as well as Cuba and Venezuela. Eliasson gained the support of the OIC by changing one – the only – aspect of the text, strengthening the language on religious tolerance. Initiated by New Zealand, the EU in a last effort tried to persuade the US by enlisting pledges from as many UN members as possible not to elect any human rights violating country – but in vain. This campaign failed, and deciding that it could not get a perfect HRC, the US ended up opposing the new forum in near total isolation. The EU defended a similar position to that of the US until the last two weeks of negotiations, when the US decided to reject the compromise package. The fact that the EU accepted the compromise deal in the end, contrary to the US, does not allow us to conclude that the EU was in the “middle” or the bridge, only that the EU accepted a deal in the end, which the US did not. The EU would have proved its bridging power if the last minute effort by New Zealand and the EU to convince the US had been successful. EU and the south The wider UN membership was not organized around the developing countries coalitions of the G77 or NAM. Most countries accepted the idea of a new institution, of upgrading its status and having more regular sessions, but categorically refused the idea of membership criteria and two-thirds majority voting.

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Even though there was no overall coordination by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on the HRC negotiations and important Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile or Uruguay joined the EU/CANZ17/US position, there could have been a NAM position on the opposition to criteria and two-thirds majority elections according to several negotiators.18 Interestingly, since the negotiations over the implementation of the new HRC have started, the developing countries tend to speak together via NAM. The important question is why democratic countries, such as South Africa, did not support many of the EU/CANZ/US positions. It might, of course, be possible to argue that only the EU/CANZ/US really defend human rights, whereas other countries (still) only prioritize interests. Versions of this argument are heard in the EU. But such an answer is short-sighted and highly arrogant. Two major reasons can rather help to explain such positions, one more generic about alleged EU double standards on human rights policies at the UN, the other about the content of the proposed changes as such. Alleged double standards Most of the African and Asian countries had for a long time objected to the “double standards” of the CHR, that they were the only target of criticism by the CHR, leaving other situations like Chechnya outside; in short: resolutions were politically motivated, and Western democracies addressed only situations where they did not risk to compromise other national interests. Delegates from democratic developing countries singled out EU opposition to CHR and Third Committee attempts at criticizing the US for its human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay. Past attempts by Cuba at convicting the US had not found the support of the EU. This in turn did not increase the credibility of the EU’s claim to strengthen “universal” human rights. The linchpin for many became if the EU was willing to support resolutions against the US, and evidence over the past years had shown that this was not the case.19 While the EU was trying to act as a bridge between the US and others on issues of structure of HRC reform, therefore, its claim to do so was undermined (from the south’s perspective) by the European track record on substance. The EU realized somewhere midway through the negotiations the risk of losing the battle and of earning an even worse mechanism than the CHR. The EU then changed its discourse and accepted the idea of dialogue, as well as capacity building and the support for those countries on their way to the fulfillment of human rights standards, as important tools of the new council.20 The EU embraced the previously southern calls for a more genuine approach of dialogue and cooperation – even though not abandoning the instrument of country specific resolutions (which the hardliners of the south sought to abolish and replace by purely a system of dialogue and exchange). Once these concerns of developing countries were incorporated, negotiations were facilitated and moderate developing delegates adopted more flexible positions.21

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Non-reflective and non-strategic content of the proposals While there was strong US and European support for creating a rights mechanism that would institutionally exclude abusers, this plan met fierce opposition from the vast majority of the global south, opposition not only from dictators, but also from southern democracies, such as South Africa or India. A major question evolved around possible membership criteria. Options ranged from “no criteria” to the strongest existing human rights standards, e.g. including abolition of the death penalty, or the acceptance of gay adoption rights. The EU did not support such strict criteria, and more generally, the EU and the US (and CANZ) were criticized for never having given clear answers to the following questions: who defines the criteria, who monitors them and decides on the eligibility of candidates? In fact, no clear position existed. EU internal disagreement over the “how” led to a more general position mainly insisting on the need for criteria. Only the US made a concrete proposal: “No Member State against which measures are in effect under articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter, or which are subject to UN Security Council investigation, including a Commission of Inquiry.” This criterion was unacceptable, also to the EU, as it proposed to give the Security Council (SC) control over HRC membership – not to mention that the decisions by the SC are not necessarily based on human rights considerations. Perhaps Liechtenstein’s position helps us to understand their opposition better: Liechtenstein argued from the beginning “We do not think that introducing criteria for membership is either feasible or desirable.”22 When negotiators from southern democracies were asked why they did not support criteria or a two-thirds majority election, their answers went along the lines of the principle of equality and effectiveness considerations. They argued that the UN should not create exclusive clubs, the main value of the UN being its universal membership. Excluding the entire category of countries the HRC was actually supposed to help in their transition towards human rights protection or to pressure into respecting human rights was not seen as the most promising strategy. Put differently: alternative proposals presented could as much have been derived form a strong human rights defender position. The lack of transparency by the EU about criteria sustained the fears of many among the developing countries of yet another body dominated by the “West” setting its standards and applying these in an uneven manner. Given such suspicions of developing countries and the level of low trust, the EU could have proposed an institutional substitute for trust, possibly a clear mechanism for establishing the proposed criteria. The EU, as the US, advocated for two-thirds majority voting, hoping that human rights abusing countries would not master to find the support of twothirds of the UN membership. The majority of the G77 favored simple majority voting. The proposed two-thirds majority vote and criteria were seen as increasing the control of the EU over the new body: for EU members, strict human rights criteria were not seen as a constraint, and the two-thirds majority gave the EU –

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as much as to everybody else – more say in the elections. Even if criteria aimed at strengthening the UN’s work on human rights, one cannot contest that this would have deferred stronger control over the work of the HRC to democratic and human rights defending countries, among which the EU is close to a majority. In the end, the EU move to ask for “no clean slate” per region,23 e.g. more candidates than slots, found broader support among the wider membership. Liechtenstein had already earlier on proposed an institutional mechanism that would have given incentives for each region to present more candidates than seats.24 Liechtenstein and others argued that two-thirds or simple majority voting would not make any difference if there was no choice. The primary goal should be to give all member states a real choice between candidates and trust them not to elect human rights violators, with potentially much higher impact on the outcome of the elections. This would have empowered other democratic countries to make real choices over membership instead of imposing some (Western) criteria. The EU’s objective of creating stronger control by democratic countries over the UN human rights machinery met with the opposition of developing countries. In contrast, the EU found ways out of stalemate when it chose to prefer an institutional setting with the potential of empowering other democratic countries to make real choices over membership instead of imposing criteria. Similarly, its acceptance of mandates and methods proposed by other democratic countries to address human rights issues facilitated the support of moderate countries for a strengthened body. The EU realized too late that the power asymmetries at the UN are no longer such that the EU can remain the eternal norm-maker. Unlike in its current neighborhood policy, the EU cannot suggest others to adopt rules without participation in their making. It turns out that, in the end, this strategy of controlling membership and decision-making processes, which would have helped the EU to remain an eternal norm-maker, led to a situation in which the EU lost control even further within the new HRC.25 The desire to exclude member states challenging EU positions in the CHR – instead of finding new ways of dealing with them – backfired.

HRC institution-building story The EU is an even more coherent bloc in the HRC than in the General Assembly – in all contested HRC resolutions to date, the eight EU members have voted together. Additionally, the EU members of the HRC have also found to fill a leadership vacuum because the US has so far declined to run for membership of the Council. This makes the HRC unique within the UN system as a major forum in which the EU bloc acts as a center of gravity unaffected by a US alternative – and has an extra burden of responsibility for defending rights there. Positively, a number of the worst rights abusers did not stand for election to the HRC during the first secret ballots in May 2006. The EU scored a notable success in campaigning against Belarus’ attempt to take one of the eastern

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European seats – a success that was repeated in May 2007, when one-third of the seats were open for election again. On this occasion EU support ensured that Bosnia and Herzegovina narrowly beat Belarus in initial balloting, eventually winning by 112 votes to 72. But the overall profile of the HRC remains mixed from a European perspective on human rights. Earlier in this chapter, we divided the membership of the General Assembly into a European bloc, frequent allies of the EU on rights, frequent opponents and hard opponents. The first members of the new human rights body elected by the General Assembly in 2006 were distinctly weighted towards the latter pair of groups. Of the 14 countries elected in the May 2007 round of ballots, four were members of the European bloc (Bosnia, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovenia) and one of its hard opponents (Egypt). The remaining nine states were all among its frequent opponents. The EU’s members have therefore found themselves in a doubly problematic situation on the HRC, with both their structural position weakened by the reweighting of seats, and a three-to-two majority of members coming from among Europe’s opponents on rights in the General Assembly. Individual successes such as the repeated blocking of Belarus do not totally offset the flaws in the European position. This is complicated by the fact the EU also has to defend the US – many members of the new Council have pushed to condemn American activities. The EU members have refrained from criticizing the US, doing some damage to relations with other states. While the EU has been left (against its preferences) without US support in the HRC, therefore, it has found itself cast as America’s defense team there. The overall experience of the HRC has suggested that the EU remains on the defensive in the new body. The EU distanced itself from an early HRC decision on Darfur, and NGOs have criticized its compromise resolution of 2007 as soft on Khartoum. The majority of HRC resolutions are taken by consensus, but the EU has so far lost in two-thirds of those that have been voted on.26 In those cases where it abstains or is defeated on HRC resolutions, the European bloc is usually in a minority of 12–14 states. The Latin American countries in the HRC often split in contested votes. This is in part because the Latin American countries are more sympathetic to thematic resolutions linking rights and development that the EU typically opposes. But the Latin American countries do continue to share the EU’s position on many aspects of the HRC, such as its close cooperation with NGOs. Working through compromise, the EU can however manage to push through resolutions in the HRC – in June 2007, the EU co-sponsored a resolution on Darfur with the African Group. Again, this showed that divisions over rights are sometimes surmountable. While Germany introduced the resolution on behalf of the EU, Egypt – normally one of the hardest opponents on rights – acted as the African co-sponsor. The EU’s continued push for resolutions condemning specific countries goes in parallel with the EU’s declining emphasis on advancing new international

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human rights norms. The EU has not promulgated, since its worldwide campaign against the death penalty, a new field for international human rights normbuilding. The Canadian or Swiss governments have been more proactive and creative in addressing new (thematic) human rights concerns. The EU is by contrast quite conservative and does not push “new” issues (Smith 2006a) and its engagement in the Human Rights Council and Third Committee has been highly dominated by addressing country-specific situations. Its proactive thematic approach is limited to individual countries, like France on human rights and extreme poverty, or Germany and Spain on international human rights and access to water – both rather addressing concerns in the south rather than issues that also concern European countries, reinforcing the image of the EU using the HRC only to point out problems in the global south. A lack of common and coherent EU answers to new challenges is the main obstacle to being innovative. On issues of human rights in the fight against terrorism, immigrants’ rights or sexual orientation, the EU cannot go ahead with an already agreed position. Its individual members would be part of the larger consensus-building process, with Sweden probably being closer to New Zealand and Chile than to Poland. Such fundamental disagreements only allow the EU to act as norm-enforcer (of those norms that the EU member states have agreed upon), but not to be a leader in norm-building. Another example of norm-development is the follow up process to the Durban World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. In view of the Review Conference in 2009 on the Durban Declaration, the African group introduced in December 2006 a resolution calling for a preparatory process, including the establishment of a Preparatory Committee. Democratic Latin American countries supported the proposal, while the EU opposed it (among other reasons out of financial concerns over additional money for supplementary preparatory meetings). This trend raises a rather key question about the EU as normative power in terms of its “ability to define what passes for ‘normal’ in world politics” (Manners 2002: 236). It seems as if the EU is less interested in norm-building, in “defining” what is normal, than in the “enforcement” of norms, trying to apply pre-set criteria to individual states. If this seems obvious in the enlargement scenario, the EU does essentially attempt the same within the UN, but with less success as power asymmetries are less poignant inside the UN without the membership perspective. Besides substantive work, the HRC’s early work tended to focus (if perhaps inevitably) on procedural issues. These have often had however substantive implications. During its first year, the HRC has spent much time trying to define its working mechanisms and instruments – what aspects to take over from the CHR, what to change, what to add. The central issue in the end was China’s position that a two-thirds majority should be required to take action on country-specific resolutions, de facto killing the instrument. In response to China’s position, European Union members threatened to withdraw from the Council. In the end, China agreed, but one cost

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of China’s agreement, according to government sources, was that the mandates of the Special Rapporteurs on Belarus and Cuba would be terminated. Russia – a council member – has led demands for an end to the mandate of the controversial special envoy for Belarus for a long time. Part of the deal was also to set as permanent item on the Human Rights Council’s agenda “the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”– the only permanent country/regional situation on the HRC agenda. This quest had been supported by the vast majority of southern delegations. Also, over the course of the last year, two “mandates” to monitor had already been abandoned by the HRC: Uzbekistan and Iran. Throughout the so-called institution-building process, most negotiations evolved around the HRC’s power to address country-specific human rights situations, as well as the level of member states control over the UN human rights monitoring mechanisms. As already mentioned above, most of the African and Asian countries had for a long time objected to the “double standards” of the CHR, that they were the only target of criticism by the CHR. Also, the reluctance of the EU to address internal, domestic, human rights problems, such as homosexuals’ rights in Poland or immigrants’ rights in Germany, at the United Nations did not help to support the EU’s claim for universal coverage of the HRC. In turn the majority of NAM members decided to oppose the re-introduction of mechanisms that would single out countries, with negotiations about the HRC agenda as one manifestation thereof. In order to prevent any possibility for the HRC to address new situations of human rights violations, Algeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Russian Federation, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia did not only oppose the inclusion of an agenda item like “Situations requiring the attention of the HRC” but also of the category “other issues,” as it could be “misused” for introducing human rights situations. Nonetheless, the following, among others, favored the maintenance of the latter category: Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, Japan, India, Norway, Republic of Korea and Switzerland. Whereas Australia, Norway and Switzerland are not surprising allies, the position of the Latin American countries as well as India and the Republic of Korea merit attention. Similarly, southern democracies supported the maintenance of strong NGO participation in all HRC fora. The lines on human rights are not completely set. Unfortunately, the EU had not benefited from the time starting with the adoption of the HRC resolution to the beginning of the negotiations on the procedures of the HRC to develop a coherent and credible set of proposals for new human rights tools based on dialogue and capacity building. It did not live up to its promise of using the HRC not only for country-specific resolutions, but also for dialogue, as well as capacity-building and support for those on their way to the fulfillment of human rights standards. Even if it is by no means clear if such an endeavor would have changed positions, it could have tilted more moderate countries towards the center. The case of the “Human Rights Council Advisory Committee” is also revealing. As replacement of the former standing CHR Subcommittee, it is supposed

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to function as a “think tank” for the HRC, undertake studies and research on behalf of the HRC. The EU had advocated abandoning the standing character of the body and replacing it with a roster of individuals that the HRC could choose from according to need. The alleged idea was to avoid unnecessary meetings of the committee members, but also to reduce the likelihood of one or two members of the committee to influence all committee reports and studies in a direction not favored by the EU (such as emphasizing too much the right to development). This was not only opposed from the Cubas and Chinas, but also from countries like Argentina and South Africa, and it was India that presented a compromise proposal. These countries did not think that the “waste” of meeting time was that grave and sympathized with the economic claims of the south. The HRC story shows that southern democracies are willing to defend the basic principles of a functioning UN human rights machinery, but also one of the most fundamental values of the UN: universal membership and equality of its members. Furthermore, they expect either the EU to live up to its discourse and its expectations towards democrats: namely to set human rights questions above other national (or EU) interest considerations or alternatively accept that all countries support human rights causes when the price thereof is not too high in terms of other national interests, as the Europeans do.

Conclusion The creation of the HRC has thus in large part confirmed the importance of underlying political issues we noted in our introduction and discussion of voting patterns on rights in the General Assembly: the insufficiency of unity as a European strategy and the importance of polarization and bloc politics to all UN affairs. At the most basic level, the failure of the EU to grasp that its own aspirations to be a bloc at the UN will stimulate the inclination of other countries to hold onto group identities has undermined European initiatives to move beyond bloc-based politics – a failure of political self-awareness. The data in this article shows a deepening divergence between the EU and US on thematic rights issues in the UN General Assembly – and the US has effectively boycotted the HRC, leaving the EU to represent the West there. But this is complicated by further factors: the most obvious is the EU’s difficult position vis-à-vis the United States, by which it attempts to assert its own identity but cannot escape from the US alliance – a problem that has taken on a new form in the HRC. The “bridge building” strategy we noted as one option of the EU looks particularly weak in here – the true bridge builders at the UN appear to be those “realist democracies” that shift between substantive agreement with the EU on rights and sympathy for the south. This distinction between the EU and its Latin American allies points to a more fundamental political challenge: the clashing definition of “universality” at play. From the European perspective, the challenge has been to universalize a set of rights that pre-existed the HRC – the most obvious tool for doing so being country-specific resolutions. We might call this “output universality,” by which

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the goal of the HRC is to raise all countries to a set standard. But the south desires an alternative – “input universality,” perhaps – by which all countries are able to engage in the definition of norms in the HRC. The fact that the EU is more focused on targeting countries than developing new norms thus leads to frictions – while the Latin American countries are ready to play both games. The net result has been a clash at the nexus of norm-making and the pursuit of individual countries – a major clash about the rules by which countries can be challenged on rights. Rather than debate norms themselves or discuss individual states in depth at the HRC (with the exception of Sudan), the EU has been forced to put its reputation on the line over the precise set of conditions by which it will be possible to focus on future abuses. This is an unsatisfactory situation from any perspective, and the EU has suffered from appearing to be firmly on the defensive – not a change-maker but rather a defender of the status quo in this case. It is important to recognize that the issue at stake was of extreme importance – an HRC with virtually no right to pursue offending countries would be one in which there was little purpose in debating norms. But equally, a chamber in which there is no room for normative discussion is a poor venue to debate individual states. The EU, having succeeded to act as a bloc in the HRC, is yet to act as the core of a network of states capable of sharing and spreading a vision of human rights. Instead, it finds itself acting defensively in both General Assembly and HRC, and will continue to do so until it adopts a political approach that appears more genuine progressive to the south. That is not a matter of giving up on principles, but on promoting them better.

Notes 1 Cf. The Enlarging European Union at the United Nations: Making Multilateralism Matter, published by the European Union, agreed by the troika and member states in New York, April 2004; The European Union and the United Nations: The Choice of Multilateralism, Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, September 2003. 2 Cf. Eurobarometer: The EU’s Relations with its Neighbours, A Survey of Attitudes in the European Union, September 2007; Eurobarometer: Europeans and Development Aid, June 2007. 3 Javier Solana, speech to the Annual Conference of the European Union Institute for Security Studies, Paris, 25–26 September 2005. 4 Policy-oriented publications include Espen Barth Eide (ed.) (2004) Global Europe Report 1: Effective Multilateralism: Europe, Regional Security and a Revitalized UN, London: Foreign Policy Centre and British Council Brussels; Ojanen, H. (2006) The EU and the UN: A Shared Future, Helsinki: FIIA; and Ortega, M. (ed.) (2005) The European Union and the United Nations: partners in Effective Multilateralism, Paris: Institute for Security Studies. 5 Voting Patterns in the United Nations reports are available at www.state.gov/p/io/ conrpt/vtgprac/. 6 More technically, we have calculated voting coincidence scores as follows. Each vote cast by each member state is given a score between 0 and 2 relative to the EU consensus position, as follows:

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Table 6.2 Score voting coincidence EU vote

“No” vote Abstention No vote (absence) “Yes” vote

7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Score for voting coincidence of third state “No”

Abstention

No vote

“Yes”

2 1 1 0

1 2 2 1

1 2 2 1

0 1 1 2

A “voting coincidence” percentage is then calculated for each state by adding up its total score for a General Assembly session, and dividing this by the maximum possible score for that session (the maximum score being that which a state that always voted with EU consensus positions would achieve). The overall “voting coincidence” percentage for a given session is calculated by totaling the individual percentages of all non-EU countries and dividing them by the number of non-EU countries. This method can be applied to smaller samples votes (such as human rights votes) and other countries (as for China and other states here). These countries include Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. These counties include Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Israel, Japan, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Samoa, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Tonga, United States, Uruguay and Vanuatu. Voting Patterns in the United Nations reports are available at www.state.gov/p/ io/conrpt/vtgprac/. Boockmann and Dreher (2007) have also shown that there is no correlation between the domestic human rights record and how countries vote on human rights resolutions. These countries include Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Norway, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. The CHR was a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council. The General Assembly is the highest organ with universal membership, the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council both have limited membership. The idea was to elevate the institutional status of the UN human rights machinery in order to reflect the importance the UN now assigns to human rights. The CHR was limited to six weeks per year. General Assembly Resolution A/60/L.48. EU priorities for the 60th session: www.europa-eu-un.org/articles/en/article_4599_ en.htm. EU Council Conclusions of November 7th 2005 on UN reform (emphasis in original). Furthermore: “It [HRC] must retain the system of Special Procedures and build on positive NGO-CHR engagement.” CANZ = Canada, Australia and New Zealand speaking together. Interviews with UN delegates conducted in New York by the author, June and July 2006. For example on Guantanamo Bay: Cuba introduced for the first time a resolution on “Question of arbitrary detentions in the area of the United States naval base in

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Guantánamo” at the 59th meeting of the CHR in 2004. The representative of Cuba introduced this draft resolution E/CN.4/2004/L.88/Rev.2, which he subsequently withdrew. At the 60th meeting, on April 21st 2005, the representative of Cuba introduced draft resolution E/CN.4/2005/L.94/Rev.1, Question of detainees in the area of the United States of America naval base in Guantánamo, sponsored by Belarus, Cuba and the Syrian Arab Republic. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Venezuela subsequently joined the sponsors. At the request of the representative of the United States of America, a recorded vote was taken on the draft resolution, as orally revised, which was rejected by 22 votes to eight, with 23 abstentions. The voting was as follows: In favour: China, Cuba, Guatemala, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, Sudan, Zimbabwe. Against: Armenia, Australia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Eritrea, Finland, France, Germany, Honduras, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mauritania, Netherlands, Peru, Republic of Korea, Romania, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America. Abstaining: Argentina, Bhutan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Indonesia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Togo and Ukraine. Based on interviews by the author with officials of EU member states that participated in the HRC negotiations, June and July 2006. Based on interviews by the author in New York at the UN and via telephone with main actors from the different negotiating parties 2006 and early 2007. Statement by Christian Wenaweser, Liechtenstein’s ambassador to the UN, October 24th 2005. Due to the principle of equitable geographic representation, each region of the UN has assigned number of seats in the HRC, which are however voted on individually by the entirety of the membership – this was one of the compromises of the Eliasson document. Liechtenstein had made a proposal in that direction much earlier, arguing for simple majority, no criteria, but instead a membership scheme that would recompense with additional seats those regions that presented more candidates than slots. As it turns out, Africa did not present more candidates than seats – thereby effectively circumventing the new election mechanism. Arguably, the Liechtenstein proposal could have had better results. The number of members on the Council from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) – currently 18 out of 47 Council members – is seen as playing a major role in the current tensions within and around the Council. The terms of OIC members Algeria, Bahrain, Indonesia, Morocco and Tunisia will expire in 2007. If they are replaced with non-OIC members of the African and Asian groups, it is thought that HRC dynamics could shift. However, it is also possible to be re-elected for a second term. Of all HRC resolutions passed in its first five sessions, 65 percent were passed by consensus, 6 percent were passed with EU support, 6 percent were passed with the EU abstaining and 21 percent passed against EU opposition.

7

The reception of EU neighbourhood policy Florent Parmentier

Since 2002, the European Union has struggled to formulate a coherent strategy for the ‘wider Europe’, then including several countries that subsequently became neighbours of the enlarged community. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) emerged out of the dilemma over membership that faced the EU, offering an uneasy and varied mix of proposals and plans for closer cooperation with a very diverse group of countries. In essence, the ENP is a process of norms diffusion in the European ‘near abroad’, largely influenced by the EU’s security concerns and realized under the constraints of the ‘enlargement fatigue’. Most analysts of the ENP focus on the mechanisms through which norms are spread. Inevitably, comparisons are made between the neighbourhood and enlargement policies; these two policies share numerous similarities – in their origins (Jeandesboz 2007), principles (extending the European internal order, embedded in its social preferences) and methods (conditionality and socialization) (Kelley 2006; Tulmets 2006) – but there is also a fundamental distinction between the two policies in the absence of membership prospects for the ENP. Other studies are centred on the political and security interests developed in the ENP framework, in various fields: migration, asylum, justice and home affairs, etc. It is also generally well-noted that because of security and political considerations, the new enlarged EU can no longer stay passive in its own ‘semiperiphery’. The latter is now closely linked to the ‘core’ through a whole set of features – geographical mobility of individuals, economic factors, claims for ‘Europeanness’, and geopolitical proximities. This chapter is an attempt to link the ‘norms diffusion’ and the ‘norms reception’ processes, the latter being largely neglected by scholars (Rupnik 2007; Meloni 2007; Delcour 2007). The ‘norms reception’ process corresponds to the norm-takers’ appropriation – completely, selectively or accordingly to capacities – of standards aiming at codifying their behaviour as actors on the premise of commonly accepted principles, norms and values determined at the EU level. Hence, the ‘norms reception’ approach leads to the following question: how do neighbours confront, reinterpret, incorporate, implement or avoid the EU normative message in a context of regional asymmetry? In order to understand how norm-takers receive European norms, it is necessary to distinguish three levels of analysis: political discursive strategy,

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procedures and substance. The discursive strategic level deals with how the norm-takers reinterpret the EU norms and values. The level of procedures is about how the norm-takers incorporate the norms and values in the legal system (Constitution, laws, judiciary codes etc.). Finally, the ‘substantial’ level is how the norm-takers implement or avoid the norms and values in practice (organizational ethic, role of bureaucracies and social groups etc.). The chapter therefore seeks to provide an explanation of the norms reception process. In pursuit of this aim, the first part of the chapter seeks to characterize the Europe Neighbourhood Policy and the way it considers the ‘neighbours’, and the second part argues that the norms reception should take into account the configuration of the relations between the norm-maker and the norm-takers – marked by a complex asymmetry. Finally, the norms reception process is analysed in the case of the Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’.

How to become a neighbour? While the neighbours’ objective is to follow the track of Central European countries, i.e. to obtain a promise of adhesion, Brussels wants the ENP to be – at least for the moment – an alternative policy to enlargement. As such, its various features help to understand how the ‘neighbour’ category was created and why it is reluctantly accepted. Sharing everything but institutions In December 2002, Romano Prodi laid out a project suggesting that the EU should share ‘everything but institutions’ (Prodi 2002). According to him, the EU should stabilize its periphery through a substantive concept of proximity, extending to this region ‘a set of principles, values and standards which define the very essence of the European Union’ (Prodi 2002). It implies that the neighbours should benefit from the same treatment and economic incentive as the EU members, except for institutional participation in the process. After the ‘big bang’ of 2004 and the failure to adopt a European Constitution through the Dutch and French referenda, the ‘enlargement fatigue’ and ‘capacity of absorption’ (Emerson et al. 2006) have become part of the European vocabulary and strategy. The EU needed time to ‘digest’ the newcomers: as Chris Patten put it: Over the past decade, the Union’s most successful foreign policy instrument has undeniably been the promise of EU membership. This is not sustainable. For the coming decade, we need to find new ways to export the stability, security and prosperity we have created within the enlarged EU. We should begin by agreeing on a clearer vision for relations with our neighbours. (European Commission, 2003a) Considering the triangle ‘institutions – interests – identity’ helps to think about the reception of this policy. Sharing ‘everything but institutions’ would

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mean that the neighbours and the EU can share interests or identity. However, these various aspects are closely linked in the neighbours’ own perceptions. It is not clear how they may defend their interests without being part of the European institutions, since institutions determine the rules (strategy sets and utility functions) of the game i.e. decision-making. It is also questionable whether you can share a European identity while not being an EU member, because the two seem synonymous. Borders are generally considered as the central instrument of political order, implying a sense of ‘Othering’ for the outsiders. In fact, the neighbours suspect that the ENP framework is an attempt of the EU to minimize its costs of transaction in transforming the neighbourhood without giving a guaranteed membership. In that regard, the concept of ‘neighbour’ heightens the relevance and centrality of questions about the European identity (Ifversen and Kølvraa 2007). The social construction of a neighbour The EU, as a norm entrepreneur, creates its own category of analysis, whose regional reception is generally largely neglected by scholars. In fact, the acceptance of the ‘neighbour’ category is closely linked to the definition of the EU ‘borders’ and polity. The study of external perceptions of the neighbours is central to understand the logics of the ENP and norms reception (Chaban et al. 2006). First, it helps to measure the gap between intentions and EU observable actions. Second, Eastern Europeans’ views on the EU help to shape EU identity and roles through regular and continuous interaction between own role conceptions and structurally based expectations. As such, ‘EU foreign policy, while being to a large extent driven by internal ideas and processes (i.e. by agency), is also partly shaped in response to others expectations and reactions’ (Chaban et al. 2006: 247). Third, especially in the neighbourhood, the impact of the EU is largely influenced by outsider’s expectations and perceptions. These three logics should be grounded in the particular context of the Eastern European neighbours, whose expectations are quite high as regards the EU. The concept of ‘neighbour’ may appear to be natural and obvious from the viewpoint of the EU – the whole region being a European ‘buffer zone’ protecting it from ‘instability’ – yet, the ‘neighbours’ are displeased by the sense of otherness it implies. Rather than being ‘natural’, this concept is a socially constructed reality, which carries an ambiguity felt about the Europeanness of the neighbours. The category of ‘neighbour’ is not self-attributed, and has been considered with great defiance in Ukraine and Moldova, because it is accused of being too essentialist, Euro-centrist and exclusionist. Furthermore, in Slavic languages, the equivalent of ‘neighbours’ is not positively connoted as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition: the ENP is generally translated as ‘Policy of Good Neighbourliness’ (in Russian, Politika Dobrososedstva) (Meloni 2007: 30). The very term of ‘neighbours’ partly shows the ambiguities of the ENP: despite the pan-European rhetoric of 2003 (‘Wider Europe’), the policy refers to the

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‘European Neighbourhood’ and not to the ‘European Union Neighbourhood’. Moreover, the extension of this policy towards the Southern Caucasus and Mediterranean states has been seen as a denial of the European identity in Moldova and Ukraine. It is not clear either why Switzerland, Iceland and Norway should not be considered as EU ‘neighbours’ since they are not EU members, but are located in its close periphery. The geographical ambiguity of Europe lies in the fact that it cannot be conceived without borders, but these borders remains fluid and contradictory – the neighbours’ membership being neither agreed, nor rejected in the long run. The reception of such a political decision is therefore central, because it is not a purely administrative or technical question. Opening the Pandora’s Box can engender a complex, costly and risky process, even if such a decision would be based on clearly stated criteria and procedures.

Norms reception and regional asymmetry Despite the rhetoric of equals in the ENP (the terms ‘interdependence’, ‘partnership’ and ‘to share’ are abundantly used), the reality is more about an unbalanced relationship. The neighbours have more or less room for negotiation according to their expectations and respective position – as it is shown in the cases of Russia, Ukraine and Moldova, and Transnistria. Why asymmetric interdependence brings reception back in While many approaches insist on Europe as a type of norms entrepreneur, the asymmetric interdependence should help to take into account the norm-taking side. The use of the figure of empire as a metaphor of the post-Cold War European security has been increasingly in vogue. ‘The projection of Europe’s Utopia on to the rest of the world has a long history and many labels, from enlightenment to colonialism, civic imperialism, or civilian power’ (Nicolaïdis and Howse 2002: 767). Ole Wæver uses it in order to describe the polycentric system of government, multiple and overlapping authorities, complexity, fuzzy borders and divided sovereignty (Waever 1997). Imperial systems are generally organized around concentric circles – a core, the close outsiders, and beyond (the close outsiders being more or less an equivalent of the ‘neighbours’). Jan Zielonka calls the EU a ‘neo-medieval empire’ (Zielonka 2001, 2006) on similar premises, while Ulrich Beck considers the EU as a cosmopolitan polity, a kind of ‘peaceful empire’ (Grande 2007). On that premise, the EU as a norm-diffuser has been described as a ‘soft imperialism’ (Hettne and Söderbaum 2005) or a ‘normative hegemon’ (Haukkala 2007; Diez 2005). The ‘soft imperialism’ refers to ‘an asymmetric form of dialogue or even the imposition or strategic use of norms and conditionalities enforced for reasons of self-interest rather than for the creation of a genuine (interregional) dialogue’ (Hettne and Söderbaum 2005: 539). Similarly, the ‘normative hegemon’ uses its normative clout to set an asymmetrical bilateral relationship heading toward transference of its norms and values.

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Yet, none of these assertions fully captures the picture. The relations between the neighbours and the EU is not a simply of a ‘core-periphery’ type, implying a form of domination – more or less associated with violence. In that sense, ‘soft imperialism’ seems an oxymoron – it equates empire as a polity with imperialism, which is a policy. A ‘normative hegemon’ supposes a kind of monopoly of legitimacy regarding norms – whereas it is sometimes difficult to delineate the origins of norms between key actors (the EU, US, OSCE, WTO). As such, most of those approaches lay much emphasis on the EU action and gives little freedom for neighbours to act. Therefore, it is probably more relevant to analyse the relationship between the EU and neighbours in terms of complex asymmetric interdependence, in which neighbours have some room for manoeuvre, highlighting the crucial role of reception in this social process. This asymmetry is fundamentally a function of scarcity, since the power of each actor is determined by the scarcity of the material or symbolic goods sought by the other actor. The migration question is probably a case in point to confirm the asymmetry of power and double-standard logics behind a normative rhetoric. The European Commission document on the wider Europe and its neighbours (March 2003) mentioned the objective of the ‘four freedoms’, among which the free movement of persons. In the EU–Moldova and EU–Ukraine Action Plans, it is striking to see that the migration question is nearly only considered through the prism of the security-related concerns of Western European countries – on readmission agreement, effective border controls, human trafficking, criminalization of illegal migration and admission of asylum seekers and refugees. In return for such steps and confidence-building with the EU, neighbours can expect some kind of ‘visa facilitation’. The EU–Moldova Action Plan neither mentions the fact that the diaspora plays a major role in Moldovan economy (more than onequarter of the GDP), nor includes it in a coherent development strategy. It does not take into account the possible new tensions between neighbouring countries – e.g. at the Romanian–Moldovan and Polish–Ukrainian borders – because of symbolic (exclusion sentiment) and practical (mainly economic) dimensions. This interdependence leads to various results in terms of ENP acceptance – refusal from the Moscow side, forced acceptance from Ukraine and Moldova, while the EU factor has an increasing influence at the level discourse in Transnistria, EU’s closest ‘frozen conflict’ (Lynch 2004).1 The Russian refusal to take part in the process Moscow’s behaviour before the ENP testifies that states can negotiate and comply selectively with the EU normative discourse and practice (Delcour 2006). The legal relations between the EU and Russia are based on the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA), which entered in force in December 1997: its main objectives were to promote European market and democratic norms, to make clear that the quality of the relations depends on the level of Russia’s internal reforms and to diffuse European norms and values without any

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expectations as regards membership prospects. The ‘Common Strategy’ adopted by the Council in June 1999 stipulated that: A stable, democratic and prosperous Russia, firmly anchored in a united Europe free of new dividing lines, is essential to lasting peace on the continent . . . The EU welcomes Russia’s return to its rightful place in the European family in a spirit of friendship, cooperation, fair accommodation of interests and on the foundations of shared values enshrined in the common heritage of European civilization. (European Council 1999) However, if the EU mentions the common values and wish for norms convergence, the Russian discourse refers to geopolitics and great power interests. Whereas Russia was included in the forthcoming ‘new neighbours’ in 2003, it then refused to be part of this policy and searched for an alternative. In fact, rather than being treated as a neighbour (or an ‘object’ of this policy), Russian leadership insisted on being considered as a partner (or an ‘actor’), dealing in bilateral terms with the EU – and, if necessary, directly with member states. At the St. Petersburg Summit of May 2003, the EU and Russia agreed to develop their plan for ‘Four Common Spaces’ (European Commission 2003b): common economic space; common space on freedom, security and justice; common space on cooperation in the field of external security; common space on research, education and culture. Russian elites consider Moscow as a reviving Great Power involved in global politics, and shaping its own regional pole – the ‘Near Abroad’.2 Since international relations perceptions evolve more slowly than the current politics, it comes as no surprise that Russia desires to be recognized as a global player, and strives for material and social benefits normally associated with superpower status. Despite a shared neighbourhood, there is not a shared understanding on this region and its evolution between Moscow and Brussels. Russia and the EU face a fundamental clash in their perceptions of the postCold War world, around the central question of sovereignty (Kratev 2007). Divergences can be observed on various grounds such as geopolitics, democracy or energy. The very same terms – partnership, democracy or energy security – have different meanings. The Russian neo-eurasianist mind (Chaudet et al. 2007: 55–81, 119–136 and 137–225), in vogue among the political elites since the decline of the ‘Westernizers’ in the mid-1990s, seems to oppose the European worldview. It lays much emphasis on sovereignty whereas the EU model is based on governance. Neoeurasianism thinks in terms of geopolitics, sphere of influence and civilization – a Schmittian rather than a Kantian view of politics. It is deeply concerned with ‘hard security’, Russia being surrounded by an instable neighbourhood (Caucasus, China, Central Asia), which lead to a feeling of insecurity. Therefore, multipolarity and multilateralism should not be confused: the first refer to a realist view of a balance of power, while the second implies a genuine world pluralist

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system (Laïdi 2003). However, it does not preclude the possibility of agreement on issues such as the Kyoto Protocol in 2004. Another major difference between the EU and Russia lies in the conception of democracy. Russia defends its own concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ – inspired by the works of Carl Schmitt on decisionism, and developed by Vladislav Surkov, an adviser of the Kremlin (Chaudet et al. 2007: 78). The state should set the rhythm of economic and political changes without interferences from abroad. According to this logic, sovereignty is a matter of capacity and tends to lose its representative dimension, instead justifying the development and build-up of power. It implies a solid strategic identity, economic independence and military strength. In the energy domain, Moscow’s ability to negotiate is larger, e.g. for the establishment of a pan-European energy market (Denysyuk and Parmentier 2006) or when Russia refused to sign the Energy Charter Treaty (Energy Charter Secretariat 2004),3 which defends, according to Russia, more the consumers than the suppliers. Although the economic relations show as a rule a strong asymmetry (the Russian GDP is comparable to the Dutch one), the energy sector demonstrates greater mutual interdependence – the supply-power of Russia being counterbalanced by the share of the internal market in Russia’s export.4 In the case of the Russian–Ukrainian energy crisis of January 2006, the ratification of the Energy Charter Treaty would allow the EU to have more transparency of supply between the main protagonists – Turkmenistan, Russia and Ukraine – and a system of early warning with Russia and transit countries. In the wake of the crisis, the EU sought to develop an energy security concept, based more on interests (diversification of partners and sources) than principles – it may be argued that the price asked by Gazprom to Ukraine reflected a greater leaning toward market-based logic than the politically-motivated low prices of the CIS (Stern 2006).5 A reluctant agreement: Ukraine and Moldova Brussels retains much more leverage in Kiev and Chisinau than in Moscow, because of their desire to join the EU. There, the ENP works through a socialization strategy combined with a type of ‘soft conditionality’. This conditionality needs to be further elaborated. ‘Soft conditionality’ (i.e. linking the granting of benefits to the fulfilment of some conditions) differs from the ‘hard conditionality’ used during the enlargement because it does not lead to the political inclusion within the EU. ‘Soft conditionality’ influences policies, but does not propose a one-fits-all policy. During the enlargement process, ‘hard conditionality’ was legitimate because it contained an element of democratic legitimacy through popular referenda. In the case of the neighbours, in the absence of membership, there can be no such negative feedback after the implementation of the acquis. There can be no referendum and the neighbours are not part of the decision-making process that normally accompanies representation in the EU institutions.

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However, it could be too quick to conclude that the neighbours are under the EU ‘domination’; based on their perception, the EU plays metaphorically the role of a ‘substitute for empire’ (Rupnik 2003), reluctant to continue to accept more newcomers – in that sense, it would be an ‘empire by invitation’ (Lundestad 1998). There is a great appeal for internalizing the acquis communautaire and the EU values (despite opposition and resistance in the implementation), since it is considered as an imperial modernization – and based on their own expectations to be recognized as fully ‘European’. The main threat the EU poses to the neighbours is marginalization – as the case of Slovakia in the 1990s clearly shows.6 Therefore, the Ukrainian and Moldovan political leaderships take it pragmatically as a ‘second best’: the lack of alternative pushed them to accept the Action Plans. The ENP is seen as a way to strengthen the European profile of their country, waiting for an eventual membership prospect. As Oleg Ryabchuk, then Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine put it: We do not support the idea that the ENP should be distinct from the policy of the EU enlargement. On the contrary, we believe that by enhancing cooperation and encouraging reforms it could be of great help in supporting Ukraine’s European aspirations. It should become a short-term model of relations, designed to prepare the ground for Ukraine’s progressive integration into the EU. (Ryabchuk 2005: 6) The gap between neighbours’ expectations and EU actions was especially strong after the Orange Revolution, when the EU was asked to consider the case for membership. The cooperation between the EU and neighbours depends on the political will of each side, but it works better when there is a special emphasis on EU security. For instance, the Moldovan and Ukrainian sides have requested assistance from the EU on the Ukrainian border (Transnistrian segment) in June 2005. The EUBAM (European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine) was launched in December 2005 in order to improve the quality of the common border and struggle against contraband and trafficking. As regards this cooperation, Solana declared in Odessa: the decisive factor is not what the EU does, but what we do together. Our border engagement is here to help you in many crucial fields – from technical assistance to deep political co-operation and from making your fight against corruption a success to building the preconditions for a settlement on the future status of Transnistria. (EUBAM 2005) However, though Ukraine and Moldova had initiated this border control mission, they had in the end little room to shape the dynamics of cooperation.

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Transnistria: how a normative power gains influence in a ‘frozen conflict’ The enlargement to Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 has also led to the creation of the ‘Black Sea dimension’ of Europe, with an emphasis on strategic and security stakes – e.g. the so-called ‘frozen conflicts’. The EU may influence its neighbourhood with other international actors that do not share similar norms and values – contrary to what critics might expect. The de facto state (Pegg 1998; Lynch 2004) of Transnistria, a crossroad for contraband (Parmentier 2006a) and trafficking, is increasingly attracted by the EU – in its own way. Tiraspol is a separatist entity that broke with Moldova in 1991, and has not reached an agreement for a peace settlement. Since the break, it has elected the same leader, Igor Smirnov – who proclaimed his aim of securing the Transnistrian independence (Smirnov 2004). Whereas in the early 1990s, the Moldovans were more or less willing to unite with Romania, Transnistria remained strongly attached to Moscow, adopting the ‘great chauvinist’ attitude close to the Russian far right. Yet, despite diffusing strong anti-Western sentiments (more specifically anti-American), the Transnistrian leadership tries to reincorporate partly the European normative discourse, especially with the new Speaker of Transnistrian Parliament, a self-defined ‘pro-reformist’, Yevgeny Shevchuk. After the referendum of September 2006, he implicitly argues that the EU should support this vote for independence on normative principles (Novyj Region 2006) – although with dubious base. The creation of the ‘NGO’ designed from above, Proryv (‘Breakthrough’), as an artefact for civil society (Parmentier 2007), or media manipulations tend to fake compliance with EU norms, obscure the more public relations aspects of many actions aimed at ‘normalizing’ the Transnistrian situation on the international level (Parmentier 2007). The reasons for European attraction in Transnistria are two-fold: first, the political leadership is less monolithic that it once appeared, since the old Moscow armament networks face more competition with local enterprises that increasingly depend on the EU market, e.g. the local firm ‘Sheriff’, a wellimplanted conglomerate, Moldavizolit, Moldavkabel, Tighina, Floare Tirotex, Odema, Rybnitsa Metallurgical Plant (Popescu 2007: 81). The Chambers of Commerce and Industries of Leipzig and Tiraspol have established direct ties. The ‘stake in the internal market’ has political effect in promoting European norms and standards (Gstöhl 2007) – the so-called ‘regional policy externality’ (Egan and Nicolaïdis 2001) – even in Transnistria. In fact, according to local experts, ‘Europeanization of business rules, norms and standards in the Transnistrian zone, consideration of economic and social interests is the most suitable way for reconciliation’ (Center for Strategic Studies and Reforms 2006). Second, its own claimed course toward independence leads the Transnistrian authority to gain some legitimacy on the international stage, particularly in the US and EU. While it is generally considered that the EU has more leverage in countries asking for integration and well-intentioned toward

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Brussels, it can reach a growing degree of influence in other cases due to its regional situation. The reincorporation of the EU discourse shows how the normative stance may have effects at the level of the official discourse – Tiraspol being neither close to a procedural nor a substantive democracy.

‘Norms reception’ and the Orange Revolution The dialectics of European involvement The discussion in this part is not another contribution to the well-developed body of literature on the Orange Revolution (Wilson 2005; Aslund and McFaul 2006; Karatnycky 2005; de Tinguy 2006; Goujon 2005; Parmentier 2006b). It intends to illustrate the norms reception process through the dialectics of EU involvement, before taking into account how discursive strategy, procedures and substance changed along the EU lines in the follow-up to the Orange Revolution. The dialectics of European involvement The dialectics of involvement relied on previous bilateral relations between the EU and Ukraine and the open nature of the Eastern borders. The bilateral relations between the EU and Ukraine developed more slowly than between Kiev and the member states, due to the motivation of the two sides. On the one hand, although Ukraine was the first CIS country to sign the Partnership and Co-operation Agreement (PCA) in June 1994, it came to force more than four years later. In fact, the EU member states hesitate between a ‘Russia-first policy’ embodied by Germany (Kempe 2006: 6)7 or a ‘proenlargement’ policy inspired by Poland, which explains why the EU seems reluctant to develop wide relations with its Eastern neighbours. On the other hand, Ukraine has developed its own European discursive strategy in the early 1990s, although it was assessed as a case of ‘declaratory policy’, that is ‘integration without Europeanisation’ (Wolczuk 2004). The pro-Western rhetoric of the Kuchma era was compensated by a pro-Eastern policy, highlighting the internal and external contradictions of Ukraine on religious, linguistic, ethno-cultural or political terms.8 The European message was reduced to a geopolitical allegiance that allowed gaining some strategic autonomy vis-à-vis Russia, and the internal transformation dimension was neglected. Ukraine is internally divided over its foreign-policy orientation, and Kiev had to develop a policy that prevents the alienation of major ethnic groups in Ukrainian society by steering its ‘multivector policy’. President Yushchenko had taken into account this fact when he paid his first visit to Moscow the day after his inauguration (24 January 2005) and declared that Russia was a ‘permanent strategic partner’, while adopting a clear stance for a European choice (the choice of Borys Tarasyuk as the Foreign Minister, with well-known pro-Western orientation, is significant). Public

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opinion often sees no contradiction in finding itself in overlapping integration spaces, although the implementation of a multi-vector policy is hardly realistic. Despite the difficulties of bilateral relations, the Orange Revolution opened up the question of the European integration of Ukraine. The EU was involved by giving significant direct support to election monitors as well as groups from civil society. The enlargement of 2004, incorporating eight Central European countries including three Baltic States and Poland, gave a strong impetus to the EU presence (Hill 2002). In fact, the EU politics can be understood as the two-way process of policy-making and institution-building at the European level which then feeds back into the member states and their political process and structures, including NGOs – leading the EU to denounce the electoral frauds from the very start. Moreover, the post-enlargement EU has acted as an efficient mediator in the round-table, with a troika composed of the Polish President Kwasniewski,9 the Lithuanian President Adamkus and the High Representative for ESDP, Javier Solana. However, it is also accurate that the Polish posture raised some opposition within the EU, or at least scepticism. Among others, José Borrell, then President of the European Parliament, criticized the role of Poland and Lithuania for acting under American influence and having a different stance from the majority of the other European countries, especially that one advocated by the older members. In fact, the EU discourse around implementing the acquis first and then asking for membership negotiation has been reversed by the advocates of Ukrainian membership: the EU should provide Ukraine with a membership perspective, as a moral duty, because Kiev has shown its attachment to the European values. According to the Ukrainian discursive strategy, the Orange Revolution made Ukraine more compatible with the EU; it should in any case avoid drawing the final boundary of the European Union – given there is no ‘natural borders’ based on history, geography or culture. Thus, it carries the assumption that the Orange Revolution constitutes a radical break with the Kuchma era, of a political rather than social nature, on a norm-taking base. The following section investigates this claim of norm reception in Ukraine. In order to investigate the Orange Revolution and norms reception, the discussion follows three levels of analysis: discursive strategy, procedures and substance. It also distinguishes two definitions of revolution, with different time sequences: ‘revolution as a moment’ and ‘revolution as a movement’. First, ‘revolution as a moment’ refers to a type of upheaval, which is generally sudden and massive. In this situation, according to Charles Tilly (Tilly 1978), two or more blocs contest for state power: the Orange coalition, outside the existing polity try to obtain the power; these contenders receive electoral support from a significant part of the population against the current administration; and the repressive institutions (army, police, SBU – secret services) prove unwilling to repress the Orange supporters, who were massively mobilized on the Maidan place, thus making incomplete the old regime’s hold on the state apparatus. The outcome was a ‘negotiated transition’ as in Poland and Hungary 15 years earlier. Yet, if the Polish and Hungarian challenged a monopoly

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party-state, the Orange Revolution had more to do with a revolution against post-communism – that is election falsifications, corruption, a competitive authoritarianism, that is to say a hybrid fusion of the former Soviet system with the emerging reformed economy and polity (Kuzio 2005) and a ‘blackmail state’ (Darden 2001). The most important point for norms reception is the emphasis laid on procedures during the crisis: it was the electoral frauds that broke the back of the Kuchma regime’s power; both pro-Yushchenko and pro-Yanukovych forces sought the support of the Central Electoral Commission and the Ukraine Supreme Court to legitimize their political position by legal means;10 the round table and the re-vote of the run-off held on 26 December 2004 were essential in the peaceful ending of the process. As such, the respect for procedures opens the way toward a more substantive democratization in Ukraine. Second, ‘revolution as a movement’ describes a type of change: the time sequence is longer. As Huntington put it, revolution is ‘a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structures, leadership and government activity and policies’ (Huntington 1968: 264). This very demanding definition goes beyond revolutionary romanticism (or ‘surge to freedom’): the outcome is as important as the particular event. The fundamental changes promised by the Orange Revolution in the dominant values of the society remains largely unachieved – some calling it a ‘Revolution betrayed’, whether for not fulfilling its ‘pro-market’ perspective (Aslund 2005)11 or for making a political deal with Yanukovych in September 2005 (Maksymiuk 2005). In fact, Ukraine has a weak institutional framework which hinders the political and economic reforms required to approximate the EU standards. State institutions are captured by various economic interest groups – the so-called ‘oligarchs’12 – which mainly supported Yanukovych, but not necessarily (e.g. Petro Poroshenko or David Zhvania) – and some corrupt bureaucrats. The norms reception is then constrained by the structural capacities of the Ukrainian state, with the state apparatus using informal practices of decision-making and policy and resistance to formal structure imported from the EU model. Although it has been unanimously considered as a breakthrough in terms of democratization, and has achieved some results (press freedom, freedom of speech), it has fallen below public expectations, partly due to a greater political instability – democratization does not necessarily go hand in hand with stability (Mansfield and Snyder 2005). Many crises occurred in a few short month: the conquest of power toward a common enemy is often easier with political allies that are altogether rivals. Programmatic issues and political strategy diverged – on questions such as mass reprivatization or the way to treat the former Kuchma elites (Gongadze case, 2004 electoral frauds, oligarchs). In September 2005, Yushchenko, a soft-liner, removed the charismatic and hard-line Tymoshenko from her prime ministerial post, after months of haggling. This split in the Orange camp opened the door for Yanukovych to make a political comeback as Prime Minister, after the victory of his party in the March 2006 parliamentary

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elections and the break-up of the Orange coalition. Although he cannot claim a majority of the seats in the Verkhovna rada (one-chamber Parliament), his party reached an alliance with the Communist Party and former Yushchenko ally, Oleksandr Moroz’s Socialist Party of Ukraine. The new coalition was combined with changes in the constitutional framework (a shift toward a more parliamentarian regime), which may impede the coherence of policymaking and legislative capacities of the Rada (Whitmore 2006; Petrov 2006). Paradoxically however, the third place position of the presidential party, ‘Our Ukraine’ and the absence of use of ‘administrative resources’ is a confirmation that the 2006 elections were ‘free and fair’. The respect for electoral procedures seems to have led to a more substantive culture of democracy – it is dubious that Yanukovych would use the same illegal tools to win an election as in 2004, given the political cost of such practices. The two conceptions of revolutions evoked – revolution as a moment or as a movement – help to catch the norms reception in a particular context and time. The attraction of the European message is very evident at the level of discursive strategy, but its translation in procedures and substance is more difficult to reach – the adoption of the three levels proves to be unequal over time.

Conclusion: from ‘social preferences’ to ‘social embeddedness’ The European norms should not be seen as transcendent values, hovering over European societies, rather they should be properly associated with social preferences and interests so as to avoid the idealistic trap (Laïdi 2005). The EU sometimes selectively exports its norms into its neighbourhood – it has more leverage in Ukraine and Moldova than in Russia, based on its own legitimacy in terms of neighbours’ own finalité. If the EU is seeking to advance its agenda on legitimate norms in the neighbourhood and to define the boundaries of ‘Europeanness’, the neighbours press for these norms to be included in a possible future wave of enlargement. On their side, this policy is pragmatically accepted, though also rejected for some of its inherent ambiguities. Their relatively weak position in a situation of complex asymmetric interdependency pushes them to adopt at least the European discourse, and some internal changes leading to the implementation of European norms. By implementing procedures, the norm-takers are expected to slowly head toward substantive reforms and reincorporation of norms – a liberal teleology in an evolving neighbourhood. Similarly, the norms reception process in the neighbouring states should not be understood as a passive absorption of norms and values through various mechanisms (as conditionality), because the neighbours can confront, accept or avoid them. In fact, the norms reception process in these states should be understood in terms of ‘social embeddedness’ (Hobson 2000; Seabrooke 2002). ‘Social embeddedness’ conceives the state–society complex as a contested rather than a functional space: the state can enhance its interest only when they become largely embedded within the whole of its society. By contrast with

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‘isolated autonomy’ (Skocpol 1979) or ‘embedded autonomy’ (Evans 1995, Hobson 1995) approaches, which lead toward a neo-realist and functionalist explanation of the complex asymmetric interdependence, ‘social embeddedness’ helps to emphasize the role of social norms. The EU norms exportation in the Eastern neighbourhood should not only be seen as a resource for the state to launch reforms and dominate society, but also as a way for society to make the state more accountable – given the particular legitimacy laid on the question of ‘Europeanness’. The EU norms reception approach brings the legitimacy question back in the relationship between the Brussels and the neighbours; the EU norms are also an object of contestation and power within the state–society complex of the host countries. To be successfully adopted by local actors, international norms need to take into account the ‘appropriatedness’ of the norm (depending on the initial conditions of the norm-takers) and the political will of the concerned elites (Cortell and Davis 1996). However, the social embeddedness approach does not necessarily mean that maintaining the status quo is the only viable option for the EU. Yet, it enlightens a particular dilemma for the EU: if it plays power politics, it turns a blind eye to norms as a legitimate basis on which it can act; but if it refuses to be a transformative power, it can only export norms without retaining normative power. In its attempt to articulate the role of the social preference – the normative power theory and social embeddedness – the norms reception approach recognizes that if the EU constrains the neighbours, its policies are also resources with which states seek to enhance their power and interests. This approach helps to explain how the European norms are confronted within the internal political game of the neighbours, and how they may have constitutive effects. It also helps to understand why the same norms can have tremendous effects in a neighbouring country and not in another, a fact that is not always well-defined in the ‘normative power’ literature.

Notes 1 The ‘frozen conflicts’ refer to the post-Soviet conflicts (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh), based on a drive of separatist states toward independence and state-building. They are unrecognized by the international community, and the negotiating process of conflict resolution proves inefficient. In fact, the adjective ‘frozen’ is certainly misleading because of the fluid nature of the conflict: identity, borders, economic interests are still evolving. 2 The concept of ‘near abroad’ (blijne’e zarubeje) refers in the Russian foreign policy toward the post-Soviet countries, and witnesses of a shift in Russian strategic thought after years of Westernization. According to the 1993 foreign policy concept, Russia is still a great power with several foreign policy priorities: ensuring national security through diplomacy; protecting the sovereignty and unity of the state, with special emphasis on border stability; protecting the rights of Russians abroad; providing favourable external conditions for internal democratic reforms; mobilizing international assistance for the establishment of a Russian market economy and assisting Russian exporters; furthering integration of the Commonwealth of Independent States and pursuing beneficial relations with other nearby foreign states, including those in Central Europe; continuing to build relations with countries that have resolved prob-

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lems similar to those that Russia faces; and ensuring Russia an active role as a great power. The EU attempted in the 1990s, through the Energy Charter Treaty, to overcome the contradictions between competitive markets and long-term producer–consumer supply agreements. The Energy Charter aims at providing certainty and protection for energy trade, transit and investment, and opens Russia’s domestic energy market to competition, reflecting Europe’s stake in securing reliable supplies on favourable trade conditions. Besides, the same interdependency exists between Russia and Ukraine, because 80 per cent of the Russian gas to the EU is delivered through this country. Before the crisis, the Yushchenko administration suggested in March/April 2005 that gas transit tariffs should be moved to ‘European’ level and paid in foreign currency (US dollars): Gazprom retaliate that the partners should also move toward ‘European’ prices (previously, it cost three to four times lower for the CIS countries). It is also notable that the increase does not concern only Georgia and Ukraine, both contesting Russian hegemony, but also Belarus. Slovakia was under the EU pressure because of its internal political situation: if Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar (between 1994 and 1998) was in favour of EU and NATO integration, its behaviour did not fit with the requirement of both institutions. The European Commission made it clear in July 1997 that Slovakia did not fulfil democratic criteria, and that the starting negotiations should be delayed. As a result, Meciar lost the following elections in September 1998. After 1989, Berlin had three strategic objectives: maintaining good relations with Moscow; playing a decisive role on behalf of Central European countries, e.g. Poland; and coordinating German initiatives with its European and transatlantic partners. Until the Orange Revolution, Berlin answered to the Ukrainian aspiration toward Europe that it should reform its political institutions and strengthen its civil society. Yet, the reactions during the crises were rather limited comparing with Poland, Schroeder having a very personalized relation with Vladimir Putin. It is interesting to remember that if Kutchma won the presidential elections against the pro-Western Leonid Kravchuk in 1994, he appeared as the pro-European candidate in the 1999 contest, against Petro Symonenko of the Communist Party of Ukraine. He launched a strategy of Ukraine’s integration with the European Union in 1998. Then, his foreign policy was marked by a serious drift toward Russia. President Kwasniewski was able to lead the team of international mediators during the crisis for three main reasons. First, he was trusted by the outgoing President Kuchma during Ukraine’s international isolation between the ‘Gongadze scandal’ (2000) and the dispatch of Ukrainian troops to the invasion war in Iraq (2003). Second, he remained relatively neutral before the elections, underlining only his support for the principal of an open, fair and democratic poll, which made him an acceptable mediator to both sides. Third, Kwasniewski’s knowledge of Ukrainian affairs made him a legitimate candidate for the mediation. The Central Electoral Commission took position for Yanukovych in November 2004, while the Ukrainian Supreme Court broke the political deadlock in early December when it invalidated the official result that would have given Yanukovych the presidency. Strangely enough, the same Orange Revolution is sometimes criticized for not striking hard the ‘oligarchs’, notably among the followers of Yulia Tymoshenko. The massive misappropriation of state assets and rent-seeking after the independence led to the emergence of the so-called ‘oligarchs’, individuals whose access to political decision-making help their economic pursuit. It is not a monolithic and homogeneous social group, divided between regionally based elites, each trying to secure an access to the presidency.

8

European Union’s exportation of democratic norms The case of North Africa Luis Martinez

Since the states of the Maghreb gained independence, democracy has been depicted as a possible horizon by the political leaders of those countries. Nevertheless, following independence, those post-colonial states had other challenges to face, such as underdevelopment, state-building and the recovery of a lost identity, and therefore democracy was relegated to the back burner. Authoritarian regimes seemed to be a necessary step for the development of societies considered as not yet civilised. Charismatic leaders such as Boumediène, Hassan II, Bourguiba and Qadhafi embodied young states working toward change. Those figures masked, though, the great upheavals that were taking place within those societies: the demographic revolution, the legitimacy deficit of political institutions and the economic failure of development schemes. As those emblematic figures disappeared one by one – with the exception of Qadhafi – it finally became clear how fragile those regimes were, confronted with social struggles before and Islamist social movements and political parties afterwards. Acknowledgement of the disastrous trajectory of post-colonial states in North Africa (civil war in Algeria, international embargo on Libya, police regime in Tunisia and overwhelming social injustices in Morocco) should have led to an in-depth critical account of North Africa’s governance (Albrecht and Schlumberger 2004). However, it seems clear that such badly performing economic and political systems suit the governing elites and that the European Union supports those regimes within the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. After the failure of democratic transition in Algeria (1989–1991) and exportation of democracy to Iraq, there is little room left for hope in a broad-sweeping democratic moment taking hold in the Arab world in general and in the Maghreb in particular. And yet, North Africa continues to have its gaze strongly trained on Europe. A Euromesco survey shows that the EU is seen as a model both in Morocco and Algeria. In answer to the question ‘If you had to vote for a project, which one would you choose?’, 42 per cent chose EU integration and 30 per cent, regional integration; and this despite all the common characteristics and advantages that they share with the other North African countries. On the other hand, only 2 per cent of the respondents chose the establishment of a free trade area with the United States. The desire for a close link with the EU should be

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analysed as the demand for domestic reforms in response to external constraints. Many North Africans believe that economic and social reforms can be achieved only if there is an external actor favouring them. This is also the reason why the citizens of the Maghreb are highly disappointed in the EU’s lack of engagement of the Arab Maghreb Union: 44 per cent of them think that the EU is scarcely engaged, interested and involved in North Africa and 25 per cent of them feel that the EU is not at all involved in North Africa. This disappointment is as strong as the conviction expressed that reforms can only be made within the context of a regional project. The EU’s lack of interest in strengthening regional integration is judged as a lost chance for improving the region’s economic and social context. In such a scenario, the rise in power of the PJD (Justice and Development Party) is seen as a ‘chance for Morocco’s people’ by 19 per cent of the people interviewed and as an opportunity for the UMA by 22 per cent of them. On the contrary, 27 per cent of the people interviewed believe that the PJD’s victory in the legislative elections scheduled for November 2007 will be a cause for concern for the European Union. The PDJ seems to be the domestic constraint needed in order to launch economic and social reforms. In short, since there is no external actor exercising constraint, the population will opt for an internal constraint with the hope of seeing its living conditions improved. In this way, an Islamist government becomes the ideal solution for defeating inequalities, reducing unemployment and eradicating poverty. The EU’s lack of involvement in North Africa is offset by overwhelming support for the PJD (www.euromesco.net/). In other words, reforms will either be achieved via external constraints or via the PJD. Whereas Maghreban societies would like the EU to get more involved in the region at the political level, since 11 September 2001 and Eastern enlargement, the EU has placed security issues (terrorism, migration, borders, energy) at the heart of its concerns and gives the impression of reducing its relationship with North Africa to the sole issue of security. Within this framework, the EU has reshaped its neighbourhood policy. According to Rosa Rossi (Rossi 2004: 11): A step-by-step or progressive approach towards EU neighbouring countries is also required in order to introduce a gradual engagement for each state depending on its willingness to progress with economic and political reform. The way to pursue this policy is not anymore political conditionality but rather benchmarks: clear and public definitions of the actions that the EU expects the partners to implement.

EU policy in exporting European norms and democratic values to North Africa In May 2004, Chris Patten underlined that: Over the past decade, the Union’s most successful foreign policy instrument has undeniably been the promise of UE membership. This is not sustainable.

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L. Martinez For the next decade, we need to find new ways to export the stability, security and prosperity we have created within the enlarged UE. We should begin by agreeing on a clearer vision of the relations with our neighbours.

Adopting this point of view, the European Commission presents its neighbourhood policy (ENP) and defines a new framework for relationships with countries that are not concerned with EU membership. The exchanges between the EU and the South Mediterranean countries now take place within the framework produced and defined by the EU (Labouz et al. 2006). For the Maghreban countries that wish to: The EU offers our neighbours a privileged relationship, building upon a mutual commitment to common values (democracy and human rights, rule of law, good governance, market economy principles and sustainable development). The ENP goes beyond existing relationships to offer a deeper political relationship and economic integration. The level of ambition of the relationship will depend on the extent to which these values are effectively shared. The ENP remains distinct from the process of enlargement although it does not prejudge, for European neighbours, how their relationship with the EU may develop in future, in accordance with Treaty provisions. (ec.europa.eu/world/enp/policy_en.htm) Bilateral relationships are thus engaged: The central element of the European Neighbourhood Policy is the bilateral ENP Action Plans agreed between the EU and each partner. These set out an agenda of political and economic reforms with short and medium-term priorities. Implementation of the first seven ENP Action Plans (agreed in early 2005 with Israel, Jordan, Moldova, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Tunisia and Ukraine) is underway and that of the latest to be agreed (with Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) is about to begin. Lebanon will follow shortly and the EU-Egypt ENP Action Plan is nearly agreed. Implementation is jointly promoted and monitored through sub-Committees. (ec.europa.eu/world/enp/policy_en.htm) In North Africa, only Libya has not yet activated the ENP procedure, since it is not yet a member of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The ENP replaces the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The latter, on the wane, has not produced the expected results. In North Africa, the virtuous circle did not kick in and the results of the Barcelona process are extremely mixed (Moisseron 2005; Barcelona Plus Report). Democracy is still absent from the region, economic development is very low and intra-regional trade is no more than 3 per cent. Paradoxically, the country that has proven to be the ‘best pupil’ is Tunisia. The EU’s lack of interest in North Africa’s political problems explains the general situation of the region. North Africa must become a privileged partner

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for EU relationships, like Mexico within the framework of the NAFTA.1 The short-sighted vision of the EU becomes evident in the EU’s spreading itself thinly over diplomatic theatres where its influence is very limited (Israel–Palestine conflict, Iraq war). In fact, the European involvement in those areas is the result of the EU’s fear of being marginalised in favour of the United States. Interference in these conflicts requires considerable financial and military means, rare resources in Europe where the growth rate is half that of the US. Instead of challenging the US in those areas where it is bound to lose ground, would it not be wiser for the EU to become more heavily involved in a region such as the Maghreb, with the aim of building a model of development and democracy whose visibility in the Middle East would certainly represent an attraction? In the long run, would not the integration of the Maghreb in a preferred relationship with Europe allow the EU to have greater influence over Middle East conflicts at a lower cost? Within the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the economic and security dimension has largely prevailed over the prospect of political reforms. Nevertheless, over the last ten years the South Mediterranean economies have not taken off and security problems have developed through terrorism. It thus seems plain that, if restoration of the major macroeconomic balances was an imperative, it is not enough to ensure stability in states facing poverty, injustice and a lack of basic rights. In the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, democracy seems to be left by the wayside, but how is economic change conceivable if the political leaders of those countries show little concern for fulfilling their citizens’ expectations (Gillepsie 2004)? Here it is not a matter of imposing democracy, like the US tried to in Iraq, but of emphasising that democracy is an imperative goal that North African political leaders must strive to accomplish. Complacency with authoritarian regimes which patently disregard human rights empties the ENP of its meaning and relevance. For that reason, the indifference, even the complacency with which EU member states deal with corruption in North Africa is extremely worrying. The purloining of public resources to private ends by unscrupulous political leaders must not be ignored by the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. It is hard to accept that denouncing corruption within the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership is taboo. In Southern societies, this taboo empowers the Islamist movements, which base their action on virtue, in opposition with regime corruption. The EuroMediterranean Partnership remains silent over the issue of corruption even as the major NGOs deplore it. In this context, how is it possible to imagine that a viable economic policy can take place on the other side of the Mediterranean? In all modern and democratic societies, corruption is a moral problem that jeopardises political leaders’ integrity; in authoritarian regimes democracy is an important handicap to development (Bardhan 1997). Foreign investors are worried about the offshore capital movements towards foreign financial markets. How then is it possible to increase foreign investors’ trust (and so increase FDI) if national capital is invested abroad (Youngs 2002)? Corruption is more the syndrome of regimes characterised by opacity and the exclusive control of

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resources than a simple matter of personal enrichment. In North Africa, poverty, social injustice and deep socio-economic inequalities lend the issue of corruption a particular savour. In Algeria and Libya, two authoritarian oil-producing states, all of these symptoms are present. Is the ENP capable of reforming such authoritarian oilproducing states like Algeria and Libya? The strategic document on Algeria (2007–2013) produced within the framework of the ENP pinpoints three areas where change would lead to improvements: a reform of the legal system; economic growth and employment; the strengthening of basic public services (Algeria Country Strategy Paper 2007–2013). Concerning Libya, which has been invited to join the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and has benefited from the ENP, the EU was confronted with the problem of the death sentence hanging over the Bulgarian nurses. This case provides an opportunity to investigate two phenomena: is an oil-producing state immune to external pressures? Can the European member states stand together even in the face of an attractive Libyan market? In other words, can the EU lean on an authoritarian rentier regime to encourage it on the road to a democratic transition?

The oil rent: an obstacle to democracy and a diplomatic weapon Algeria and Libya are two authoritarian states: what margin for manoeuvre does the EU have? Is it possible to promote democracy in the case of an authoritarian oil state? Yasuyuki Matsunaga asks the following question: ‘Is the rentier state adverse to democracy?’. He recalls that in theory, oil is an obstacle to democracy. The concept of rentier state appeared in the 1960s and is defined as ‘a state that derives a substantial share or all of its income from abroad in the form of resource rent’ (Mabro 1969). From a theoretical perspective, it helps explain the political functioning of North African and Middle Eastern authoritarian states. The rentier state has no need of collecting taxes from its citizens, due to its external revenues (Beblawi and Luciani 1987). The lack of bargaining or taxpayer demands between the state and its citizens gives rise to the depoliticisation of the whole society. From this standpoint, there is ‘no representation without taxation’, according to the expression used by Luciani. The ‘rentier redistributor state’ ensures stability and social peace by offering, through oil export revenues, goods and services to its population in exchange for its depoliticisation. One might think that this mechanism immunises the rentier state against political and autonomous demands in the face of external pressures. In fact, oil rent is a great lever encouraging the construction of a security machine which annihilates all forms of political protest. The ‘authoritarian syndrome’ appears closely linked to the oil rent. Nevertheless, ‘the Arab world is more and more present in all the comparisons of cases of regime transformation’ (Camau 2006). There is now a new interest in the ‘democratic slips’ of authoritarian regimes, taking into account the vulnerability of regimes in the face of political pressures (Ferrié 2003). On the other hand, oil rent in Algeria and Libya raises ‘the question of

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the conditions by which authoritarian regimes and more precisely autocracy preserves itself through the changes that it makes’ (Ferrié and Santucci 2005: 11). Besides being an obstacle to democracy, oil rent encourages the development of violence in authoritarian regimes. This is amply evidenced by the analysis of the role of oil rent in the progression of Algerian civil war (1991–1999), in Libya’s revolutionary politics (1977–1993) and in the various Iraq wars (1980, 1991 and 2003) (de Soysa 2000; Collier and Hoeffer 1998). The work of K. Terry Lynn shows how the abundance of resources, especially oil, in states with weak institutions can lead to their collapse. So Michael L. Ross notes that: ‘Oil does greater damage to democracy in poor states than in rich ones’ (Ross 2001: 356). This is borne out by an analysis of the case of Libya. The oil sector is the main source of revenue for Libya. Oil sales have led to the establishment of a redistributor state that nourishes an unproductive public sector and that buys social and political peace. Since Qadhafi took power, oil sales have tapped huge amounts of money (360 billion dollars between 1973 and 2003 (Jeune Afrique Intelligent 2003)). Complex informal networks gravitate around the redistribution, investment and spending of this fortune. The ability to restrict direct access to this strategic resource is a key factor in the stability of Qadhafi’s power and that of his family and clans. In the 1970s, the nationalisation of the oil sector and later controlled access gave the state total control over energy resources and a significant increase in income. In this context and from the point of view of Libya’s leaders, the opening of the oil sector after the lifting of the embargo must not turn into a perestroika, which would inevitably lead to questioning the legitimacy of their power (on the example of the Algerian liberalisation at the end of the 1980s, which led to the destabilisation of the FLN and therefore the whole state (Moore 2004)). Unilateral control over the oil rent is vital for the survival of the regime. In this situation, the main aim of the current regime is to increase Libya’s oil production to three million barrels per day (bpd) to reach the production level prior to nationalisation. To do so, the regime needs to modernise and replace outdated infrastructures. As a consequence, Qadhafi has called for foreign investments, required to achieve this goal. The setting up of an expert body governing the oil sector is a strong sign directed at international enterprises. The experts’ main task is essentially to bring back the American oil companies. The return of the Oasis Group is an important goal aiming at creating a powerful lobby capable of putting pressure on the American Administration in order to remove Libya from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The Oasis Group (Amerada Hess, Conoco, Grace Petroleum) had left Libya in 1986 following an order issued by Ronald Reagan to cease all relations with Libya. For months, the group had been negotiating the retrocession of 41 per cent of its shares in the Waha Oil Field (Maghreb Confidentiel 2004). Libyan authorities would also like to see the return of corporations such as Exxon and Mobil, which had left Libya in 1982.2 For diplomatic, military and political reasons, the government of Shukri Ghanem had to satisfy American companies. Those last years, more or less secret negotiations have taken place, where commitments have been made both

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by Libya (allowances to the families of the victims of the regime, an end to the massive arms programme, help to the fight against terrorism, etc.) and English and Americans (an end to the legal proceedings against Qadhafi, relaunching of diplomatic relationships and the revival of the military cooperation (Maghreb Confidentiel 2002)). The opening of the Libyan oil sector cannot, at a first stage, be controlled or organised according to any hierarchy. In short, the final goal of the Libyan government was to re-establish trust between the regime and the British and American governments. The privileged treatment US and British companies were granted in Libya corresponded to the regime’s political will to solidify the new diplomatic relationship. In this perspective, Tony Blair’s historical visit to Tripoli in May 2003 finalised a series of previous negotiations in the military and diplomatic field.3 In 2003, Libyan authorities evoked the possibility of organising a summit in Madrid at which Qadhafi, Tony Blair, José Aznar (before the terrorist attacks of 11 March 2003) and George Bush would be present! In fact, Seif el Islam, Qadhafi’s son and likely successor, views the international system as being completely disrupted since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Seif el Islam has worked to make Libya move to the ‘good side’, that of US allies. In this respect, Libya has some strategic assets: oil, anti-terrorist expertise and a strong role in African politics (Exxon policy in Chad and South Sudan), all of them are of great interest for the new allies. In fact, the British export credit agency ECGD has resumed coverage of British investments in Libya. Also, in 2004, the British (UK Trade and Investment in cooperation with Energy Industries Council) have organised a mission to Libya with the aim of understanding Libyan ‘business culture’. Many companies taking part in the operation underlined their concern with ensuring Libya has the capacity to provide the necessary logistics to manufacture equipment. Libya does not have an industrial structure able to satisfy the products’ demand that foreign investments in the energy field will create. Jacques Chirac’s visit followed by that of the French Defence Minister were part of the same plan: the promise of military cooperation in exchange for favourable treatment of French oil companies in Libya. It is therefore clear that the level of diplomatic exchanges is the key to access the Libyan oil market. Exploration licences attributed in 2003 to Repsol and OMV within the framework of the call launched in 2000 by the NOC were a sort of reward for the companies who had invested in Libya during the embargo. Libyan production was maintained under the embargo essentially by European company investments: Repsol, Agip, OMV, Wintershall and Total (Libya Country Report 1998). Agreements among companies have even allowed the common exploitation of blocks in the Murzuk Basin. The excellent relationships between Austria under Joerg Haider and the Italian political elites explain the ‘performance’ of these oil companies in Libya. Similarly, right after the embargo was lifted (April 1999), French investments in Libya were strongly encouraged by Libyan authorities, as a reward to the French role in promoting Libya’s case at the United Nations. But when France threatened Libya not to vote in favour of the definitive lift of sanctions if Libyan authorities did not ade-

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quately compensate the families of French victims, trade negotiations in Libya were frozen to the detriment of French companies. Libya exports 90 per cent of its oil production to Europe (Libya Country Analysis Brief 2005). Oil was a diplomatic weapon during the period of the embargo (1992–1999). Libyan positions followed from the will to maintain oil production despite the sanctions. In general, the few interested companies were encouraged to take part in oil production. The strategic partnership with Italy favoured Italian companies, which had very good relations with Libya. Germany and Switzerland also developed a strategic partnership with Libya favouring the establishment of oil companies (Joffé 2000). The Spanish company Repsol also gained a strong foothold in the Libyan market during the embargo. Under the embargo, the setting up of European oil companies in Libya was a considerable asset for neutralising the conflictual relationships with the US. The Clinton Administration had evoked the possibility of strengthening the embargo against Libya through an oil embargo. A whole arsenal of sanctions had in fact been devised in order to penalise foreign companies investing in Libya. Italy and Germany made clear to the Clinton Administration their rejection of an oil embargo on Libya since Libyan oil exports to Europe were too important. For Libya, the development of an interdependent energetic relationship with Europe was a major asset on the diplomatic level in a time of tension with the US. From the regime’s viewpoint, the diplomatic goal had been reached and Libya enjoyed strong European backing capable of countering the sanction diplomacy adopted by the US (Cortright and Lopez 2000). So, despite UN sanctions, Libya remained an attractive prospect for international oil companies and those companies have discovered sizeable oilfields. The EPSA 3 conditions have allowed foreign companies to make discoveries in regions that were little explored until that time (Murzuk Basin, Ghadames, Mabruk). The American threats of unilateral sanctions were not going to prevent international companies from participating.4 European companies have taken advantage of the departure of American companies during the 1980s: they set up in Libya despite UN sanctions and despite the unilateral American embargo. Libya, like Algeria, became a strategic country for Europeans within the framework of the European energy policy. European companies have always been attracted by oil reserves and the gas potential, and they planned a positioning strategy while waiting for the embargo to finally be lifted. European oil companies have enabled Libya’s regime to maintain its oil production despite international sanctions. The Libyan regime, forced to revise its oil policy, has progressively ‘opened’ the oil sector according to the development of conflictual relationships with the US. Therefore, under the embargo European companies exploited the diplomatic tensions with the US and made considerable investments in Libya. The presence of European companies was a source of protection against the US for the Libyan regime, a factor helping to maintain production and an opportunity to create political and personal ties with European political leaders. As the analysis of Libyan oil policy shows, the regime has very cleverly built

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up the relations needed to strengthen it. Libya’s oil policy has been successful in satisfying the diplomatic aspirations of the regime: strengthening ties with Europe, encouraging the return of American companies and improving Libya’s image. Libya has a relational network on the international scene that has enabled it to easily reintegrate the international community. However, the regime’s energy policy has failed to meet the industry’s demands. Like the Algerian military authorities, which have managed to make the rest of the world forget the civil war owing to the liberalisation of the oil sector and a policy of national reconciliation, Qadhafi’s regime nourishes the ambition of placing Libya in the small circle of countries supplying Europe with oil. On the model of French policy in Algeria, Italy aims to become the ‘godfather’ of the new Libya. To that end, Italy has considerable assets: with its oil company, Agip, Italy has enjoyed a privileged partnership with Libya for decades and it operates in the Maghreb at the crossroads of Algerian and Libyan gas suppliers.5 Libya has a clear interest in connecting some of these gas fields to the Algerian transport networks. Does Algeria have any interest in the development of such a synergy? If, in the short run, Algeria may be worried about seeing another gas supplier in North Africa, in the long run Algeria can use its dominant position in order to become a real hub of gas exportation towards Europe through the Euro-Mediterranean gas pipeline that passes through Morocco and the Transmed gas pipeline. In any event, despite the conflictual relations between Morocco and Algeria, the building of a 1,385 km gas pipeline from Hassi R’Mel to Cordoba, Spain, via Morocco, points up the importance of making certain interests converge. Libya and Algeria obviously stand to gain from a convergence of interests in the international gas market. Having learned from the past experiences in the oil field, Sonatrach and Noc have acted together in order to ensure and reinforce their positions. It is likely that the success of those companies in the oil sector will be replicated in the gas field. The shaping of a Euro-Mediterranean space gradually obliges the South Mediterranean countries to work toward policy convergence. The example of the building of the Gazoduc Maghreb Europe (GME) shows that the construction of a regional space has consequences on the bilateral relations of those countries (in this case, Morocco and Algeria). Libya is a gas provider country situated in the Euro-Mediterranean space. In May 2003, the ministerial Declaration of the Euro-Mediterranean forum on energy stressed the need to complete the ‘Euro-Mediterranean gas ring’ for 2003–2006, reinforcing its support for the following projects (Euromed Report 2003): • • • •

gas pipeline supplying Spain and France starting from Algeria; gas pipeline supplying Italy and France starting from Algeria; gas pipeline starting from Libya to supply Italy (through Malta); gas pipeline connecting Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.

The Libyan regime is aware of the advantages of its geographical position, but also of the European concerns regarding threats to stability and security hanging

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over South Mediterranean countries. Libya’s energy policy offers it considerable protection: does not its progressive integration in the circle of energy suppliers make Libya immune to possible criticisms concerning human rights violations and the lack of political freedom? Like other mechanisms essential to the regime, the oil sector is undergoing transformations that fit within the regime’s general plan. The main aim of the oil policy is to consolidate a regime that ten years of embargo have considerably weakened. The oil rent is, in this case, a considerable diplomatic asset: it allows the clearing of a regime considered until a few time ago to be a ‘pariah state’ (Sicker 1987).

The ENP, the Bulgarian nurses and the Libyan El Dorado Five nurses in a paediatric hospital in Benghazi were arrested in 1999 together with a Palestinian doctor. In May 2004, a court found them guilty of having deliberately inoculated 430 children with the HIV virus, 51 of whom have died. The nurses were sentenced to death by the Criminal Court and for a few years their life depended on the final decision of the Supreme Court. On 24 July 2007, following months of secret negotiations, the Libyan regime finally agreed to release them. Until then, the European Union’s sole reaction had been through a statement made by its European Representative (Statement by Ferrero-Waldner 2006). But no single EU member state, not even the Scandinavian countries, ever launched a campaign against Libya. How can this silence be explained? This chapter shows that, given the El Dorado Libya represents, the Bulgarian nurses were ‘abandoned’ to silent diplomacy by which only convert negotiations could lead to the nurses’ liberation. Libya represents a lucrative and attractive market that seriously tests the strength of the human rights principles touted by the EU. In fact, the European Union’s limp reaction in this case reveals the limits of its ability to export European norms and democratic values. It is true that Libya is not party to the ENP and this limits the scope of EU action. But the real explanation is connected with the fact that Libya offers a huge market for arms industries, oil companies and transport industries. On 11 October 2004, EU sanctions on Libya were lifted and arms sales to this country once again became legal. In this context, no state dared take the defence of the Bulgarian nurses for fear of trade retaliation. Hence, only a common EU action could have been effective, thereby sheltering individual states from Libya’s possible retaliatory measures. For over a year, Qadhafi’s son Seif el Islam tried to find a compromise between the demands formulated by the revolutionaries in Libya and European demands. To everyone’s great surprise, his perseverance finally paid off in July 2007. The Qadhafi regime handed the ‘hostages’ over to France, which had taken part in the final stages of negotiations. In exchange, the regime hopes to finalise a series of negotiations on arms contracts, even the construction of a civilian nuclear power plant. Libya is going through a process of transition that could, in the event of too much EU interference in its domestic affairs, weaken those who advocate Libya’s alliance with Europe. Now that the Qadhafi regime has placed itself on

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the ‘good side’ (with the United States and its allies), Seif el Islam believes that Libya must not repeat its past errors but that the contrary must take advantage of its comparative assets and offer its new allies the energy supply it needs as well as cooperation in the fields of security and migration. The new elites emerging in the oil and security sectors, educated in US universities, have progressively marginalised the ‘revolutionaries’ educated in Eastern Europe and for whom Africa and the Arab world were Libya’s future horizons. According to these new elites, Libya must absolutely bind itself to the Western world. But how can the revolutionary regime be undone without major upheaval? It still has ‘watchdogs’ who do not look favourably on the changes the regime is going through. In fact, the new elites in coercion apparatuses, the new economic and diplomatic staff, the clans affiliated with the regime and Qadhafi’s family are undertaking to transform the regime. They are developing a new discourse that they diffuse to the international community via the figure of Seif el Islam. They form alliances in strategic areas such as oil and the ‘war on terror’. In short, they are building a new image of Libya that is supposed to forever erase a past in which Libya was likened to a terrorist state. Even if Qadhafi’s speech on the 37th anniversary of the revolution produced a stir in the American media, the New York Times stressed that Qadhafi ‘was criminalising the creation of opposition parties’. Nevertheless, at the end of September 2006 the Libyan media was priding itself in Foreign Minister Shalgam’s trip to New York and his meeting with Condoleezza Rice. Libya was invited to discuss the big issues of the moment: the war in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Darfur humanitarian crisis. For the Libyan regime, this meant it had been admitted to the club of responsible powers! The conversion of the former ‘terrorist state’ was a success. It demonstrated the regime’s capacity to adapt artfully to unforeseen changes (Martinez 2007). But Libya especially looks like an El Dorado compared to the chaos in Iraq. For instance, to the regime’s great satisfaction, in July 2006, the IMF mission in Libya stressed in its discussions with Finance Minister Tayeb Al Saffi, that his country could play the role of an economic centre if economic reforms were carried out. For the moment, the government is focusing its policy on three areas: oil, military and civil infrastructures. Libya appears as one of the more attractive Mediterranean countries. The main aim of the creation of a Council for Oil and Gas Affairs has been to devise a strategic policy in the energy field. The Council is directed by the new Prime Minister Baghdadi Mahmoudi and it is composed of the following members: Tayeb Safi, Tahar Jehimi, Maatoug Maatoug, Fethi Ben Chatouan, Ahmed Menissi, Fathi Ben Gdara and Shokri Ghanem. In 2006, Libya produced around 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (bpd). The government plans to immediately increase its production capacity to 1.8 million bpd and eventually to three million bpd in 2020. Prior to nationalisation in 1970, Libya was producing 3.3 million bpd (Gazzo 1980). The lifting of the embargo has made Libya extremely favourable to foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in the oil sector. Ahmed Abdulkarim, former chairman of the Noc and present director of OilInvest, the state-owned oil holding company, underlined that the government is trying to collect ten billion

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dollars of foreign investments in the field of oil before 2010 (Houston Business Journal 2004). According to the British consulting company Robertson Research International Ltd, Libya is a first choice destination in the field of oil investment. Only the 25 per cent of gas and oil stocks, estimated at 40 billion barrels, are exploited (Hassan 2004). In the gas sector, Libya plans to soon start exporting its natural gas to Italy through an underground pipeline in the Mediterranean. Libya’s gas stocks are estimated at 1,500 billion m3, which is 1 per cent of the world stocks, and its production in 1999 was about 12,200 billion m3/year (Energy Information Administration 1999). Compared to the Iraq nightmare, Libya represents a dream for oil companies. Whereas the defeat of Saddam Hussein promised the access to the world’s second largest oil reserves and huge profits in the reconstruction of a state ‘brought back to the Middle Ages’, the emergence of Qadhafi’s Libya as a new El Dorado came as a surprise.6 It must be said that, after the embargo, Libya started a belly dance to turn the heads of the big oil and industrial companies. In September 1999, Finance and Plan Minister Abdel Hafiz Al Zalaytani underlined that between 2001 and 2005, the government would invest 35 billion dollars (60 per cent by the state and 40 per cent FDI) in the oil and electricity industries. He stressed that, for the next 20 years, the country would need around 150 billion dollars in investments (of which 60 per cent by the state)! Libya’s projects are certainly huge but on a par with its financial capacities. Unlike Iraq, Libya is safe and creditworthy. For the authorities, these are undeniable assets that should be exploited since Libya has moved to the ‘good side’. In September 2006, the government issued its third international invitation to tender: 12 offshore licences and 29 onshore licenses were put up for bid in the prolific basins of Sirte and Ghadames and in the exploration basins of Murzuk, Jufra and Cyrenaica. This third invitation fits in with the policy of opening the oil sector inaugurated by Shukri Ghanem. In September 2004, Shukri Ghanem’s government put 15 offshore and onshore areas for exploration up for bid, which was exceptional. The procedure was meant to be more transparent than usual in order to choose foreign investors. The Shukri Ghanem government announced that the process would be conducted in a transparent fashion and that there would be a departure from the opacity and the arbitrariness that had characterised decisions in Libya in the past. This new way of proceeding was meant to prove the new authority acquired by the Shukri Ghanem government in the complex decision-making process. The Prime Minister had managed to convince the informal circles close to the Guide that Libya needed to change its methods if it wanted to convince foreign investors to return. The new government wanted to demonstrate that the modernisation of the Libyan economy and infrastructures absolutely had to go hand in hand with changes in trading practices. Nevertheless, the licenses granted through EPSA IV demonstrated that the oil sector remains a diplomatic weapon for Libya. US companies obtained nine blocks of the 15 put up for public sale. The political and diplomatic aim was achieved. In May 2006, the US and Libya re-established diplomatic ties. The US–Libya Business Association, lead by David Goldwyn, had met its goal: Libya is again

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accessible to Amerada Hess, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, Occidental and Marathon. But the Russian giant Gazprom is also interested in Libya, as it seeks to link Algeria and Libya with its supply strategy for Europe. In early July 2007, Gazprom management, led by its Deputy Chairman Alexander Medvedev, came to Tripoli to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding with NOC. What was at stake was to strike a deal with Libya similar to the one with Sonatrach on gas liquefaction and common calls for projects. All this made the Europeans worry. Actually, Russia was trying to regain a foothold in the market that it was assured of winning. In May 2007, the meeting in Tripoli between Yuri Safranik, chairman of the Russian Oil and Gas Union and Muhammad Saleh Mansouri, President of the Libyan Business Council, took place with representatives of the big Russian companies: Lukoil, Tafnet, SoyuzNefteGaz, Makhachkala Seaport, etc. Although the oil sector is the government’s priority, it is also concerned with the civil infrastructures that suffered under the embargo. Revenues from the oil rent have made a sustained investment policy possible. Air transport is one of the privileged sectors: 12 Airbus (eight with an option) have been bought for Afriqiyah Airways; two business jets were sold to Libya by Bombardier Inc. Even more important, a deal was reached between EADS and the Libya Africa Portfolio for Investment, led by Beshir Saleh, in order to build a training and maintenance centre, an Air Academy and a meteorological centre. The idea is to make Libya a regional hub for Africa and the Middle East. The government aims to create a trading area from Zuwarah to Bukamash. This free trade area is meant to have considerable impact on Libyan economy since for the moment only the oil sector can benefit from the opening of the market. This project, called ‘the Road to the Future’ and backed by Saadi al Qadhafi, was introduced early September 2006 and, in his words, should make the Libyan coast an area comparable to ‘New York, Monte Carlo and Hong Kong’. This includes a series of projects: the Socialist Port Authority, in charge of managing seven commercial harbours, is planning to enlarge the Misurata harbour in order to reach a capacity of six billion tons of merchandise per year. The Railway Executive Board has planned railway construction programme for lines from Sirte to Benghazi (600 km), Benghazi to Tobrouk (470 km) and even an underground project is under study. These projects have captured the attention of investors in the major industrialised countries. After having given up on the development of weapons of mass destruction, Libya now has the ambition of becoming a conventional military power. The Russian, British, French, German, Italian and American industries are all scrambling for a piece of the action. As pointed out earlier, the lifting of EU sanctions in October 2004, and the end of the American embargo in May 2006, opened the Libyan arms market to international industries. For the moment, the Libyan market involves the modernisation of nine frigates of the Libyan navy, border control and the refitting of Mirage fighter aircraft. Since July 2006, the CIEEMG (Interministerial Commission for Examination of War Material Exports) has been exploring the possibility of selling Tiger combat helicopters to Libya.

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Libya still hopes to be a leading country in the region and on the continent. In order to obtain the status of responsible power that Libya seeks, it needs to rebuild its military power. The renewal of diplomatic ties between Libya and France will even make the sale of Rafale airplanes and Tiger helicopters to Libya possible. On 21 October 2006, the Defence Ministry has confirmed that there is a Libyan offer being studies at the CIEEMG. The Libyan market is highly coveted: the competition among European companies is stiff and it is likely that the defence of the Bulgarian nurses was being sacrificed on the altar of trade. What government would dare to jeopardise its economic and commercial interests?

Conclusion In the presence of an oil El Dorado, the exportation of norms and democratic values is a priority for EU member states. It could even be said that, in a rentier state, it is primarily corrupt practices that dominate. The lift of sanctions, by the EU, over the sale of arms to Libya produced some criticisms. During a debate at the WEU on 22 October 2004, the British Lord Russell-Johnston lamented that as soon Libya started behaving better, the first reaction of the EU was to sell the country arms, adding that it was not the best of solutions. In fact, how can international opinion be convinced – if this is indeed necessary – that Libya needs to rebuild its conventional arms policy? The EU justification for lifting sanctions on the sale of arms to Libya rests on the argument that Libya must be supplied with the means to fight against illegal migration!7 In September 2004, a month before the EU decision, Italy clearly expressed its will to help the Libyan regime to avail itself of the military tools necessary to regulate migration flows: new radars, helicopters, optical viewfinders, ships, etc. Using the excuse of an ‘invasion’ of African immigrants coming from Libya (the pool of illegal immigrants is estimated at around two million Africans), Italy managed to convince its European partners to put an end to the ban on arms sales to Libya. In exchange, Libya allegedly offered to set up ‘holding centres’ for illegal immigrants (Ferré 2005). The exploitation of the migration issue for military and commercial aims was effective: the argument worked and the EU lifted its embargo on arms sales to Libya. The migrant problem is a headache for the Libyan regime for two reasons: first, migrants spark xenophobic tendencies among the Libyan population and, second, they are a cause for concern for Libya’s neighbour countries, which are caught off guard by the flow of illegal immigrants through Libya. In the summer of 2000, Libya was spotlighted in the media due to a tragic event involving African immigrants: some one hundred Africans were massacred by young Libyans ‘who did not want foreigners in their country’. Ali Abdel-Salaam AlTereiki, the Libyan secretary of the People’s Committee for African Affairs, stressed during a press conference that those murders were not of racist origin: ‘Racism does not exist for us, we are not whites . . . More than two and a half million Africans live in Libya and only 1700 of them have an identity card’.

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Such practices illustrate the patent contradictions of Libyan society. Libya, involved in the African Union project, has reacted with violence to African immigrants allowed to stay in Libya without a visa. Many immigrants use Libya as a stepping stone to Europe. In September 2007, Qadhafi asked the EU for about ten billion euros in financial aid to combat these flows. If not money, Libya hopes that Italy, for instance, will help it build an efficient navy. Concerning its land borders, Libya has created special brigades and a Berber, General Mohamed Ahrim, has been made responsible for the new armed brigade in charge of controlling migration flows at the borders. All Libya needs now is to acquire modern military equipment. Malta, the main EU member state concerned with the issue of illegal immigrant flows, requested in late September 2006 that the EU provide Libya with concrete support: ‘if Libya had better patrols at its southern border, it could reduce the number of immigrants that then reach Malta and Italy’, stressed Tonio Borg, Maltese Minister of Internal Affairs. Libya is changing rapidly and it emphasises its convergence with the US and EU interests in all areas. Libya put an end to its WMD programme and encourages all its neighbours to do the same. Libya is liberalising its oil sector and it offers Europe guarantees for its energy supply. The 7 October 2004 inauguration of the West Jamahiriya Gas Project seals Libya’s bond to Europe: ‘We declare before the world that Italy and Libya have decided to create in the Mediterranean a sea of peace. The Mediterranean will be a sea of trade and tourism, a sea under which oil and gas pipelines will pass through Libya and Italy to link Africa and Europe’ (Jamahiriya News Agency 2004). At the same time, given European worries over the migration issue, Libya is willing to accept ‘camps’ on its territory. In February 2003, Tony Blair launched the idea of creating ‘regional protection areas’ outside of Europe and his project has been taken up by Otto Schily, German Minister of Internal Affairs, and his Italian homologue Giuseppe Pisanu, who launched the idea of creating ‘closed centres’, actually camps where migrants’ asylum applications would be examined (Saint-Saëns 2004). Can the European Neighbourhood Policy help to dismantle the Libyan revolutionary regime? It must be acknowledged that the regime has started to free some political prisoners. At the same time, in January 2005, a directive of Colonel Qadhafi to the People’s General Congress asked for the abolition of the People’s Court (conducting secret political trials). Nevertheless, for the Libyan League of Human Rights: The abolition of the ‘People’s Court’ and the exceptional laws is undoubtedly a commendable step in the right direction but should be followed by other measures if the purpose of their abolition is to remedy the deplorable human rights situation in Libya. In fact, respect for human rights has been obstructed not only by the ‘People’s Court’ but, more particularly, by the total lack of an equitable and independent judiciary. (The Libyan League for Human Rights 2005)

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The opening of Libya to human rights organisations is part of the political determination to convince the Bush Administration that Libya has definitely changed and that it should therefore be struck from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The fear of meeting the same fate as Saddam Hussein convinced Qadhafi to change.

Notes 1 According to Martin Ortega: Within the Barcelona Process, a sub-regional association could be created, having EU and the three countries of Central Maghreb as its members. This sub-regional framework would coordinate and help the three Maghreb countries in their integration process. They would therefore benefit of the EU expertise in the gradual opening of borders and the promotion of South-South exchanges. An alternative would be the launching of a 5+5 Group that would then become a 5+5+1 with the EU. There is the need to have specific and concrete projects to help the integration of Maghreb. (www.iss-eu.org:new/analysis/analy161.html) 2 www.euromesco.net/. 3 In an interview for the Sunday Times, Seif el Islam stresses the role of the ‘market tools’ – the unveiling of the Libyan networks – that allowed to get nuclear technology in exchange of a British engagement in the formation of the Libyan army. 4 In August 1996, Bula Resources signed an agreement with NOC for exploration in the Sirte and the Ghadames basins. In November 1997, the Repsol/Total/OeMV/saga Petroleum consortium signed an agreement of exploration and sharing of the production in the Murzuk basin. In November 1999, Repsol signed a new arrangement. At the same time, the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) signed an arrangement with NOC and so forth. 5 In 1985, Agip discovered a considerable gas stock in Libya. Agip suggested linking this Libyan production with the Euromed Gas Pipeline. In 1994, Agip started talks with Algeria, Libya and Tunisia for a common exploitation. The exploitation of the field of El Wafa in Lybia in an example of common exploitation. This camp, discovered in 1991, needs the construction of a pipeline leading to the terminals in order to be exploited. One of the most economic solutions would be to transfer the production in the field of Alrar, in Algeria. This field, built by the Soviets in 1985, is directly connected through pipeline to Hassi R’Mel. Total, Agip, Repsol and Lasmo acquired some positions in the field of El Wafa in the perspective of cooperation between Algeria and Libya for common exploitation (Gurney 1996). 6 According to the British society Robertson Research International Ltd, Libya is one of the main destinations for investments in hydrocarbons. Only 25 per cent of gas and oil stocks, estimated at 40 billion barrels, are exploited (Hassan 2004). 7 The Luxemburg Declaration (General Affairs and External Relations Council) states that: ‘It is well-known fact that one of the EU member states – and therefore all member states because of the open borders – is having considerable problems with illegal immigrants coming from Libya. The Ministers agreed today that cooperation with Libya on the topic of migration has become a pressing matter’, EU Foreign Ministers on Libya.

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The uncertainties of democratic promotion in Afghanistan Jean-Noël Ferrié

Any discussion of the state of democracy and more precisely the ‘democratic moment’ should involve making a distinction, as does Michel Camau, between the concepts of ‘democratization’ and ‘democratic globalization’ (Camau 2006). Democratization is a virtuous process through which totalitarian and authoritarian regimes become substantially democratic. Democratic globalization, on the other hand, involves diffusion of the democratic reference and specific democratic mechanisms, without necessarily giving rise to substantial democracy. Democratic globalization can therefore extend even to authoritarian regimes. In this respect, the ‘democratic moment’ is more an element of ambiguity than a real opportunity, in that it likens democratic globalization to democratization. Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the expression ‘democratic moment’ is something other than an illusion, and in this regard, confusing democratic globalization with an extension of deliberalization (as alterglobalization advocates tend to do) does not accurately describe the situation. Authoritarian regimes are obliged to come to terms with this reference, but the fact that this compromise does not entail democratization in the true sense does not mean it has no effect on the nature of such authoritarianism. Therefore, the confusion has to do with what actually occurs and not with the fact that something rather than nothing happens. What creates such an ambiguity is the undeniably mistaken idea that the universalization of a model necessarily and automatically implies the standardization and universalization of an agenda and the behaviours linked to it. This misunderstanding is generated by an underestimation of what is undertaken with regard to what the local context allows. In other words, the constraints of path dependency have been largely misjudged, and therefore the exportation of norms inherent in this illusory agenda remained poorly thought out. Oddly contrasting with the political scientist’s approach, sometimes overly concerned with the acceptance of external norms by local actors, it seems that most experts of democratization and state-building do not even imagine that the democratic set – consensual transitional government, constitution, elections, transitional justice – could be at all ill-suited to any of the situations to which it is applied. They see the democratic set as doctors might consider the protocol for multi-injured patients in emergency medicine, which takes into account only the biology of human beings and not their specific variables (Caplan and Pouligny 2005).

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To a large degree, Afghanistan offers a striking example of the democratic confusion that I set out to analyse in this chapter. The country is now experiencing a crisis of the constitutional and democratic institutions that were rapidly introduced by the international actors. I will especially focus on the differences between the attitudes and the agenda of American, European and French actors, even if at first the aim was to support a unilateral agenda initiated by the United States, and to ‘regularize’ it, since the intervention can only seriously be said to have been motivated by the desire to avenge an outrage. Nevertheless, the empire of democratic ideology is such that this pure act of reprisal was spontaneously placed within a model of ‘democratic conversion’ naturally involving an undervaluation of the context and excessive trust in the efficiency of the democratic set (Dorronsoro and Harling 2005).

Present state of Afghan institutions After the American attack on Afghanistan, the international community rapidly engaged in the reconstruction of the Afghan state, starting from the 2001 Bonn Agreement. Complex constitutional institutions were also set up, thereby legitimating, a posteriori, the American revenge. Certainly, if we consider the huge problems of human development that continue to exist in Afghanistan, institutional reconstruction was not the most urgent measure to take, yet, the situation thus created is now a state of fact. Moreover, the arrangements made in Bonn concerned only the ‘winners’, and not all of them were staunch partisans of the developed constitutional agenda, such that the arrangements were more idealistic and abstract than realist (Ottaway and Lieven 2002), since they gave the various actors political power that might then prove to be counterproductive as regards the goals initially pursued (Afghanistan National Human Development Report 2004: 124ff). The institutions created have proven to be rather unsatisfactory: 1

2

the Afghan political regime is a presidential one but, because of the electoral system chosen, there is no majority party to support the president or even any stable coalitions that might at least provide for the consolidation and predictability of political preferences; there is no formal distinction between the system of law and the system of regulations, and therefore the parliament can potentially take charge of all the issues and legitimately claim to impose its own solutions.

Moreover, in the early stages of implementing a constitution, institutional balances depend more on political party activities than on the existence of stabilizing rules. As a consequence, the parliament is naturally apt to seek an equilibrium favourable to its primacy and the sole interests of its components. In February 2007, the parliament thus tried to impose its leadership on the executive and the international community by passing an amnesty law, whereas the country had committed itself to setting up a system of transitional justice. The

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parliament is also trying to gain control of the courts and in the wake of the debates over the amnesty law, has threatened to withdraw Afghanistan from certain international treaties it has signed. The international community is not in a position to counter these initiatives without considerable cost, also because the idea of democracy promotion seems more and more to boil down simply to the imposition of Western – or even just American – standards (Carothers 2006). The international community risks therefore to be repeatedly confronted with such initiatives. There is also the ensuing risk of conflicts between the executive and the legislative powers, with the consequential paralysis of the state analysis. There is also the possibility that the parliament will articulate projects of ‘national reconciliation’ (as the case of the amnesty law suggests). All this is naturally the result of the equilibrium set up with the Bonn arrangements.

The causal models Democratic institutions were established in Iraq with the same speed that characterized Afghanistan (2003: the constitution; 2004: presidential elections; 2005: legislative elections). This rapidity is based on the idea of a virtuous circle, i.e. the idea that democratic transition will automatically be brought about by setting up democratic institutions, which are meant to create the contextual conditions and the attitudes favourable to their success. This figure inverts the classical conceptions of democracy according to which the institutions sprout in fertile ground: here the institutions supply the topsoil. Where does this conception come from? There are three possible origins, partly interrelated: Political theory, of course, which has tried to design a new model to replace the gradualist one, according to which democratic institutions eventually take root in well prepared ground. The democratisation of Eastern European countries has served as a model: the occurred swiftly, at least where it succeeded. The adoption of a constitutional compromise and the election of the various governing bodies have been followed by a consolidation of the regime. It is in fact with regard to what happened in Eastern European countries that analysts such as John Elster have talked about a ‘virtuous circle’. (Elster 1998) The influence of the idea – a very ‘American’ one that probably relates to the political history of the US – that once the institutions are installed and elections are held, the main problems are settled. The reference to the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after World War II plays an important role in this belief. (Caplan and Pouligny 2005)

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Those three origins can and, to a certain extent, do merge together: the first is founded on the second and so is the third. It seems that the ambiguity of the ‘democratic moment’ is generated here: the theory of the ‘virtuous circle’ is founded on the elision of the context. The problem of context is left for afterward, but the possibility of excluding the context from the factors of democratization derives from the misunderstanding of the contextual conditions of this very elision. In the Eastern countries, at the moment the virtuous circle was engaged, those countries benefited from favourable contexts that could, together with the democratic institutions, create the fertile ground to consolidate them. In other words, the democratic agenda can’t be standardized. Democracy does not have an intrinsic timeframe acting independently from the places where it works (Bunce 2000). The United States apply the protocol of constitutional regulation regardless of the context and the experience, as it is shown both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Although in Afghanistan, constitutional institutions proved to be rather ineffective and the cost of elections was very high, the US ambassador to Kabul argued at the donor meeting (JCMB: Joint Coordination Monitoring Board) in London in January 2007 that the main preoccupation for Afghanistan should be to finance the next elections. The US attitude concerning institutions is not purely naïve, as it may seem in a context where it might appear that to achieve democratic progress the primary concern ought to be the development of human security. Actually, support for institutions goes along with the American capacity to select strategic institutions. In fact, American technical assistance to the Afghan parliament has particularly been given to the budgetary commission, i.e. regulating finances, sidelining any other sponsor showing an interest in it. However, this is a mixed rather than a realist attitude. This attitude derives from the deep-seated conviction that Americans have in the link between democracy and tax-paying. For them, representation is founded on the classic political theory that says the representatives control the use that is made of tax revenue, because representation is based on consent to taxation. This is supposedly the basis of constitutional institutions. But what does controlling the use of tax revenue mean in a country crippled by corruption and mainlined by sponsors?

The European Union attitude and its French variant The EU and in particular the French attitude to the democratization of Afghanistan is different from the American one. Neither the EU nor the French attitude reduces democracy to the mere installation of constitutional institutions; they have a broader conception of democratization based in particular on the diffusion and respect of norms to achieve an overall balance (Laïdi 2005). The European Commission Strategy Paper on Afghanistan for the 2007–2013 period emphasizes issues such as the ‘transitional justice process for handling human rights abuses which were committed during 23 years of warfare, women’s rights and an unreliable justice system’ (European Commission 2007a: 7), while

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(singularly) linking the weakness of Afghan state institutions to the degradation of the Afghan environment (ibid.: 9). The relevance of these considerations is undeniably normative: it is indeed hard to see how transitional justice can allow for better reconstruction of Afghanistan (ibid.: 11). Even more, this implies the strengthening of a possible opposition to the state such as it is exists, since the European document says that ‘support may be provided to the government and civil society organizations for initiatives related to transitional justice’ (ibid.: 25). Here, civil society may have an agenda opposite to the government’s, which could harm the stability of a government nothing short of authoritarian (probably more out of weakness than design) that does not have the strength to impose itself and its own norms. But that is not all: transitional justice could also represent a threat for the parties to the Bonn agreements who support the Afghan government today, many of whom – some as ‘warlords’, others as ‘freedom fighters’ – perpetrated human rights violations, just as all the others did. Nevertheless, the European Commission and several European countries financially support the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, led by Simar Samar, a women’s rights militant and minister in charge of women’s affairs in the first transitional Afghan government. One of the main tasks of this Commission was to re-examine past abuses. In Kabul, fundraising drives organized by this Independent Commission are ostensibly held in the presence of the European Commission representative and many European ambassadors. One can only be doubtful with regard to what appears as a practical contradiction between these two goals: the effective development of transitional justice is at odds with the government’s political stability, also supported by European countries. But this contradiction has a reason that I shall explain later on. At the same time, the rest of the European Commission programme seems to be less idealist and more strategic, since it concentrates (in the field of governance) on establishing the rule of law through actions concerning police and justice and the reform of public administration. However, the causal assertions used to justify this strategy are more normative than realist: ‘The reconstruction of the justice sector is essential for the establishment of the rule of law, which is, in turn, a key condition for political stability and sustainable economic development’ (European Commission 2007a: 22). Technically, political stability does not necessarily imply the rule of law, as underlined by Huntington (1968): a state can be stable and authoritarian, or even stable because authoritarian. At the same time, there can be a ‘rule of law for business’ which is not, or not by the same token, a ‘rule of law for citizens’. From the social science standpoint, the relationship between rule of law and economic development is not clear. The linking of all these preferences is not a foregone conclusion but the result of a normative preference. Finally, it should be noted that Afghanistan is just one case among many others (especially the ACP countries) of a European policy unified through a doctrine approved both by a body of experts (the executive administration of the European Commission) and by the citizens’ representatives (the elected representatives at the European Parliament). Thus, the communication from the

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European Commission is entitled ‘Governance in the European Consensus on Development’ (Commission of the European Communities 2006) and defines governance as: Respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms ... support for democratisation processes and the involvement of citizens in choosing and overseeing those who govern them; respect for the rule of law and access for all to an independent justice system; access to information; a government that governs transparently and is accountable to the relevant institutions and to the electorate; human security; management of migration flows; effective institutions, access to basic social services, sustainable management of natural and energy resources and of the environment, and the promotion of sustainable economic growth and social cohesion in a climate conducive to private investment. It should rapidly be pointed out that the principles outlined in this communication express only the European idea of governance and are not a sociological observation specific to any given society. It is a transcendental definition – in the Kantian sense – of governance. Democratic governance, according to the French doctrine of cooperation, is quite close to the European conception: The French approach to governance goes beyond the issue of institutions or the formal frames of government. It concerns also the mechanisms of social coordination that take part in political action. It refers to the political decision-making process among and within all the social groups (state, enterprises, communities, associations, etc.) and at all levels (from local to global). It concerns the process of decision development as decisions themselves . . . The aim is not only to help reform a state but also to help a given society to rethink its own administrative process. (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, DGCID/DPDEV 2007) This definition is an interesting one, since it allows us to consider as part of governance the functioning of associations while assuming that political institutions are not necessarily part of it. This extensive, and subtly selective, model refers, in a certain way, to the gradualist definition, since it considers that context matters in achieving results and that local processes determine the final output. Yet, that this is also admittedly a very cautious strategy, since the support for NGOs is the least troublesome form of aid to governance in our relations with authoritarian regimes. Supporting the civic education of women, for example, does not pose any problem to the ruling regimes since this usually involves literacy teaching and not promoting their active integration into political life (the European Commission cooperation policy uses the same careful subterfuges). This governance strategy moreover tends to minimize, but not ignore, the issue of civil liberties and human rights. It develops mechanisms more than it claims transcendental principles.

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In the European Union governance policy, the concern with human rights is more pronounced than in the French conception, which instead devotes most of its financial support to cooperation plans. In Afghanistan, the Independent Commission for Human Rights is not financed by France and support for its activities does not mobilize people of the same level in the donation meetings. For the Europeans, the silk thread of respect for legality is a substantial element for democracy, as Michel Camau, referring to Aron, shows in his analysis. There is here a certain coherence with the European Union’s normative discourse. This reference to respect for norms is not part of a gradualist approach but of the idea that the principles are intrinsically good. It is undeniably an ethical conception of democracy. France’s position, instead, is one of a state that wants to act as a bilateral actor and that cannot limit itself to the role of a ‘normative community’. The ‘normative community’ replaces the ‘national community’ that does not exist. On the contrary, France, being a national community, wants to preserve its bilateral arrangements (Laïdi 2006: 6). This is even more important in the case of Afghanistan, since the presence of France referred to its past and therefore to its bilateral history with Afghanistan: archaeological missions, French secondary schools Esteqlal and Malalaï, teaching of law and medicine. It is moreover because of this pre-existing framework that France engaged, together with Germany, in setting up a training programme for magistrates, which concerns more the concrete implementation of principles than their declaration. This action also implied intra-European competition, since the lead nation in the reconstruction of the justice system is Italy and the European Commission has pledged to support the lead nation in these areas (European Commission 2007a: 22). An analysis of the amnesty law crisis should help to hone the distinction between the various types of actors, their common attachments and their specific interests.

A case study: the amnesty law The amnesty law passed by the Afghan parliament in February 2007 provoked a strong reaction among the international community. Whereas at the Bonn conference Afghanistan had accepted the principle of a transitional justice system to try the crimes perpetrated during the civil war, a majority of deputies – eager to preserve their safety – agreed to vote for an amnesty. This law was particularly poorly designed, since it proclaimed, for example, the obligation to respect ‘freedom fighters’ but did not specify the specific forms of immunity that this implies. This law was considered by the donors as a retreat from the Bonn arrangements and from international agreements and conventions signed by Afghanistan, the respect of which is imposed by article 7 of the constitution. The strongest reactions to the amnesty law did not come from the US but from Europe, even if they varied from one country to the next. France adopted a cautious and moderated stance, suggesting that a demarche might be envisaged with the head of state, but it did nothing concrete in this

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direction. Countries such as Denmark and Holland, on the contrary, proved to be very active, encouraging and conveying protests among civil society. Poland, newly present in Afghanistan, seemed to consider the Afghan parliament sovereign in its decision on the question. What is interesting is that the Europeans who were strongly against the amnesty law hoped that the President Karzai would not endorse it, but had he not, this would have been tantamount to a coup d’état. The ideological stand according to which good behaviour is worthy in and of itself also implies that bad behaviour should be punished, the context notwithstanding. Nevertheless, the context is not reducible to an ideological stand. It was not possible to force the President not to endorse the law voted by his supporters (the parties to the Bonn agreements), also because the Western protests gave rise to a large-scale demonstration in support of the amnesty. The law was therefore passed after a cosmetic change restating the individual rights of victims without modifying any other of the law’s provisions. The moral of the story is fairly clear and can be summarized as follows: 1

2

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The setting up of democratic institutions does not necessarily produce the virtuous behaviours that are meant to strengthen them. On the contrary, democratic institutions can easily facilitate behaviour that substantially contradicts democratic principles. In fact, institutions depend on the context and the local actors as well as their intentions and their expertise. Therefore, nothing guarantees that a democratically elected parliament will respect constitutionalism more than the majority rule or norms more than the power of numbers. From this point of view, even the democracy promoters do not consider the respect of institutions as their priority, since some of them do not consider a democratic choice acceptable if it violates their norms. Coherent supporters of democratic process should have accepted the amnesty law. Here we see the same contradiction as for Palestine, and Europe seemed inclined to adopt the same attitude: our ‘supra processual norms are more important than our processual principles. This dual normativity is difficult to justify for the norm-takers. All the Western actors do not share the same conceptions. Actually, democratization conceptions strongly depend on current foreign policies. Americans are more attached to institutional aspects not only out of conviction but also because they dramatically need an Afghan state as a partner. Some Europeans prefer substantial principles: they are the ones whose foreign policy is more linked to the existence of political blocks or a normative community (EU, NATO). France on the contrary wishes to develop an independent foreign policy (even if in the case of Afghanistan it is not very active), and so France prefers to avoid confrontational systems and situations. It thus seems to be better adapted to complex contexts, because it is more willing to support change within them (if it finds willing partners) than to provoke it. Finally, the limits on the effectiveness of a normative community depends

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J.-N. Ferrié on the cohesion of its members and the risks inherent in completely substituting norms promotion for bilateral arrangements among states or the acceptance of states of fact. In the Afghan situation, the head of state depends both on his external and his domestic support and this dual dependence also partly explains his weakness. Therefore, head-on opposition to the amnesty law implied putting the head of state in a very difficult position for his own stability. The choice of affirming disturbing principles without imposing them in reality has revealed to be a no-win decision, since norms have not been respected and Europeans generated dissatisfaction among Afghan political actors.

Conclusion If we consider the Afghan situation, it is clear that the creation of democratic institutions cannot be planned independently from the context. Voluntarism seems more to be the consequence of their underestimation than the manifestation of an ambition. From this point of view, the idea that democratic change in Eastern countries and the globalization of the democratic reference imply a global democratic opportunity is a mistake. It is not possible to ignore local conditions, i.e. the power relationships and the actors’ ideas of what they can and cannot do. It is not even possible to ignore our own substantial conceptions of democracy since, if they are not respected, this provokes a reaction in us that can lead to actions in contradiction with the promotion of democratic institutions. Having acquired the habit of thinking of norms as universal, we end up forgetting that this universal character is a construction and not a spontaneously shared transcendental norm. Moreover, this construction is an historical one, made up of our institutions, our debates and our values. In this context, the affirmation of a norm always consists in addressing a new public while playing for an existing audience. This duality of audiences is a source of tension. It is therefore clear that our democratic convictions lead us, I dare say, to make mistakes, to believe in the supreme virtue of institutions and to believe in the superiority of universal norms without paying attention at the specificity of the contexts. Yet, contexts remain decisive and our own beliefs and strategies depend on our own contexts of action, on our plans, on what we can tolerate and on what seems normal to us. The globalization of a reference is, from this point of view, nothing less than the universalization of a related system of actions. In this sense, the promotion of democracy would benefit more from active pessimism than from messy and chaotic optimism.

10 The European Union, China and human rights1 Richard Balme

The European Union’s China policy relies on a strategy of ‘constructive engagement’ with China in world affairs. In the words of the EU website: The commitment of the EU to the strengthening of its political dialogue with China is notably based upon recognition that China, as a UN Security Council member, a growing economic and political power, and an increasingly assertive member of the international community, can exert a significant influence on a wide series of issues of global concern. A broad EU–China political dialogue was formally established in 1994, through an exchange of letters, ‘in recognition of China’s status as an emerging power on the international scene’. This dialogue has grown into a regular series of meetings at several levels (Balme, forthcoming). The scope of the dialogue has gradually broadened over time to cover issues ranging from non-proliferation to the security situation in Asia, from global warming to the fight against illegal migration and trafficking in human beings. The 2003 policy paper defined concrete and practical action points for the implementation of EU policy towards China for the ensuing two to three years: in particular, an enhancement of political dialogue through better focusing of the existing mechanisms and systematic inclusion of global and regional governance and security issues; more resultsoriented dialogue on illegal immigration and launching of negotiations to sign a readmission agreement; ways of improving the efficiency and impact of the human rights dialogue were also specified. On 13 October 2003 China released its first ever policy paper on the EU. At the EU–China Summit in the Hague on 8 December 2004, a joint declaration on non-proliferation, agreements on peaceful nuclear research, customs cooperation and the prolongation of the Science and Technology Agreement were signed. Four cooperation agreements were also concluded. Both parties stressed the importance of further deepening their relationship, turning it into a ‘strategic partnership’. More recently, the Commission issued a communication entitled ‘EU-China: Closer Partners, Growing Responsibilities’ (Commission of European Communities, 2006), accompanied by a trade policy paper setting out the challenges of trade and investment relations in more detail. The tone of the

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communication is in diplomatic terms slightly more demanding than previous statements issued with the initial developments of the relations: ‘Relations are increasingly mature and realistic . . . The EU’s fundamental approach to China remains one of engagement and partnership. A closer strategic partnership means mutual responsibilities increase’. The initiative sets out a comprehensive approach, identifying as priorities support for China’s transition towards a more open and plural society, sustainable development, including cooperation with China on energy issues, climate change and international development; trade and economic relations; stronger bilateral cooperation, including in science and technology, and migration; and the promotion of international security, both in East Asia and beyond and more broadly on non-proliferation issues. The Council welcomed the communication and the trade working paper and endorsed their recommendations in conclusions adopted on 11 December 2006. Human rights are intended to be the ‘cornerstone’ of the European Union’s foreign policy. The Treaty of Nice stipulated that the objectives of developing and consolidating democracy and the rule of law and respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms be pursued also in the field of economic, financial and technical cooperation with third countries (Art. 181a). As a result, the pursuit of human rights has become a transversal objective of all of the EU’s external activities. The EU draws on a range of tools to promote human rights and democratization objectives in external relations. Some of these tools are instruments of traditional diplomacy and foreign policy, such as declarations, demarches (through diplomatic representations to third countries), as well as resolutions and interventions within the United Nations framework. In addition, the EU promotes human rights and democratization through various cooperation and assistance programmes it implements with third countries and through political dialogues. In doing so it uses a specific legal basis, a ‘human rights clause’, which is incorporated in nearly all EU agreements with third countries since 1995. There are now more than 120 such agreements. In the event that those principles are breached, the EU may take certain measures, ranging from refusal to grant visas to senior government members to the freezing of assets held in EU countries. The human rights clause also offers the ultimate possibility of suspending the agreement. However, its principal rationale is to be an incentive for dialogue and cooperation. The pivotal role of the human rights clause is particularly evident in the Cotonou Agreement, the trade and aid pact linking the Union with 78 developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific (the ACP group). In case of human rights violations, trade concessions can be suspended and aid programmes reduced or curtailed. The EU asserts that poverty reduction, the main objective of its overseas development policy, can only be achieved through democratic consolidation in the long term. In 2001 the Commission issued a communication to the Council and the European Parliament stating priorities for human rights promotion (European Commission 2001). Six guidelines have been adopted by the Council regarding the death penalty (1998), human rights dialogues (2001), torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (2001), children and armed

The EU, China and human rights 145 conflicts (2003), human rights defenders (2004) and promotion of International Humanitarian Law (2005). The EU also claims to be the largest donor in the world, accounting for 55 per cent of development assistance, 20 per cent of which is managed by the Commission. The Commission’s proposal of 13 July 2005 for a new EU Development Policy aimed at reducing poverty in line with the Millennium Development Goals, and highlighted the importance of the promotion of good governance, human rights and democracy. This ‘European Consensus’ is intended to provide a common framework of objectives, values and principles that the EU supports and promotes ‘as a global player and as a global partner’. Funding is provided under the European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) established upon the initiative of the European Parliament in 1994, the main aim of which is to promote human rights, democracy and conflict prevention in third countries. In 2004, the EIDHR funded projects worth more than 100 million euros in 32 countries. One of the key concepts of the EU human rights policy lies with ‘mainstreaming’, the process of integrating human rights and democratization issues into all aspects of public policy decision-making and implementation, including trade and external assistance. The Commission’s Country Strategy Papers (CSPs), which are designed to set out a comprehensive overview of important issues in the EU’s relations with specific third countries and provide the background for external assistance to those countries, include an assessment of the situation of human rights and democratization. This assessment must in turn be an integral element of the assistance strategies adopted, with regular reviews providing the opportunity for expanding and refining references to human rights. Likewise, the European Commission uses its bilateral and regional cooperation programmes to advance ‘good governance’, the rule of law and democratization and human rights cooperation. Such instruments have been used, for instance, to support electoral commissions, reform the judiciary, advance the rights of women and children and work with national human rights institutions. Accordingly, the last communication of the Commission on EU–China relations includes a section entitled ‘Supporting China’s transition towards a more open and plural society’. It states: The Chinese leadership has repeatedly stated its support for reform, including on basic rights and freedoms. But in this area progress on the ground has been limited. The EU must consider how it can most effectively assist China’s reform process, making the case that better protection of human rights, a more open society, and more accountable government would be beneficial to China, and essential for continued economic growth. Democracy, human rights and the promotion of common values remain fundamental tenets of EU policy and of central importance to bilateral relations. The EU should support and encourage the development of a full, healthy and independent civil society in China. It should support efforts to strengthen the rule of law – an essential basis for all other reform. At the same time, the EU will continue to encourage full respect of fundamental

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Indeed, human rights have been a critical issue of EU–China relations since the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989. This tragedy and related attitudes of the Chinese government would provide the trauma setting the cognitive frame of EU–China relations on human rights, to a large extent still prevalent today. In the aftermath of the event, the EU promptly launched an arms embargo against China. However, this ‘hard’ approach to China rapidly proved untenable and ineffective, and inappropriate to deal with the gradual and controlled process of domestic change successfully imposed by Chinese authorities. As a result, the establishment of a human rights dialogue between the two parties illustrated the shift, or rather the acceptance of a ‘soft’ approach to China by the EU. With the growing importance of China as a global player, these relations have gradually evolved from unilateral pressure to the accepted coexistence of two adjacent normative systems, allowing for non-confrontational dialogue and gradual change, but at the cost of accepting a slow pace of transformation of the human rights situation in China. This situation creates tension between the practice of European Union diplomacy and its proclaimed values, as well as between the reality of human rights promotion in China and its understanding by European public opinion. This chapter explores the contours and implications of this situation. I first consider the development of human rights dialogue as the key instrument of the EU’s China policy on the issue, and the engagement of China in the international regime of human rights. I then define the main tenets of the Chinese approach to human rights, before reviewing developments in Chinese political, civil and social rights, including the death penalty, arbitrary detention, freedom of expression and labour rights. For each case study I provide an assessment of the potential impact of the EU policy. The issue of the lifting of the arms embargo is then considered. The last section is devoted to the impact of China’s rise on human rights’ promotion in third countries, with a focus on recent developments in Africa. Finally, the conclusion offers some reflections on the challenges facing the EU in its human rights policy on the basis of the Chinese experience.

The policy instrument of soft power: human rights dialogue Human rights have been a major theme of EU–China relations since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. The beginning of the human rights dialogue responded primarily to the EU’s necessity to restore and develop relations with China, and to the ineffectiveness of its own regime of sanctions to alter Chinese

The EU, China and human rights 147 domestic policy. It was also conceived as an alternative to the US approach, which at the time tried to link trade policy to human rights.2 German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1995 and French President Jacques Chirac in 1997 asserted the need to take differences in human rights approaches into account. The EU–China dialogue on human rights (initially distinct from the political dialogue) was initiated in January 1996, but was interrupted by China after Denmark (plus nine other EU member states) tabled a critical resolution at the 1997 United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) session. Later in 1997, China decided to resume the dialogue. Since then, the dialogue has been held twice a year. For the EU, the human rights dialogue constitutes a platform to engage China on sensitive issues, and to allow for the channelling of EU concerns directly to the Chinese authorities. The EU seeks to promote a ‘positive’ and ‘result-oriented’ approach through dialogue and cooperation, and intends to see it connected to decision-making in China so that it brings tangible improvements. The Commission supports the process through its cooperation programmes. Since 1997, several projects (on village governance, legal cooperation, promotion of women’s rights, networking on Human Rights Covenants etc.) have been carried out. The human rights dialogues on the European side are guided by benchmarks set out by the Council. The human rights situation in China and the impact of the dialogue was evaluated by the Council in October 2004, resulting in Council Conclusions and oral briefings to the European Parliament and to NGOs. The overall assessment of developments showed a mixed picture of progress in some areas and continuing concerns in others. On the one hand, the Council acknowledged that China has made considerable progress over the last decade in its socio-economic development and welcomed steps towards strengthening the rule of law, while urging China to ensure effective implementation of such measures. On the other hand, the Council expressed concern that, despite these developments, violations of human rights continued to occur, these including restrictions on freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and association, a lack of progress in respect for the rights of persons belonging to minorities, continued widespread application of the death penalty, and the persistence of torture (European Communities 2006). The Council considered the dialogue a valuable instrument and an important element of overall EU–China relations, and endorsed proposals for improving the dialogue and the accompanying expert seminars aimed at encouraging tangible results on the ground. Subsequent dialogues held in 2005 and 2006 were accompanied by preceding meetings at the political level during which the EU raised a number of key concerns, stressing in particular the release of prisoners connected with the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square, respect of religious freedom, speedy ratification and implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), reform of the re-education through labour system (RTL) and the importance of allowing for greater freedom of expression, including on the Internet. The EU handed over a list of individual cases of concern, to which China replied in writing.

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The ‘net impact’ of the dialogue in terms of direct consequences would be impossible to assess precisely (Dejean de la Batie 2002). Indeed, Chinese authorities claim a different conception of human rights, enlarged to social and economic well-being, and tend to minimize the importance of political and civil rights, at least in the assessment of the current situation. The understanding of ‘improvements’ therefore varies substantially on both sides. Other dialogues are also conducted between China and the US, Japan, Canada, Australia, Norway, Switzerland and, within the EU, Germany, the UK and Hungary. In 2001 the Swiss government initiated with the Berne process a multilateral dialogue grouping the UK, the US, Canada, the EU, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Chinese authorities never establish any formal link between bilateral dialogues (even less so sanctions) and human rights developments, if any. Therefore changes in the human rights situation in China need to be attributed to the conjunction of bilateral dialogues, intermittent international public pressure, and above all to domestic political considerations.

China’s engagement in multilateral institutions Undeniably China’s engagement in multilateral human rights institutions has progressed substantially since the early 1980s. China has signed and ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1980), the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD, 1981), the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT, 1988), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1992) and its optional protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 2001). It also signed but has yet to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1998), and the CRC optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflicts. China is also active in the international human rights regime in submitting reports to treaty bodies, participating in the drafting of new instruments, and hosting a number of multilateral conferences. In November 2006, China held a ‘Human Rights Exhibition’ showcasing human rights achievements in China. To date (June 2007) China has participated in 15 UN peacekeeping missions including in East Timor, Bosnia, Liberia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Haiti and Sudan (Kornberg and Faust 2005). It signed a memorandum of understanding with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, initiating some forms of cooperation, and Chinese authorities agree to receive lists of individual cases in bilateral dialogues and to provide answers, although on an informal basis. China also allowed a limited number of visits from international rights monitors, including the special rapporteurs on torture, freedom of religion and the rights to education, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Finally, China was an active promoter of reforms of the Human Rights Commission, and supported the newly established Human Rights Council, although membership in the Council

The EU, China and human rights 149 is both more selective and more demanding for countries with poor rights records (the US was among the few countries to vote against the reform). The engagement of China in the international regime of human rights, however, is both gradual, as can be seen with the duration of the process, and selective. The main reason for the delay in ratification by China of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) lies with the reform of the judicial process required to limit arbitrary detention (see below). China also took no action on the CAT optional protocol, seen as too demanding in terms of international visits to prisoners, perceived as an infringement upon its sovereignty. It also abstained from any action on the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (CMW), and expressed a reserve on union rights when the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was ratified (Choukroune 2005). Finally, China opposed the International Criminal Court along with the United States, Israel, and a few other countries. This attitude whereby China’s engagement in the human rights regime is subject to its domestic interest is frequently denounced as instrumental behaviour seeking respectability while avoiding responsibility, and overall as a lack of genuine commitment. There is little doubt that China has learned the rules and how to play with them in dealing with UN human rights organs. Compliance with international norms, particularly those dealing with rights, is more easily procedural than substantial. The implementation of substantive norms can also be subject to genuine cognitive interpretation, or to self-interest calculation. China indeed seems to engage in compliance when it can, and when it sees it as being in its national interest (in other words when expected gains outweigh potential costs perceived as low), and to resist otherwise (then using procedural battles, political and economic pressure, and normative arguments). There is no evidence, however, that this behaviour substantially differs from those of other countries (Kent 1999; Foot 2000). The major limitation of the EU human rights dialogue lay with its link to the UNHRC. The existence of the dialogue does not preclude as such the EU from publicly expressing its concerns about human rights violations in China. In 2001 and 2002, the EU Presidency expressed serious concern about the human rights situation in China in its opening statements to the annual UNHRC sessions. Demarches were also made, including at the highest level, to express European concerns whenever necessary. As exemplified by previous practices and by Sino-US relations, the dialogue nevertheless remained unofficially linked to the absence of a resolution against China at the UNHRC. Every year at the annual session China proposed a ‘motion of non-action’, in order to exclude draft resolutions concerning China from the agenda. EU member states agreed to oppose this motion of non-action, arguing that all cases brought to the Commission should be discussed, but not to initiate cases against China. In 2001 they clarified their strategy and indicated that they would later support a resolution passing through the motion of non-action, which has never occurred so far. Through these diplomatic contortions, China arguably negotiated the existence

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of bilateral dialogues against its own respectability in the UN institutions. Such a situation was clearly not satisfying from the perspective of promotion of multilateralism in human rights issues at the global level. But it was part of the excess of political compromises marshalled to prevent the UN Human Rights Commission from openly functioning as a court against non-Western and developing countries, hollowing its own procedures and resulting in its general discredit. Whether the UN Human Rights Council established in 2006 will be able to avoid similar pitfalls in the future remains to be seen. Universal enjoyment of human rights demands greater efforts to promote dialogue and cooperation . . . One of the lessons drawn from the Commission on Human Rights is that power politics runs contrary to democratic principles, and that confrontation will not give rise to the culture of human rights . . . We believe that the Universal Periodic Review should be conducted in accordance with the principle of justice, fairness, objectivity and non-selectivity with a view to promoting a constructive dialogue rather than allegations and accusations among nations on issues of human rights.3 When both bilateral and multilateral relations are considered, China overall adheres to the international regime and is part of the international community on human rights. Progressive and selective as it may be, the trend has been toward more cooperation, not confrontation, with Western countries and international organizations on this issue. China officially subscribes to the idea of universality of human rights as defined by the United Nations. Rights have been largely entrenched in domestic political discourses and institutions. Although claims based on the exhaustive enumeration of rights defined by the 1982 constitution are generally not justiciable, numerous laws and regulations have been passed to specify and give legal effects to most of them. From a procedural perspective, China is currently revising its criminal code. In 2004, the constitution was amended to assert that ‘The state respects and safeguards human rights’. Obviously this is no guarantee of effective realization. But given the doctrine of the regime, its disrupted political transition and rising power, such a semantic change is a political move worth noticing. The ‘constructive engagement’ of China definitely deserves some qualifications and criticism, but is closer to a moderate success than to an absolute failure. It can be seen as the external side of the incremental development of constitutionalism in Chinese domestic politics (Peerenboom 2002; Cai 2005). Nevertheless, most of this progress was accomplished slowly over a long period starting in the 1980s. The launch of the EU–China dialogue in the mid1990s corresponds to the signature of the ICESCR and ICCPR during the same period. But few demonstrable improvements have occurred in more recent years. Moreover, the rare liberations of dissidents by Chinese authorities related to the international context, if any, are generally linked to the development of Sino-US relations, or interpreted as such. This does not mean that the EU–China dialogue on human rights is ipso facto ineffective. But it needs to be understood as one

The EU, China and human rights 151 element among others, including other bilateral and multilateral dialogues, the rising international status of China, and primarily domestic change, supporting a long and gradual change of approach to human rights policy by the Chinese leadership.

A Chinese conception of human rights? Chinese engagement in multilateral institutions does not come without significant changes at the domestic level. The constitutional amendment of March 2004, both proclaiming and committing the state to respect and safeguard human rights, is indeed a strong departure with regard to the previous distance with what was seen as a bourgeois and counter-revolutionary notion, potentially dangerous and alien to the working class power. China now hosts official think tanks, websites, exhibitions and international meetings on human rights, and makes use of the notion to communicate and to promote its own political development. The government White Paper Building of Political Democracy in China includes a chapter on human rights (www.china.org.cn/english/features/ book/145926.htm (21/6/2007)). Although propagandist accents are far from absent in these different statements, at least they attest that the Chinese government does not simply ignore or campaign against the idea of human rights at the domestic level. Quite the opposite, it fully embraced the notion as part of its own political rhetoric, and intends to promote it within Chinese culture and society. In doing so, Chinese authorities also assert a number of tenets in their approach to human rights promotion as part of socialist democracy. The latter include: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

continuity of the regime: human rights development is presented as a continuous process underway since the foundation of the PRC in 1949; the legitimate universality of human rights must be adapted to the specific situations and levels of development of different countries; human rights include political, economic and social rights, individual as well as collective rights; the right to subsistence and development is the most important of human rights; human rights development involves rights as well as duties for citizens; stability is the precondition, development the most important aspect, and legislation the guarantee of human rights development; human rights are fundamentally a domestic issue; and dialogue and cooperation are the only ways to effectively promote human rights at the international level. (www.humanrights-china.org/index.asp)

Some differences immediately appear with the conception of human rights prevalent in Europe. While China subscribes to the principle of universality, it also clearly prioritizes development over other rights, and expects its own performances to be judged accordingly. The European view acknowledges that

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different levels of development inevitably affect access to economic and social rights, but also asserts the intangibility of civil and political rights. In other words, social and economic rights can be relative, while civil and political rights are absolute rights. In this sense the latter are more fundamental than the former. On another crucial aspect, it is easy to understand how the contemporary history of China, devastated by colonialism, shapes Chinese leaders’ attitudes, preferences and claims for sovereignty before any other issue, not without popular support on the matter. Again, Europeans, and indeed the whole international human rights movement, are at odds with Chinese authorities on this question, as they share the idea of a duty to fight human rights violations as attempts to fundamental rights precisely resulting from sovereignty abuses or failures. In other words, human rights transcend borders, and cannot be left to the sole appreciation and benevolence of national governments protected by the respect of sovereignty. Finally, European public opinions, and to a lesser extent their governments, expect China’s commitment to human rights to be demonstrated by a rupture with the past, in particular with the silence surrounding the tragedy of Tiananmen and with the toned-down official history of the Mao years. For almost two decades, the Chinese leadership nevertheless sent no signal in that sense whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, such a rift between these different visions and approaches leave major gaps in the possible accomplishments of EU–China cooperation on human rights.

Promoting civil and political rights in China The usual assessment of the human rights situation in China describes a twofold implementation gap, denouncing both the non-ratification of some of the international covenants and treaties reviewed above, and the deficit or absence of reform at the domestic level. International non-governmental organizations (NGOs), influential on Western public opinion, paint a dark picture of civil and political rights in China, according to which Chinese authorities continue to detain political prisoners, restrict religious freedoms, exert brutal repression in Tibet and Xinjiang, and suspend full democratization in Hong Kong. EU interventions in favour of North Korean refugees fleeing into China have been to no effect. The death penalty is widely used and Chinese authorities remain reluctant to communicate data about it. China still denies the International Red Cross access to political prisoners. Critics particularly denounce the lack of progress or aggravation of the situation in view of China’s engagement in the international community, with its accession to the WTO and its hosting of Olympics in Beijing in particular (Gallagher 2002; Amnesty International 2007). Such a picture is embarrassing for EU institutions and member state governments. To a large extent, bilateral dialogues at the EU or national levels echo human rights activism of European civil societies. The EU in particular addressed the rights of ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang; the abolition and application of the death penalty and the need to obtain statistics on its use. The allegation of organ transplants from executed prisoners was raised for the first

The EU, China and human rights 153 time by the EU in 2006. Reform of the Re-education Through Labour (RTL) system and similar institutions without judicial overview used for misdemeanours; prevention and eradication of torture and rights of prisoners; independence of judges, the right to legal counsel and a fair and impartial trial; protection of human rights when countering terrorism, the principle of ‘nonrefoulement’ to North Korean refugees in China in line with China’s international obligations were also raised. The European Parliament occasionally issues positions on human rights in China,4 and visits by Chinese officials to Europe are usually punctuated by activist demonstrations, which are irritating for the Chinese leadership. NGOs are also critical in their assessment of the dialogue itself (Human Rights in China 2004), denouncing the lack of transparency, the exclusion of NGOs, the absence of real benchmarking to assess results, and the way it affects human rights issues at the UN. European leaders are sometimes more openly vocal on human rights when they visit Beijing, in accordance with their constituencies (German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer for instance). But in the absence of a major crisis, European public opinion is less sensitive to the human rights situation in China than to the trade issue. As part of the dialogue, the Chinese side informed the EU of a number of legislative reforms taken or underway, including a review by the Supreme Court of all death penalty cases, a special court for minors, regulations on interrogation and detention and rights of prisoners in the context of a nationwide campaign to prevent and eradicate torture, planned reform of the RTL system and the new regulation on organ transplants coming into effect on 1 July 2006. Information was also provided on a series of new regulations regarding, inter alia: legal assistance to vulnerable sections of society, measures to promote democratic governance at the village level and new regulations in the field of criminal procedures. China also gave updates on progress made towards ratification of the ICCPR. The Chinese side informed the EU on the implementation of the recommendations of the report of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, following his visit to China in 2005, and on the follow-up to the visit of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour. ‘Familiar replies’ were given on questions relating to freedom of expression, the Internet, freedom of religion and belief including Falun Gong, and freedom of association and the role of NGOs. China raised concerns about racism and xenophobia in the EU. Discussion on the rights of persons belonging to minorities was reported to show ‘little common ground’. The visit of the European Troika to Xinjiang allowed for meetings with a wide variety of representatives, including of the Muslim minority, but largely confirmed EU concerns (European Communities 2006). The following sections are devoted to the situation concerning some civil and political rights in China, and to the possible impact of the EU policy on the matter. We successively consider the death penalty, arbitrary detention and freedom of expression.

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The use of the death penalty Until 1983, death penalty cases were reviewed by the Supreme Peoples’ Court. The development of a nationwide crime wave following the reform policy, however, led Deng Xiaoping to shift appellate authority on death cases to provincial high courts, thus resulting in a fast-track criminal justice system. Capital defendants were tried in a lower level court, and the province’s high court handled both the appeal and the final review. China since then has gained the dubious reputation of imposing more capital punishments than any other country, and indeed than the rest of the world combined. Beijing does not release official figures, while human rights organizations usually estimate that China executes several thousand inmates a year. Observers also suggest that figures have significantly dropped since Beijing was awarded the Olympics. On 1 January 2007, China also reinstated review of capital cases by the People’s Supreme Court. The later reported the number of executions markedly declining for the first five months of 2007 (although exact figures were not released), reflecting a more prudent approach by local courts (International Herald Tribune, 9–10 June 2007). Clearly China so far remains committed to the death penalty, as opposed to the values proclaimed by the EU and human rights NGOs. But Chinese authorities also took action to improve their records, and to appear more moderate in the use of a punishment perceived as legitimate. The growing exposure of Chinese domestic affairs to international media and the public blaming avoidance of Chinese authorities probably provide a significant incentive to this evolution. The EU also supports a cooperation programme on the death penalty involving seminars in China and study tours in Europe for academics, lawyers and judges, while the issue is also discussed as part of the dialogue, at the official and non-official levels. If progress has been slow to materialize, it can nevertheless be argued that human rights dialogue and cooperation between the two parties accompanied a change of attitude of Chinese authorities. Domestic and international rights activists now focus on the reduction in the number of crimes subject to capital punishment. Arbitrary detention More than the death penalty as such, indeed used by a number of democracies outside the EU, arbitrary detention is a crucial element both for the characterization of the Chinese regime and for the promotion of human rights in international affairs. It is often unduly identified with the Laogai, or ‘reform through labour’, the system of labour camps widely used under the Mao era (Wu 1992; Domenach 1992), progressively abandoned under the reform era and officially ended with the Criminal Law of 1996. In practice, remaining detainees have been transferred under jurisdiction of the Laojiao under the new system (see below). China today employs several types of administrative detention, some of them existing in other countries, ranging from detention up to two weeks under the

The EU, China and human rights 155 Security Administrative Punishments Regulations, Re-education Through Labour (RTL, Laojiao), detention for the education of prostitutes and their clients, compulsory drug treatment, forced detention in psychiatric hospitals, detention of juveniles in juvenile centres or work–study schools, and proceedings whereby suspects may be detained for questioning for up to 48 hours. Under Chinese law, administrative detention is intended to emphasize rehabilitation for minor offences and to be a lighter punishment than would be the case under the more punitive criminal system (Peerenboom 2007).5 The long list above, however, is probably sufficient to indicate the extent of the problem. One of the major issues involved lies with the failure to provide prompt judicial examination of the detention decision, in violation of Art. 9(4) of the ICCPR. This is still the main obstacle for China to ratify the Convention. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has objected to RTL because only an independent judicial body can deprive people of their personal liberty (UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention 1998). Under PRC law, an administrative committee made up of civil affairs officials, labour officials and senior public security officials, take the decision. Although Chinese citizens cannot immediately contest the initial detention decision, they theoretically can appeal at later stages through administrative litigation or supervision, and through a system of letters and visits whereby they can solicit government or party official intervention. However, detainees are most often ignorant of their rights and subject to abuse when they try to assert them. Procedures are also both lengthy and costly, even though litigation fees have been reduced substantially as of October 2007, and therefore socially unfair. To address these concerns, the government adopted new regulations effective January 2004 clarifying the rights to challenge public security decisions, but these new measures were not enough to ratify the ICCPR. Providing the right to dispute an administrative decision shortly after detention occurs is desirable from a legal and human rights perspective, and would bring the Chinese legal system closer to international standards. However, given rising crime rates, the regime’s emphasis on social stability and the severity of judges, it is highly questionable whether it would result in more clemency in the number and extent of sentences. Another major issue with both administrative detention and criminal process lies in the length of pretrial detention and the lack of due process rights. The PRC’s legal system is closer to a civil law than to a common law approach, by default providing longer initial detention periods and more limited defence counsel at this stage, and therefore places China at a distance from British or American standards. The Supreme People’s Prosecutor took action in 2003 to limit extended detention violating the already long deadlines provided by criminal law, introducing a higher level review for the extension of detention, as well as email and telephone lines for filing reports on abusive detention. Detainees may nevertheless still be legally detained for extended periods of time. Moreover, many of the due process rights provided by the criminal procedure law are not honoured in practice. One of the policy options would be to abolish or significantly limit administrative detention and to place offences under the

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criminal process. The latter, however, is largely overloaded, and most cases would be subject to a simplified and fast-track procedure introduced in the criminal system on the principle of plea bargaining used in other countries, where confession comes in exchange for leniency, arguably to the detriment of rights and procedural protection. Peerenboom (2007: 97) argues that administrative and criminal detentions are rarely arbitrary in the sense that legal substantive grounds would be absent for arrest and conviction. This naturally raises the issue of the motives for detention, and particularly of political and religious freedoms in the PRC. RTL is seen in the West as a remnant of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, and frequently denounced as an instrument of massive repression of political and religious expression. With all due respect to the suffering of imprisoned dissidents and members of religious communities, as well as to those defending their cause, it is important to underscore the following. First, the purpose of RTL and other forms of administrative detention has changed over time. While counterrevolution was a frequently invoked charge in the Mao era, accounting for up to 60 per cent of crimes in some years, the motive of endangering the state today represents, according to some estimates, less than 0.5 per cent of crimes (Munro 2000). Notwithstanding the difficulties in providing these estimates, observations converge to show that administrative detention in China is used in the immense majority of cases to deal with petty criminality (Chen 2002). Second, the total number of political prisoners, including those arrested in relation to the Tiananmen events (and although they are usually detained under criminal rather than political charges), is actually unknown. NGOs usually mention a few hundred, while the US State Department Report gives the highest estimate, with 2,000. Falun Gong claims 20,000 prisoners of conscience. During its 2004 visit to China, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention requested information on the cases of 63 detainees. It was able to meet five of them and obtain information on 43 others (UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention 2004). Whatever the difficulties in estimates, the number of distress situations and abuses in detention in violation of international rights is undeniably large. But, in order to be properly assessed, these figures need to be put in perspective with a total prison population of two million. Lastly, China’s incarceration rate does not significantly exceed those of other countries, and is even lower than in the US (184 per 100,000 in China versus 59 in Denmark, 100 for France, 139 in the UK, 217 in average for OECD countries, and 497 for the United States).6 In no way could this minimize the concerns for the large number of individual cases of undue and frequently brutal detention in violation of basic human rights standards, nor the dire need for improvement of judicial procedures. These figures show, however, that the primary role of administrative detention is no longer political, and that the control of the population by punishment exerted through the administrative and judicial systems, in other words the imposition of the social order by punishing behaviour, is no more severe in China than in many other countries. Indeed, the Chinese population suffers more from a deficit of justice, rooted in poor administrative capacities and widespread corruption,

The EU, China and human rights 157 than from active state repression. When questioned on the slow pace of progress and absence of significant change on arbitrary detention, China reasserts its willingness to reform RTL and its commitment to ratify the ICCPR. The Chinese government announced in March 2007 its intention to abolish RTL. The proposal includes the removal of fences surrounding the camps, renaming them correctional facilities, limiting the maximum term to 18 months, shifting the emphasis from labour to moral education, and allowing for a judicial review of the detention decision. The EU and its member states are particularly active in judicial cooperation with China. Numerous programmes have been supported to favour the reform of the Chinese legal system, including training programmes for judges and prosecutors, exchanges of lawyers, forums and seminars parallel to the drafting of specific legislations. The EU allocated over 13 million euros for the EU–China judicial cooperation programme in 2000–2005, and 6.8 million euros to the ‘Governance for Equitable Development’ programme for the period 2007–2012, more focused on access to justice, strengthening of professionalism of the judiciary, addressing judicial corruption and favouring transparency during the legal process. In 2007 the EU also launched a call for projects to establish an EU–China Law School in Beijing, parallel to the EU–China Business School already set up in Shanghai. Changes in the Chinese legal system are slow but far from irrelevant from a human rights perspective. They are clearly supported by EU–China human rights dialogues and cooperation, where expertise and mutual respect are conditions for the possibility of persuasion. Freedom of expression Political discussion in China today is commonplace among urban elites, and citizens, easily vocal about privileges, corruption and inequalities, do not hide their feelings about the regime in private conversations. Academics and newspapers regularly publish essays critical of the state of the new society, the orientations of changes and the deficiencies of public policy. Calls for reform, more occasionally for democracy, from intellectuals sometimes close to power, are not infrequent.7 These debates are active within the CCP as well. In any case they are sufficiently vivid to motivate the Chinese leadership to take initiative, and now to flag democracy as one of its objectives. Speaking to provincial governors at the Central Party School in June 2007, Hu Jintao mentioned the term democracy (Minzhu) 14 times.8 Rather than political liberalization in the Western sense, democracy here refers to general reforms needed to develop government accountability, possibly including the introduction of elections within the Party. Nevertheless, the move is significant in that it indicates that the Chinese leadership is changing its rhetoric, at least not to leave the democratic register wide open to critics and potential opposition movements. Volens nolens, the Chinese government today operates in an increasingly pluralistic society. It is clear, however, that freedom of expression remains severely limited and

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controlled. This increased tolerance is largely unpredictable in the long run and arbitrary in the short term, subject to different criteria depending on time, place, motives and means of expression. State security, social stability and CCP leadership draw the red lines of what is permissible, but their interpretation by Chinese authorities is subject to a wide range of variations according to circumstances. Nonofficial collective action, the constitution of movements on a large scale, and relations with foreign organizations are in most cases beyond the limits of tolerance. Worship is restricted to the five authorized religions and their affiliated organizations and to registered places of worship, and proselytism by foreigners is not allowed. Restrictions on religious freedoms are justified in the Chinese perspective by a series of motives ranging from the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in Xinjiang, activism of Buddhists in Tibet in their loyalty to the Dalai Lama, the lack of diplomatic ties with the Vatican due to its relations with Taiwan, and dangerous activities of sectarian movements such as the Falun Gong, officially banned since 1999 when over 10,000 of its members suddenly encircled the government district in Beijing Zhongnanhai (Palmer 2007). Illicit movements are repressed, frequently with brutality and serious due process violations. NGOs report many cases of torture and deaths in detention. Suggestions to authorities and complaints for violation of law by government entities are acknowledged by the constitution and indeed widely used by Chinese citizens. Beijing for instance hosted until 2007 a ‘petitioners’ village’ (Dong Huang), indeed a neighbourhood where a few thousand residents dismissed in local and provincial courts gathered, and frequently ended up, in search of appeal for their case at the People’s Supreme Court, or at the Bureau of Letters and Visits of the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The annual parliament session in March attracted a new wave of petitioners every year, while the same phenomena was replicated in many provincial capitals. Judicial action and appeal to upper levels and then to the central government has been a crucial: although poorly effective means for powerless people to try to fight misconduct by local officials, to open up new channels of participation and to negotiate the frontiers of the permissible through ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien and Li 2005, 2006). Most frequently, uprisings at the local level are associated with situations of expulsion, unpaid wages, unlawful taxation, extortion and corruption, and come after judicial action or political appeal at the upper levels failed to redress torts. Eruptive movements then violently confront local authorities and are severely repressed by security forces frequently provoking casualties, occasionally including journalists. According to data published by the Chinese government between 1993 and 2003, the number of mass incidents increased from 10,000 to 60,000, and the number of participants from 700,000 to over three million. The number of incidents rose to 74,000 in 2004, and then to 87,000 in 2005 (Fewsmith 2006). The government requires approval for all demonstrations, but most of the above of course are not legal in that sense. Contentious politics in China not only includes mass protest at the local level, but also numerous individual cases of activists, journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders detained for various forms of criticism of the government, as

The EU, China and human rights 159 reported by international NGOs. The rationales for protest vary substantially from case to case and from one repertoire of contention to the other. They all involve the defence of citizens’ rights, and in a number of instances use the limited tolerance and concern for social stability of the regime to successfully promote their cause. Too frequently, however, the absence of channels of expression other than those controlled by the government for citizens to voice their grievances on the one hand, and the impossibility to openly contest the leadership of the CCP on the other, end up in confrontational situations promptly repressed by Chinese authorities in the name of social stability or state security, most often in violation of rights by international standards. Freedom of assembly is not, however, totally absent in China. Modernization and social change resulted in a boom of voluntary organizations in a number of sectors such as professions, business, homeowners, academia, leisure groups, foundations, healthcare, Aids, and so forth. In 1989 the State Council promulgated a first regulation imposing registration of all associations with the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA), on recommendation and official sponsorship of a party or state agency. As a result of this double control, the number of registered associations under the MCA’s jurisdiction initially dropped from around 200,000 in 1989 to 110,000 in 1991 (Wang and He 2004). Associational activism quickly resumed however, in the early 1990s, to come back to its former levels. In 1998, the regulation for registration was tightened again, provoking a new movement of oscillation. By the end of 2004, China had 153,000 associations registered under the MCA (Ministry of Civil Affairs 2007). The new regulation also required ‘private non-enterprise units’, providers of nonprofit social services (private schools, day-care centres, elderly homes and so forth) to register toward the MCA. Most of these institutions were previously owned by the state or associated collectives before being privatized, or have been newly established to meet needs and demands of the new political economy. There were 135,000 ‘private non-enterprise units’ altogether in 2004 (Ministry of Civil Affairs 2007). To these categories should be added 892 foundations registered in 2004, the quasi-governmental organizations linked to the CCP (among which trade unions, youth leagues branches, women’s associations, science and technology associations, federation of industry and commerce), estimated at more than five million groups, and grassroots associations such as literary circles, choirs, amateur sport clubs, elderly associations and the like, estimated at 758,000 (Wang and He 2004). To bring a comparative insight on these data, the number of registered associations in France is estimated at 800,000. These figures attest to a quickly developing third sector, if not a full-fledged civil society, in China. Associational activism remains strictly controlled, but increasingly distant from the past corporatist organization. Moreover, observations converge to establish that a large number of voluntary groups are not registered, either because they fail to register with the MCA, or because they register with other government bodies, particularly under the Ministry of Commerce, or because they operate under the wing of a host organization to avoid the lengthy and onerous process of

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registration. From the 1990s onward, associational development has entered a new phase. This new phase is characterized, first, by the emergence of a new stratum of organizations not confined to intellectuals, professionals and business, but concerned with the interests of groups marginalized in the process of reform (women’s groups, legal counselling, prisoners’ wives groups, rural development organizations, associations for people living with HIV/AIDS, selfhelp cancer groups, poverty alleviation, community groups opposing eviction, environmental protection groups and the like); and second, by the development of institutional forms aiming to circumvent state restrictions on association, therefore working as ‘projects’ affiliated with existing organizations rather than through the creation of new associations (Howell 2004). Within this organizational grey zone in between the state structure and citizens, dissidence has evolved significantly from the democratic movement initiated in 1978 calling for a change of regime, to today’s defence of marginalized interests within the existing legal framework. The rights protection movement (Weiquan) operates in a decentralized manner within the interstices of a loose but active network of collective action, subject to limited tolerance rather than full recognition (Balme 2005). The development of social movements on a national scale, action against the CCPs’ leadership and relations with foreign organizations is closely supervised and repressed. Specific circumstances offering opportunities for mobilization such as commemoration of the Tiananmen event or Zhao Ziyang’s death, with the 17th Party Congress in 2007 or the Olympics in Beijing in 2008, regularly lead to stricter control. Freedom of the press is also seriously limited by tight controls on publications, media and internet activities. Topics listed as sensitive and requiring prior approval vary from time to time, while enforcement is more or less strict and usually erratic. Chinese newspapers and websites widely report social, environmental and policy issues, including corruption cases, in a critical manner somewhat surprising to visitors. Banned publications largely circulate undercover, and students claim to easily circumvent limitations in Internet access in their ordinary activities. Technological changes as well as market reforms driving newspapers, television stations and publishers to compete for consumer demands have resulted in an unprecedented wave of expression in China. However, the work of journalists, although substantially improved for foreign correspondents, remains subject to control and is frequently repressed. In June 2007, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress nevertheless proposed new legislation allowing the media to report on public emergencies without prior government authorization ‘in a bid to improve transparency’ (China Daily, 25 June 2007). Journalists in general face serious risks when they report on hotspots of industrial or environmental scandals, corruption cases and social unrest, and numerous cases of abusive detention or violence, sometimes lethal, perpetrated by security guards or henchmen against journalists are reported. The circulation of images is particularly controlled, and access to the association Reporters without Borders’ website is blocked (as of 5 July 2007).

The EU, China and human rights 161 The use of the Internet is also restricted, filtering in particular information about Tibet, the Falun Gong and Taiwan, and blocking access to international human rights NGOs’ websites. Service providers Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and Google have agreed to censor specific content of their websites. Yahoo has been accused by human rights NGOs and international media of delivering sensitive user information to authorities, leading to some arrests. Overall the media sphere and public space appear paradoxically more open to expression than ever, in this sense more pluralistic, and nevertheless subject to persistent controls intensifying in some areas. From the above it can be seen that significant progress in individual freedoms with the introduction of more liberal legislations regarding marriage, circulation, residency of migrants with the partial reform of the resident permit (Hukou) system, the introduction of some pluralism with competitive elections at the village level since 1988, and in 2007 the property law, are not matched with a full-fledged freedom of association and expression. Again, freedom of expression issues are addressed within the EU–China Dialogue as well as in bilateral meetings, while cooperation programmes integrate support to civil society as one of their key components, or directly aim at the promotion of rights, the rule of law and development of an open and participative society. The ‘EU–China Village Governance Training Programme’ mobilized over ten million Euros between 2001 and 2006 to support the introduction of competitive elections at the local level through capacity building of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the China Civil Affairs College and provincial level training centres, training provided to over 15,000 public officials to organize and manage elections, and a number of public events to promote public awareness of the reform. Under the EIDHR micro-projects programme, four projects were selected for the 2007–2008 period for a total of 800,000 euros, including training of policy-makers for implementation of CEDAW and Women’s Law, promotion of villagers’ political and social participation in ethnic minority regions, legal aid on women’s labour rights, and NGOs capacity-building. Each of these projects is implemented by local and/or international NGOs and frequently academic institutions in cooperation with Chinese authorities. Their accomplishments at the grassroots level are remarkable. But there is no evidence of the capacity of both dialogue and cooperation to influence the Chinese government agenda on these issues. On all the matters previously analysed, EU policy and more generally diplomacy toward China is of little ‘direct’ effect, if we mean by this concessions obtained through pressure or bargaining. These issues are seen as domestic affairs by Chinese authorities, whose perceived core legitimacy is to protect national sovereignty and to resist foreign interference, particularly coming from former colonial powers and the US. Moreover, in a number of cases reforms are more easily said than done. The transformation of the legal system underway is in particular a process of institution-building for a generation-length period of time, which involves passing new laws, reforming codes and procedures, training cohorts of judges and justice officers, providing courts with building

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facilities, personnel and computers, and eradicating corruption in an environment flooded with new private money. Cooperation from the EU and other powers on these issues probably makes the most significant difference because it is long-term oriented, not controversial, and not subject to much media exposure. Finally, publicly addressing issues related to freedom of expression is at odds with the slow and discreet work of cooperation programmes from this point of view. These issues are politically sensitive for Chinese authorities who fear that the current pluralization of society and relative opening in expression will result in a ‘coloured revolution’. Support or claims by Europeans in defence of civil society, freedom of the press, dissidents, or competitive elections, are seen as a source of interference nourishing social unrest to destabilize political leadership, and are thus ignored or promptly rejected by Chinese authorities. A thin line separates the legitimate need to question the Chinese government on these issues from the risk of provoking irritation and further tension among moderates and hardliners within the regime. European powers express their concerns on these issues, but to their own acknowledgment without much significant result, with the occasional but noticeable exception of some of the individual cases they address.

Social and economic rights: the case of labour law As mentioned above, Chinese authorities place great value in the economic and social dimensions of human rights, and legitimately underscore China’s accomplishments in the last decades with this respect. A number of tremendous challenges nevertheless seriously threaten the Chinese path to development, including rising inequalities, access to education, environmental justice, discrimination against migrant workers and labour rights (UNDP 2005). Large segments of the population, possibly the majority, remain excluded from the benefits of reform, while the poor suffer most from market liberalization and associated unemployment, exclusion from social services and welfare, severe environmental degradation, brutal urban development and extreme working conditions. These realities are part of everyday life in China and hardly disputable. They are also largely acknowledged by the Chinese government, far from inactive on these issues. Indeed one of the hallmarks of the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao leadership, in comparison with the Jiang Zeming era, is precisely to claim social inequalities, rural development and poverty reduction as priorities to address on its political agenda. In a demonstrative move in March 2006, for instance, the government decided on the abolition of taxes for farmers, and one year later the reduction of litigation fees for the whole country. It is, however, tempting to see from a human rights perspective the repressive nature of rights as a set of policy instruments designed to coerce the majority of the population to the benefit of the regime’s elite, and a growing, but still tiny, middle-class. At the core of both the ideology and the new political economy of China, labour rights provide a test case for this argument. Market reforms initiated at the end of the 1970s gradually eroded workers’

The EU, China and human rights 163 individual rights they enjoyed under state socialism. Workers’ rights in StateOwned Enterprises (SOEs) largely evaporated, leaving them defenceless in the face of policy changes. Migrant workers employed in the new private manufacturing sector became one of the most victimized social groups in China. To respond to changing labour relations, the government attempted to redefine workers’ rights through legislation, in particular with the Labour Law enacted in 1995 codifying individual rights, labour standards, wages, rest and vacation, occupational safety, training and dispute settlement (Chen 2007). Further legislation and regulations were adopted to cover a variety of issues such as occupational diseases, industrial injury, unemployment insurance, minimal wages, pensions, medical insurance, maternity leave and the like. Lay-offs (xiagang) were introduced in the mid-1990s. The All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and 11 state agencies later issued administrative fiats specifying workers’ transitional rights and entitlement to compensation, as well as measures assisting their re-employment or encouraging them to start their own business. The current labour legislation also provides workers with the possibility to seek redress for their grievances, opening the way to a large number of legal procedures (Chen 2004, 2006, 2007; Gallagher 2005, Thireau and Hua 2005). However, the enforcement of these rights remains extremely difficult. Breaches of contracts, unpaid wages, excessive overtime, extreme working conditions, child labour, industrial injuries and abusive management are extremely frequent in the private sector where migrant workers are the main workforce. Chinese media regularly report tragic industrial accidents and outrageous ignorance of safety regulations, particularly in the mining sector. Policy regulations regarding lay-offs are often ignored or distorted by enterprises and local authorities pushed to give priority to economic efficiency. Moreover, collective rights, if not fully absent from Chinese legislation, are severely limited and deficient. The communist constitution and ideology of the regime largely obliterates the possibility of worker self-organization. Indeed the interests of the state and those of workers are assumed to be identical. Organizing workers is a function of the state performed through the ACFTU. Legally, workers’ rights to organize voluntarily is recognized both in the Labour Law and in the Trade Union Law, subject to the party leadership on union activities, and to affiliation to the ACFTU. Nevertheless the new political economy led to a retreat of the state from the economy and to a wave of decentralized labour disputes in the new enterprises. Attempts by workers to form independent unions when the ACFTU is absent or does not support their cause, as well as activism to promote workers’ rights to organize, are systematically and severely repressed (China Labour Bulletin 2006). In light of the Polish experience with Solidarnosc, Chinese authorities remain highly suspicious of independent unionism. The right to strike was initially acknowledged when the PRC adopted its second constitution in 1975, although no specific legislation was later adopted on this matter. ‘Freedom to strike’ was, however, removed from the 1982 constitution which is still in effect, at the time probably as a move reminiscent

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of the Cultural Revolution against ‘ultra-leftism’. The ACFTU in 1988 submitted a proposal on union reform including the right to strike, but the CCP secretariat ruled it out for fear it would fuel industrial conflicts rather than help to contain them (Chen 1999, cited in Chen 2007). As a result the Trade Union Law passed by the NPC in 1992 does not mention the right to strike. This does not in itself explicitly prohibit strike actions, and industrial conflicts in China indeed regularly result in various forms of collective action including demonstrations, work stoppages, petitioning and the like. But these activities are not protected by the law, and authorities can make use of the 1989 Law on Assemblies, Processions and Demonstrations to repress them when deemed necessary. It also prohibits the ACFTU from initiating, joining or supporting them. Finally, collective bargaining is formally recognized with the existence of collective contracts initiated and experimented in 1992. But collective contracts cover a limited part of the workforce and are logically implemented top-down in the context mentioned above. Without the right to organize and act collectively, workers are indeed structurally powerless in the face of company management. Labour unrest, however, can sometimes be virulent enough to obtain favourable outcomes in local industrial conflicts, and more generally to prompt the government to take action on labour issues. In 2002 the government speeded up implementation of the urban minimal social insurance programme. In June 2007, China’s legislature passed a new Labour Contract Law, enacted by the Standing Committee of the NPC, requiring employers to provide wage-earners with written contracts, in the vast majority of cases absent in the current situation, restricting the use of fixed term jobs, and tightening conditions for lay-offs (International Herald Tribune, 30 June–1 July 2007; Baker and McKenzie 2007). The expected legislation was passed shortly after the media revealed the widespread use of slave labour in brick factories and small coal mines in Shanxi and Henan provinces, provoking a national wave of emotion in face of testimonies by families whose children had been abducted. Labour abuses, particularly with migrant workers, are so widespread and outrageous that they indeed nourish eruptive social unrest, and mobilize close attention by the Chinese leadership. As a response to these tensions, and to prevent the development of uncontrolled and independent labour mobilization, the new Labour Contract Law to come into effect in 2008 also empowers ACFTU to engage in collective bargaining on wages and benefits. Noteworthy from the perspective of this chapter, foreign firms and their business organizations were consulted during the drafting of the legislation. The American as well as the European Chambers of Commerce in China, although less vocally for the latter, expressed their concerns about the rigidity in employment and rising production costs the legislation would introduce, and the possible delocalization of industrial plants in the context of globalization. The bill was slightly amended to take their views into account, without profound alteration to its content. Foreign firms, including European, are key actors of the export-led growth economy, with the majority of exports operated by foreign joint ventures. Multinational companies indeed find in China a low-cost and

The EU, China and human rights 165 highly flexible labour market, compensating for a poor legal and bureaucratic environment, and a competitive but hardly predictable domestic market. While driving globalization, they also are subject to its own pressures, and naturally resist rising labour costs and labour market protection. Most of these companies subscribe to the principle of corporate social responsibility, and argue that they offer more decent conditions for employment than domestic firms, which is true in many cases. But their practices recently tended to be questioned in China. Wal-Mart in particular, the large American retailer operating in China since 1996, had to give way to the ACFTU in August 2006, and to let unions organize in its superstores around the country, as opposed to its own practices in North America. American fast food chain stores also came under scrutiny for allegations of underpay. European firms operate with more generous social legislation in their homelands, but their Chinese branches relevant economic environment in terms of production costs and market access is global, ranging to all emerging countries. Their attitude toward the progress of labour legislation in China is therefore extremely cautious (Polansky 2007). European business interests can also rightly claim that labour protection in Europe and China is by no means equivalent, and that empowering the ACFTU as a response to labour unrest and public opinion sensitivity comes close to government intervention, and possibly to manipulating the conditions for economic competition to the detriment of foreign firms. This is once again related to the absence of independent unionism, and to the collusion between the ACFTU, the CCP and the government, in practice fully articulated at the local level. More generally, Chen (2007) convincingly argues that the huge deficit in implementation of labour rights in China does not come from insufficient individual rights, indeed largely acknowledged and further developed by successive legislations. Rather, it is the absence of real collective rights (organization, strikes and collective bargaining) that prevents individual rights from becoming more effective. Without progress on these issues, rights can probably be somewhat improved ‘top-down’ through relatively pro-labour legislation. However, their implementation remains highly constrained by the usual collusive arrangements between local government officials, firm managers, ACFTU leaders and judges, all under control of the CCP, which cannot be circumvented by unlawful ‘bottom-up’ mobilizations. It can easily be seen that the reasoning can be extended to civil and political rights as well. The European Union is normatively committed to promoting a high level of social standards within its member states as well as abroad. In particular, the EU currently has underway for the 2006–2010 period a 40 million euro EU–China cooperation project on social security reform. The project covers the areas of retirement, health and unemployment. It aims at sustaining both policy development through legislation and policy management with improved coverage, administration of benefits and financial sustainability. But the above analysis shows that the different EU actors operating in China – member-state governments, the EU institutions, NGOs and promoters of human rights – and multinational companies do not necessarily share the same interests or the same view about the social situation in China.

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The arms embargo: up and down with hard power The lifting of the arms embargo levied in 1989 has become a major issue in recent years. It is easy to understand how accession to the WTO, the development of political and human rights dialogue, the absence of resolutions against China at the UNHRC justified such a request on the Chinese side. Since the Deng Xiaoping’s southern China tour in 1992, the reform and opening policy has been considered by the Chinese leadership as confirmed, and has been progressively implemented and expanded in its own style and pace. Consequently, Chinese foreign policy is currently conceived as instrumental in securing a domestic policy for the development of productive capacity, economic growth and social prosperity. This international reputation (the Olympics in 2008 and World Expo in 2010) and respectability are part of this project, and being listed with Myanmar and Sudan among countries on which the EU is applying sanctions is definitely perceived as an offence. On the European side, the arms embargo is equally perceived as outdated, as the EU adopted a more restrictive ‘Code of Conduct’ in 1988, more in conformity with international covenants, although not legally binding. In any case selective arms sales to China from the EU, as well as from the US despite a more restrictive regulation, were not fully stopped, and have significantly increased in the last years. Opponents of the lifting of the embargo (particularly the US) invoke the possibility of boosting the arms race across the Taiwan strait. Chinese and EU authorities deny the intention to buy and sell more weapons for the time being, and underline the need to lift an ‘obsolete’ measure that is discriminatory for China. Strategic implications are probably more in the medium and long term, and depend on the diversification of arms suppliers to China, both in technological and political terms (Godement 2005; Shambaugh 2004, 2005; Shao 2005). Chinese authorities pressured the Commission and member states on the issue in 2003 and 2004. France promoted the initiative among the EU and after Paul Rueda’s report was issued in November 2004, member states engaged in negotiations for a tightening of the ‘Code of Conduct’ that would justify lifting the embargo in the eyes of European public opinion and the US. Chinese authorities expected the lifting to be announced for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of EU–China relations in 2005. However, the momentum was disrupted by US opposition to the measure, and by the anti-secession law passed by the Chinese National People’s Congress authorizing the use of force to stop Taiwan from seceding. An informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg agreed to delay the measure once again. As exemplified by the clash in timing between the embargo issue and the anti-secession law, Chinese authorities made absolutely no connection between the two issues, and, as expected, ‘domestic’ politics (Taiwan) prevailed by far over EU–China relations, even when it came to arms sales or lifting of sanctions considered as discriminatory. Although the motive of US pressure was not officially invoked by the Europeans, the suspension of the decision was largely understood as one obvious limitation to the EU’s foreign policy independence.

The EU, China and human rights 167 From the above narrative it is clear that the strategy of offering human rights improvements in exchange for access to advanced technologies for military industries is at best outdated, and has produced no tangible results when applied to China. The EU arms embargo has indeed been ineffective from this point of view, and European chancelleries have long ceased to link political and human rights dialogues to possible sanctions on trade or security issues. To a significant extent, European diplomacy is on this point facing a gap with the perception conveyed by Western media and human rights activists. The EU also revealed both a deficit of consensus among its member states and a lack of independence in failing to implement its own decision. In such a context, bilateral relations, at least with large member states, tended to gain in influence in the most recent period. Probably more relevant than the arms embargo, both in terms of past and future evolution, is the convergence of China and the EU on non-proliferation of WMD, their mutual support of their roles regarding North Korea and Iran, and their commitment to international covenants.

China’s rise and human rights in third countries: the case of Africa China’s dramatic economic development does not come without deeply affecting its position in international affairs (Keith 2005; Saunders 2006). The emergence of the country as a key player in globalization means that the economies of the EU and the US are now in a situation of dependence with China’s own domestic growth, and vice versa. As a result, mutual influences have been deeply transformed. On the one hand, as illustrated above, a policy of sanctions on the Chinese government runs the risk of formal or informal economic retaliation against foreign investment and market access. WTO regulations are from this perspective easy to manipulate or to distort in implementation. On the other hand, Chinese growth is similarly dependent on the state of the economy in developed countries, where signs of recession quickly prompt reactions on production and exports from China. Unsurprisingly, despite some litigation within the WTO framework, noticeably with textile exports in 2005, economic interdependence favours politically cooperative relations, overall largely prevailing. The position of China as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, as well as its general commitment to multilateral institutions, also imposes and justifies dialogue as the dominant figure of relations. But China is also increasingly influential beyond its own borders in the AsiaPacific and in other regions, and is developing new relations with Russia and emerging powers such as ASEAN countries, India, or Brazil, contributing to the more general trend of development of South–South relations. In doing so, China is primarily driven by the dire and growing need for raw materials and energy of its economy. Political concerns including isolating Taiwan, limiting Japan’s international role, and coalition-building to promote its interests in multilateral institutions, particularly the UN, is also naturally important. They sometimes come close to rivalry with Western countries when China’ influence in third

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countries introduces a wedge in former North–South relations, with some clear implications for human rights issues. Africa is particularly illustrative of the case. In November 2006, China hosted the Beijing Summit of the China–Africa Cooperation, where Hu Jintao announced a doubling of aid to African countries for the 2006–2009 period. China will provide three billion USD in loans and two billion USD in export credit, establish a China-Africa Development Fund and cancel all the interest-free government loans to impoverished African countries that were due at the end of 2005. Meanwhile the least developed countries will be allowed to increase substantially the number of items they may export to China. Three to five trade and economic cooperation zones will be established in Africa over the next three years. China plans to train 15,000 African professionals, provide Chinese experts and medicine, and build an African Alliance Conference Centre, 30 hospitals, 30 malaria prevention and treatment centre and 300 rural schools. While developing its presence in Africa, China also asserts itself as a contributor to the UN Millennium Development Goal. Testifying to the development of business relations, Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) to Africa also rose from 14.5 million USD in 1993 to 428.9 million USD in 2004 (Saunders 2006). China now receives one-third of its oil from Africa. Whatever the generosity of motives behind this policy, implications for human rights promotion in Africa are important in two aspects. First, in dealing with bilateral relations, the Chinese government claims to follow a ‘hands-off’ policy, where domestic political issues are excluded from consideration. Sovereignty is the proclaimed primary concern of Chinese diplomacy, both in excluding countries entertaining relations with Taiwan, and abstaining from intervention in third countries’ domestic affairs. This conception is an external projection of the general Chinese approach on the issue, where human rights are acknowledged subject to respect for sovereignty, in contradiction to the largely transnational nature of the human rights movement. Second, Chinese policy in Africa comes in contrast with the practice of conditionality and good governance followed by the EU and its member states, the US and international organizations. It effectively promotes a conception of human rights as relative, depending on culture, level of development and national situations, where civil and political rights come after economic rights. In a number of cases, it also leads the Chinese government to support regimes perpetrating the most serious violations of human rights, and to hamper the strategies of isolation pursued by Western countries and the UN. Chinese diplomacy in Africa attracted media attention by cultivating strong ties with Sudanese president Omar-al-Bashir, despite the civil war and mass slaughter in the Darfur region, that has left several hundred thousand dead and displaced millions over Sudan’s borders with Chad and the Central African Republic. China is reputed to buy the largest portion of Sudan’s oil exports and to sell military weapons to the government, while the regular army is largely involved in the killings (Kampf 2007). Under pressure from Western powers, China’s support to Khartoum was, however, curtailed, first during the Beijing

The EU, China and human rights 169 summit of 2006, then with the intervention of China’s UN Ambassador, Wang Guangya, in Addis Ababa in November 2006 to secure Sudan’s agreement, albeit temporary, to replace the African Union contingent with a larger, hybrid African Union–UN force. Furthermore, President Hu Jintao’s visit to Khartoum in February 2007 firmly pressured al-Bashir to bow to the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, delivery of humanitarian aid and achievement of a comprehensive ceasefire. China also agreed to participate in the Conference on Darfur held in Paris in June 2007 (Kleine-Ahlbrandt and Small 2007). Sudan is not the only country where China is involved in situations seriously detrimental to human rights. Through economic assistance and military support to Zimbabwe, China props up Robert Mugabe’s autocratic government, responsible for a disastrous economic situation starving the population of its most basic needs and cruel repression of opposition movements. While obtaining deals in mining, communications, power and transportation, China sold military vehicles and jets and technology to monitor electronic communications to the regime (Kampf 2007). With growing exposition in Africa, China will also inevitably face the challenges other powers face on the continent. Anti-Chinese riots occurred in Zambia following the September 2006 elections in which the Chinese Ambassador threatened to sever relations if the opposition candidate, Michael Sata, won. Sata campaigned on anti-Chinese sentiment, including issues of low wages, lack of safety standards and Chinese workers taking local jobs. Although he lost the election to incumbent Levy Mwanawasa, his Patriotic Front won many seats in key municipalities. Hu’s itinerary during his February 2007 trip was curtailed due to anti-China demonstrations, and the visit to a Chineserun copper mine and stadium construction site had to be cancelled. In Nigeria, the recent kidnapping of Chinese nationals also revealed the difficulties for Chinese interests to operate in the local context. Foreign workers, especially in the oil industry, have long been targets of armed militants protesting against environmental devastation and severe poverty in the Niger Delta, while oil companies make tremendous profits in extraction. In January 2007 the governmentowned Chinese National Petroleum Company office in the Nigerian state of Bayelsa was stormed and nine Chinese employees were abducted. The hostages were released a few weeks later when Hu visited the country. In another incident in southern Nigeria’s Rivers State, five Chinese telecommunication workers were kidnapped and returned within two weeks (Kleine-Ahlbrandt and Small 2007). China’s presence in Africa is therefore far more complex than a mere support to autocratic regimes in opposition to Western states’ policies favouring democratization. The Chinese economy is in need of resources and opportunities available on the African continent, while the Chinese government doctrine applies its own standards for rights, both on the economic and political front, frequently on the legacy of ancient relations established with former Marxist regimes. However, the Chinese approach, occasionally praised by some African leaders, is not necessarily welcomed by Africans. As Chinese authorities and interests intensify their presence, they are necessarily increasingly involved in

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local situations, voluntarily or not, and the proclaimed ‘hands-off’ approach is but a mirage. Indeed, one important aspect of globalization precisely tones down the importance of state-to-state and intergovernmental relations to the benefit of transnational relations. This is so much the case that Chinese authorities, probably contrary to their intention, are today involved with the fate of Darfur refugees and with the violence of the Niger Delta militias against Chinese companies. In its last policy papers toward China, the European Union addressed and expressed its concern on the promotion of human rights at the global level and in third countries.9 Combined with other pressures and invitations, it resulted in a significant change of attitude on the part of the Chinese government. Whatever the Chinese responsibilities in the difficulties of the present situation, Beijing agreed in 2006, after a long delay, to serve as a broker between the international community and the Sudanese government. This change of attitude has been decisive in the limited evolution of the situation. This position of broker, equivalent to the one held by China in the six-party talk with Korea about nuclear disarmament, is typical of its new power and mode of influence in the current context. Realizing its own interests in stability in developing countries and the potential for image-grooming, China also engaged in growing support for UN peacekeeping operations, particularly in Africa. In June 2006, during a UN Security Council visit to Addis Ababa, China’s UN Ambassador took the lead in supporting the deployment of peacekeepers in Somalia. It was the first time China took the lead in promoting a foreign intervention in a non-Asian country. These moves can be interpreted as positive signs for the promotion of human rights in developing countries. From this point of view, much will indeed depend on China’s attitude in the coming years, not necessarily ill-intentioned, but unlikely to be more virtuous than others.

Conclusion The developments of EU–China political relations over the last two decades are illustrative of very significant trends in international relations. They can be characterized by the liberalization of trade and its growing impact on political relations, the associated emergence of a major new global player in Asia, and the relative decline of cleavages inherited from decolonization and the Cold War. The different aspects of this situation rendered the use of a strategy of sanctions and rewards toward China ineffective. During the period, the EU asserted itself as an actor in world affairs, and with China in particular, not without revealing the weaknesses in integration and independence of the Common Foreign and Security Policy. With the growing importance of China as a global player, these relations have gradually evolved from unilateral pressure to the accepted coexistence of two adjacent normative systems, allowing for non-confrontational dialogue and gradual change, but at the cost of accepting a slow pace of transformation of the human rights situation in China.

The EU, China and human rights 171 Substantial developments have occurred through political dialogue and cooperation, and the close relations established today between China and European member states and institutions should in no way be underestimated, particularly in a long term perspective. Changes in the human rights situation in China result from a long and gradual change of approach by the Chinese leadership. Domestic social change in China, engagement in multilateral regimes, and bilateral relations are the operators of this transformation. On a number of cases (judicial reform and probably the death penalty), EU policy has been quite effective. Growing international exposure and domestic change provide the incentives for reform, while cooperation brings expertise, experience and arguments for the elaboration of new cognitive frames resulting in a change of policy preferences by the government. However, Chinese authorities have a different interpretation of human rights. They make use of the extensiveness of the definition of rights to underscore China’s record in economic rights and to justify the limited change in civil and political rights. They also place sovereignty as a key element and indeed a condition for human rights. Finally, they acknowledge but fall short of allowing collective rights, therefore leaving a considerable deficit in the implementation of individual rights. In the absence of proactive collective action, rights cannot be promoted and defended bottom-up. The government capacity to guarantee individual rights top-down through legislation is severely limited by the absence of freedom to act collectively, and by the lack of an independent judiciary. As a result, authorities face a continuous growth of individual complaints and eruptive social unrest. Despite the pressure of international exposure, noticeably with the Olympics in 2008, dialogue and cooperation have had no effect so far to alter the leadership’s view on these matters, anchored to the monopoly of the CCP. Other aspects of EU–China relations on human rights are worth noticing. With cooperation prevailing over conflict, human rights are subject to policy sectorization or containment, to a large extent de-linked from other policy issues such as security or trade in bilateral relations, somewhat in contradiction with the principle of mainstreaming human rights advanced as a major objective of the EU external policy. In the Chinese case, this conception of human rights policy was in the long run unable to produce tangible results through intergovernmental bargaining, and in practice foregone in the early 1990s. However, the human rights dialogue and cooperation projects do not exclusively rest with high level contacts channelled through chancelleries. On the contrary, they involve large segments of administrations on both sides, ranging from civil affairs, police, justice, education, environment, to social affairs and women’s rights, and engage academics, professionals and NGOs. This transgovernmental mode of operation, despite its limitation to selective policy networks, ensures a relatively large diffusion of human rights issues and public policy. Mainstreaming therefore practically lies more within the implementation of programmes than with the unrealistic linkage of issues during policy elaboration through grand diplomacy.

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A significant gap exists between the reality of these relations and the expectations regarding the EU’s human rights policy toward third countries prevalent among public opinions, civil society organizations and parliaments, particularly with the European Parliament. Briefly stated, it can be said that human rights promotion viewed from Europe largely differs from what is actually feasible and accomplished through European diplomacy. Dialogue also comes in that case at the cost of considerably stretching the conception of human rights, up to the point where the conditions for political liberalism, if not excluded from of the picture, are considered by the Chinese side as secondary (to economic rights), relative and progressive, therefore far from fundamental rights in the Western sense. Europe faces here a major contradiction between its aspirations for pluralism in world politics, and the promotion of its core values thought of as universal. Finally, globalization deeply affects human rights bilateral relations. To a large extent it makes the classical distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power obsolete. Economic exchanges at the heart of contemporary international relations, by favouring cooperation, cultural exchanges and the diffusion of ideas, are a powerful vehicle of soft power. But they also entail stiff competition for investments, resources, profits and jobs. National economies are inextricably linked by a dense set of relations both cooperative and competitive, leaving winners and losers in each country. The policy package adopted by national governments in external relations directly affects their domestic political economy, the legitimacy of their leadership and the prospect for international influence of their country. Such a game can be interpreted as a peaceful version of the ‘hard’ interstate competition for sovereignty depicted by realist and neorealist theories. This context of intense competition has two major consequences. First, labour rights, as a parameter of the game, are no longer confined to a domestic issue. Their local standards are used by economic agents as opportunities or constraints in the global competition. Multinational companies operating in China naturally resist potential increases in production costs associated with a better labour protection, even though they generally offer better conditions to wage-earners than local companies. Labour rights can also be locally manipulated to distort economic competition between foreign and domestic firms. They have become a crucial aspect of globalization, and their promotion depends as much on competition between multinational companies from developed and developing countries than on governments’ ideologies. The other consequence of globalization on human rights is that, as exemplified by China’s presence in Africa, South–South relations are quickly intensifying. As a result, emerging countries like China, in great need of resources and in search of overseas investments, interfere in the previously predominant relation between Western powers and poor countries. The new involvement of China in Africa comes with some difficulties, some of which are not at odds with the experience of European governments and companies. But as a result of its own doctrine, China has also been involved in a number of situations undermining the credit of its human rights engagement. The position of broker China has

The EU, China and human rights 173 adopted in some critical cases, when the need for stability was strong enough and when its own reputation was at stake, has marked a positive and significant change. It is too early to assess if it will durably help to alleviate the heavy toll the deprivation of human rights takes on populations in the poorest countries.

Notes 1 I wish to thank Feng Wei for her efficient research assistance. 2 In 1993, US President Bill Clinton threatened not to renew the status of Most Favoured Nation (MFN) to China, unless there were substantial improvements in the human rights situation. Congress often pressures the US administration on human rights in trade policy. With the accession of China to the WTO, however, China has benefited from ‘normal trade relations’ with the US on a permanent basis since January 2002. 3 Statement by Liu Zhenmin, Deputy Permanent Representative of the PRC to the United Nations, 3rd Committee of 61st Session of the General Assembly on Human Rights, October 2006. 4 The European Parliament: regards the Dialogue as a valuable instrument and an important element of the overall strategic dialogue between the EU and China, in which human rights must be treated as a priority concern; calls on the Council and the Commission to undertake strenuous efforts even if these can bear fruit only in the medium term . . . stresses that an increasingly positive trade relationship must be contingent on human rights reforms. (European Parliament 2005) 5 Peerenboom (2007, particularly Ch. 3 and 4) provides an extensive and detailed review of the situation of rights in the PRC we largely borrow from. 6 Sources: for China, Peerenboom (2006: 98). Other data were graciously provided by the Institut des Hautes Etudes sur la Justice, Paris, from US Department of Justice www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs, EUROCHIPS, and Council of Europe, Yearly Criminal Statistics, 2005–2007. 7 In October 2006 Yu Keping, head of the Office for Translation, closely supervised by the Central Committee of the CCP, published Democracy is a Good Thing, a book largely circulated and commented on by the media. 8 Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), 26 June 2007. 9 China has traditionally described its foreign policy as one of strict noninterference, but as it takes on a more active and assertive international role, this becomes increasingly untenable. The Chinese government is beginning to recognize this, and the international responsibilities commensurate to its economic importance and role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council as illustrated by its increasingly active diplomatic commitments. (Commission of the European Communities 2006: 3)

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Index

Abdulkarim, Ahmed 128 absorption capacity 46, 65–6, 104 accession criteria 12–13; see also Copenhagen Criteria Aceh 34 ACFTU (All China Federation of Trade Unions) 163, 164, 165 ACP (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific group of states) 2–3, 26, 138, 144 activist movements 28 Adamkus, Valdas 113 Adler, Emanuel 38 Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission 138, 140 Afghanistan 27, 135–42 Africa: and China 167–70, 172 Africa, Caribbean, Pacific group of states (ACP) see ACP African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) 35 Agip (oil company) 126 agricultural protectionism 2 agriculture: and GMO use 6–7 Ahtisaari plan 58–9 aid policies: and security 3, 27 air transport investment: Libya 130 Algeria 7, 14, 17, 118, 122, 126–7 Algerian civil war 123 All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) see ACFTU AMIS (African Union Mission in Sudan) see African Union Mission in Sudan amnesty law: Afghanistan 140–1 Anglo-Japanese agreement 43 anti-secession law 166 Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) 118 arbitrary detention: China 154–7 Arbour, Louise 153 arms embargo: China 146, 166–7

arms sales: to Libya 131 Ashdown, Paddy 59, 74, 76–7, 79–80 Asia: and perception of European Union 11 associational activism 159–60 asymmetric interdependence 106–7 asymmetrical integration 54 Australia 28 Austria 28, 57 authoritarian regimes 59, 122–3 authoritarianism 134 ‘axis of ego’ 37 the Balkans 16, 57–61, 70–80 The Balkans in Europe’s Future 71 Barcelona Process 133n1 al-Bashir, Omar 168, 169 Baudrillard, J. 75, 81–2n10 Beck, Ulrich 106 Belarus 7, 17, 31, 56, 64, 89, 95–6, 98 Belgium 28 bilateralism 16 Bildt, Carl 59, 82n12 biosafety 6–7 Birkelbach Report 67n2 Björkdahl, Annika 32 Blair, Tony 124, 132 Bolivia: CLS 31 Bonn Agreement 135 border control 110 borders 62–3, 66, 105, 106 Borrell, José 113 Bosnia 57–8, 59–60, 70, 74–8, 96 Braudrillard’s framework 68–9 Brazil 10–11, 27 Bretherton, C. 30 Bulgaria 55, 56, 65 Bulgarian nurses’ case, Libya 127 Bulgarian Socialists 54

194

Index

Bull, Hedley 45 Burma see Myanmar Camau, Michel 134, 140 Canada 28, 97 capacity of absorption see absorption capacity Caplan, R. 136 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety 6 CAT (Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment) 148, 149 CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) see Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women CEEC (Central and Eastern European countries) 12 censorship 160–1 Central African Republic 26 Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) see CEEC Central Europe 54–61 Cerutti, Furio 44 CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy) 78 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 46 ‘change-maker’ role 84, 100 Charter of Fundamental Human Rights of the Union (2000) 24 Checkel, Jeffrey 43 chemical products 8 Chen, F. 165 China: and Africa 167–70, 172; arbitrary detention 154–7; arms embargo 146, 166–7; assessment of human rights 152–3; conception of human rights 151–2; death penalty 154; freedom of expression 157–62; HRC 97–8; human development 26; human rights dialogue 146–8; labour rights 162–5; legal system 157, 161–2; multilateral human rights institutions 148–51; and rights issues 87; social security reform project 165; and UN 83 China policy: EU’s 143–4, 145–6 Chirac, Jacques 124, 147 CHR (Commission on Human Rights) 90, 91, 93 Churchill, Winston 44 civil society 73, 138, 161 civilization, standard of 45 climate change 5

Clinton administration 86, 125 Clinton, Bill 173n2 CLS (core labour standards) see core labour standards CMW (Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families) 149 coercion, instruments of 5, 18n5, 32 collective bargaining 164 Colombia 31 ‘colour’ revolutions 64; see also Orange Revolution Commission on Human Rights (CHR) see CHR Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) see CFSP competitiveness 3 conditionality 52, 55, 56 Constitution for Europe 24 Constitutional Framework for Provisional Self-Government 60 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT, 1988) see CAT Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1980) 148, 161 Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (CMW) see CMW Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1992) 148 Copenhagen Criteria 12–13, 52, 53, 54–5, 66 Copenhagen Declaration (1973) 24 core labour standards (CLS) 1, 5, 7, 29–31 core principle of justice 39 corruption 5, 57, 121–2 Costa Rica: CLS 31 costs: of democratization 52 Côte d’Ivoire 26 Cotonou Agreement (2000) 25, 26, 144 Council Resolution (1991) 24 Country Reports 17 Crawford, Beverly 38 CRC (Convention on the Rights of the Child) see Convention on the Rights of the Child Cremona, Marise 30 crisis, EU 38 crisis management 32–6 Croatian HDZ 54 Cuba 93, 98

Index 195 Cyprus 65 Darfur 35, 96, 168–9 DATA One campaign 28 Dayton constitution 58 death penalty 154 debt cancellation 26 debt relief 27, 28 decisionism 109 democracy promotion: Afghanistan 136; worldwide 83 democratic globalization 134 democratic institutions 135–7, 141 Democratic Republic of Congo 26, 89; EU involvement 33 democratization: from above 57–61; the Balkans 71–80; benefits 52–3; in Central and Western Europe 54–61; costs 52; and democratic globalization 134; processes 52; through enlargement 51–4, 61–5, 66 Denmark 28 development aid 26–8 development policy: and normative power 25–6 Dew-Becker, Ian 24 Diez, Thomas 33, 38, 42 discrimination 29 Doha Conference 7 Doha Declaration 6 Duchêne, François 38 e-waste 8 Eastern Europe 54–61 ECHO 33–4, 35 Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) see EPA Ecuador 31 Eder, Klaus 66 Egypt: Action Plan 18 EIDHR (European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights) 145 El Salvador 31 elections: China 161 electrical equipment 8 Eliasson, Jan 92 Elster, John 136 emerging markets 3 ‘empire’ metaphor 106 Energy Charter Treaty 109 enlargement: and democratization 51–4, 61–5, 66; discussion 44; or ‘empire’ question 71; problem of 42, 45–6 ‘enlargement fatigue’ 53, 104

enlargement policies 1–2, 12 ENP (European Neighbourhood Policy) 14–18, 63, 90, 103, 104–6, 120, 122, 132 ENP Actions Plans 17 environmental standards 1, 6–7 EPA (Economic Partnership Agreements) 25 equality: normative principle of 29–30 ESDP (Security and Defence Policy) 33, 34, 35 ethnic nationalism 59 EU development assistance 26 EU Special Representatives 78–9 EU strategies: at UN 83–4 EUBAM (European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine) 110 EU–China dialogue 143 EU–China Summit (2004) 143 ‘EU–China Village Governance Training Programme’ 161 EU–Moldova Action Plan 107 Euro-Indian free-trade agreement 6 Euro-Indian relations 11 Euro-Med agreements 16 Euro-Mediterranean Partnership 118, 120, 121 Euro-pessimism 38 Europe/European Union distinction 41–2 EuropeAid Annual Report (2005) 27 European conflict resolution preferences 31–6 European Defence Agency on Europe report 10 European economic preferences 24–8 European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) see EIDHR European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) see ENP European Network European Network on Debt and Development 28 European norms: as a concept 1 European preference for norms 3–9 European Security Strategy (2003) 33, 63 European social preferences 28–31 European Strategy Paper (2004) 17 European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine (EUBAM) see EUBAM EU–Ukraine Action Plan 107 EU–UN agenda: human rights 83 EU–UN cooperation mechanisms 83–4 ‘Everything but Arms’ (EBA) initiative 25

196

Index

Falun Gong 158, 161 family rights 24 Faust, Jörg 27 FDI (foreign direct investment): Libya 128–31 Fedotov, Yury 81n9 Ferrero-Waldner, Benito 27 Finland 28 Finnemore, Martha 39–40 ‘first circle’ (EU members) 2 Fischer, Joschka 11, 153 foreign direct investment (FDI) see FDI Foreign Ministers Declaration (1986) 24 France 28, 124–5, 139–40 Free Aceh Movement (GAM) 34 free-trade agreements 15–16 freedom of expression: China 157–62 freedom of the press: China 160 frontiers 62–3, 66; see also borders ‘frozen conflicts’ 107, 111 G-8 summits: Heiligendam 5 GAM (Free Aceh Movement) see Free Aceh Movement gas supply: Algeria 126–7 Gazprom 130 General Assembly resolutions: human rights 89–90 Georgia 31 Germany: aid 28; and Libya 125; and Poland 62; ‘Russia-first policy’ 112 Glasius, Marlies 33 global norms 4 globalism 43 globalization: and human rights 172 GMOs 6–7, 8 Goldwyn, David 129 Gong, Gerrit 45 Gordon, Robert 24 governance: definitions of 139–40 Greece 28 greenhouse gas emissions 5 Guantanamo Bay: human rights abuses 93, 101n19 Guatemala 31 Haider, Joerg 57, 124 Hakkerup, Hans 60 health and social security rights 24 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative 26 Herzegovina 59, 96 High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 78

Hilpold, Peter 25 Hix, Simon 39 Honduras 31 HRC (Human Rights Council) 90, 92, 95, 99, 148 Hu Jintao 157, 168, 169 human development 26 human rights: assessment in China 152–62; and China 146–8; Chinese conception 151–2; and ENP 16–18; EU and UN 85–90; EU guidelines 144–5; General Assembly resolutions 89–90; and globalization 172; Guantanamo Bay abuses 93, 101n19; Libya 132–3; Moldavia 17; norm-development 97; promotion 83; Ukraine 17; violations 138, 147 human rights clause 144 Human Rights Council (HRC) see HRC Human Rights Council Advisory Committee 98–9 human rights institutions 148–51 human security 33 hyperreality 69, 70, 72, 73–4, 80 ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) 148, 149, 150, 153, 155, 157 Iceland 28 ICERD (International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination) 148 ICESCR (International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) 148, 150 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) 79 identity: of EU 42, 45–6, 66, 104–5 identity crisis 44–5 Iliescu, Ion 54 ILO (International Labour Organization) 7, 31 Independent Human Rights Commission 138, 140 India: and core labour standards 7; freetrade agreements 6, 16; human development 26; and perception of European Union 11; and rights issues 87; and UN 83 Indonesia: debt 27; and RRM 34 inequality: levels of 24 instability importation 62–3 institution-building 72–3 institutional reconstruction: Afghanistan 135–7, 141

Index 197 integration 2, 39, 44, 45–6 integration capacity 64, 65–6 International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) see ICERD International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) see ICCPR International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) see ICESCR International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) see ICTY international identity 44–5, 45–6, 46 International Labour Organization (ILO) see ILO the Internet: China 160–1 intervention 61, 63, 71 Iran 89, 98 Iraq 26, 27, 123 Ireland 28 Islamism 17 Italy 28, 126 Japan 28, 29, 43 Johannesburg sustainable development goals 27 Johnson, Ailish 31 Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt 28 Juncos, Ana 32 justice: core principle of 39 Justice and Development Party (PJD) see PJD Kaldor, Mary 33 Kant, Immanuel 10 Kenya 26 Knutsen, T. 41 Kohl, Helmut 147 Kosovo 58, 59, 60–1, 70, 74, 89 Kuchma, Leonid 117n8 Kwasniewski, Aleksander 113 Kyoto Protocol 4–5, 6, 109 labour rights 162–5, 172 labour standards 1, 5, 7, 29–31 Laïdi, Zaki 42, 43, 81n10 Lamy, Pascal 4, 6 Latin American countries 96, 98, 99–100 Lebanon 15 legal system: China 157, 161–2 legitimacy 61, 75, 116 Lesotho 26 leverage 5, 6, 53, 56 Lewis, M. H. 44

liberal democracy 39 Libya: embargo 118; and ENP 17, 120, 122, 132; EU and 7; FDI 128–31; human rights 132–3; migration flows 131–2; military spending 130–1; oil production 128; oil rent 122–3; oil sector 123–7; transition process 127–8 Liechtenstein 94, 95 Lippert, Barbara 55 Lithuania 113 Liu Zhenmin 150 Lomé Convention 26 Lucarelli, Sonia 32 Luif, Paul 85 Lukasenko, Alexander 56 Lukes, Steven 42 Luxembourg 28 Lynn, K. Terry 123 Macedonia 32, 58 Maghreb states: corruption 121–2; and democracy 118; and ENP 120, 122; and the EU 118; regional integration 16; see also Algeria; Libya; Morocco; Tunisia Mahmoudi, Baghdadi 128 Maier, Charles 45 Make Poverty History 28 Mandelson, Peter 11, 18n4 Manners, Ian 38, 42 Mansouri, Muhammad Saleh 130 Matsunaga, Yasuyuki 122 MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) 26, 27, 145 Mead, Walter Russell 40 means of influence 9 MEAs (multilateral trade agreements): and WTO 6 Meciar, Vladimir 54, 55 MEDA programme 17 Medvedev, Alexander 130 Menotti, Roberto 32 Messner, Dirk 27 Meunier, Sophie 30 Mexico 27 Michnik, Adam 56 migration 3, 107, 131–2 milieu goal policy 15 military spending: Libya 130–1 military strategy 10 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) see MDGs Milosevic, Slobodan 56 Moldova 31, 105–6, 107, 109–10, 111 Mongolia 31

198

Index

Montenegro 58 Monterrey process 25, 27 Morocco 118, 126 Moroz, Oleksandr 115 Mugabe, Robert 169 Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) 26 multilateral human rights institutions: and China 148–51 multilateralism 11 multinational companies 164–5 Mwanawasa, Levy 169 Myanmar 7, 31, 89 NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) 92–3, 98 nation-state building 57–8; see also statebuilding nationalist populism 57 ‘Near Abroad’ concept 108 neighbour: concept of 105–6 neo-eurasianism 108 neo-liberalism 29 New Zealand 28, 29 NGOs: and human rights 17 Nicaragua 31 Nicolaïdis, Kalypso 30 Nigeria 26, 169; debt 27 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) see NAM norm-development: human rights issues 97 norm life cycle 40 norm-setter role 8 norm-takers 4, 16 normative conflict preferences 31–6 ‘normative hegemon’ 106, 107 normative power: assessment 36–7; crisis management 32–3; and development policy 25–6; historicity of 38–47; overview 23–4 normative preference: concept of 3; European 4–9; and geopolitics 14–18; and political asymmetry 12–13 normative social preferences 28–31 norms diffusion 103, 106, 115–16 norms, European 3–9; concept of 1 norms reception 103 North Africa 118–19 Norway 27, 28 Novitz, T. 30, 31 Oasis Group 123 Office of the High Representative (OHR) mandate 59–60 Ohrid constitution 58

OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference) 92 oil market: Libya 123–7 oil rent 122–6 Orange Revolution 62, 64, 110, 112–15 Orbie, Jan 25, 30, 31 Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) see OIC Ortega, Martin 133n1 Palestine 33, 34–5, 98 Panama 31 Paris Declaration on aid Effectiveness 27 Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) see PCA Patten, Chris 104, 119–20 PCA (Partnership and Cooperation Agreement) 107–8 Peace Implementation Council (PIC) see PIC peacekeeping 10, 31–6, 46 Peerenboom, R. 156 People’s Court: Libya 132 perception: of European Union 10–11, 43 Peru 31 pharmaceutical industry: and GMO use 6–7 Philippines 11 PIC (Peace Implementation Council) 79 Pisanu, Guiseppe 132 PJD (Justice and Development Party) 119 Poland 57, 112, 113; and Ukraine 62 populists 57 Portugal 28 possession goals 19n22 postcolonialism 46 Pouligny, B. 136 poverty reduction 144 power: Braudrillard’s view 68–70; of EU Special Representatives 78–9; hard 4–5, 10; and responsibility 75; soft 9–11, 146–8; see also normative power ‘The Precession of Simulcra’ 75 preference for norms 3–9; conflict 31–6; economic 24–8; social 28–31 Prodi, Romano 104 Product Red 28 protectionism 2, 30 protectorates 59–61 protests 158–9 Putin, Vladimir 81n9 Qadhafi, Muammar 123–7, 124 Qadhafi, Saadi al 130

Index 199 Qadhafi, Seif el Islam 124, 127, 128 Rapid Reaction Mechanism (RRM) see RRM Re-education Through Labour (RTL) see RTL REACH (regulation, registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals) 8 realpolitik: Japan treaty 43; and preference for norms 9 reception 106–7 referenda (May 2005) 44 reform plans (Ashdown) 79–80 regional integration 16 regulation, registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals (REACH) see REACH Rehn, Olli 63 reinsurance 53, 64, 65 religion: China 158 rentier states 122 representation 76, 78, 79 restrictions on the use of hazardous substances (RoHS) see RoHS rights 24; see also human rights rights protection movement (Weiquan) 160 Rio Declaration 6, 27 Robertson Research International Ltd 129 RoHS (restrictions on the use of hazardous substances) 8 Romania 55, 56–7, 65 ‘Rose Revolution’ 64 Ross, Michael L. 123 Rossi, Rosa 119 RRM (Rapid Reaction Mechanism) 33, 34 RTL (Re-education Through Labour) 153, 155, 156, 157 Rueda, Paul 166 Russell-Johnston, Lord 131 Russia: debt 27; and ENP 14, 107–9; HRC 98; and Libya 130; relations with 64; and rights issues 87 ‘Russia-first policy’ 112 Ryabchuk, Oleg 110 SAA (Stabilization and Association Agreements) 16, 59 Safranik, Yuri 130 Saleh, Behir 130 Samar, Simar 138 sanctions 123–5, 127, 130 Sata, Michael 169 Schily, Otto 132

Schimmelfennig, Frank 55 Schmitt, Carl 9, 109 Schuman Declaration (May 1950) 46 Schuman, Robert 32 Schüssel, Wolfgang 57 ‘second circle’ (Western developed countries) 2 security: and development aid 27; human 33; migratory pressure 3 Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) see ESDP Serbia 56, 58 Shalgam, Abd al-Rahman 128 Shevchuk, Yevgeny 111 Shukri Ghanem government 129 Sikkink, Kathryn 39–40 simulation: EU’s 71–2; politics of 68–70; of power 75 ‘Singapore issues’ 5 Slovakia 28, 54, 55, 110 Smirnov, Igor 111 Smith, Karen 85 ‘social embeddedness’ 115–16 social exclusion 25 social movements 160 social preferences 28–31 social security reform project: China 165 social solidarity 24, 26, 28–31 social welfare 28–9 ‘soft conditionality’ 109 ‘soft imperialism’ 106–7 soft power 146–8 Solana, Javier 58, 78, 83, 110, 113 Solana report 9, 10 solidarity: economic 24–8; social 24, 26, 28–31 South Korea 16 ‘sovereign democracy’ 109 sovereignty 11, 13, 37, 74, 75, 108–9, 152 Spain 28, 125 Special Representatives (EU) 78–9 SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement) see Sudan People’s Liberation Movement Sri Lanka 31 stability exportation 62–3 Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAA) see SAA standards: environmental 1; European 1; labour 1, 5, 7, 29–31 state-building: the Balkans 71–5; see also nation-state building Storey, Andy 25

200

Index

Strategy Paper (2004) 17 strike action, right to 163–4 Sudan 168–9 Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) 35 Sudanese crisis 35 superpowers 37 Surkov, Vladislav 109 suspension 56, 64 sustainable development 6, 27 sustainable peace 31–6 Sweden 28 Switzerland 28, 29, 97, 125 Syria 17 Tarasyuk, Borys 112 tariff barriers 2 Al-Tereiki, Ali Abdel-Salaam 131 territoriality 9 terrorism 33, 121 the Netherlands 27, 28, 29 ‘third circle’ (developing world) 2–3 Tiananmen Square crackdown 146, 152 Tilly, Charles 113 time–space framework 40–1 Tiraspol 111–12 Tortell, Lisa 31 trade agreements 15–16 trade policy 2, 15 trade unions: and core labour standards 7 Transnistria 107, 111–12 transparency 5 treaties 5 Treaty of Nice 144 tripolar world system 11 tsunami 34 Tunisia 15, 118, 120 Turkey: accession 12–13, 42, 44; and democratization 62; and intervention 63–4; social welfare 29; suspension of negotiations 56, 64 Turkmenistan 89 Tymoshenko, Yulia 114 UK 27, 28 Ukraine: and accession 42; action plan 107; and democracy 64; and ENP 14, 16, 109–10; human rights 17; intervention 63; Orange Revolution 112–15; stability 62 UMA (Arab Maghreb Union) see Arab Maghreb Union UN: human rights 83, 85; voting patterns 85–90

UN forums 85 UN sanctions: against Libya 123–5 UN Security Council 37, 85 UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Commission) 147, 149–50 unionism 163 United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) see UNHRC universalism 45 ‘universality’: of set of rights 99–100 USA: and Afghanistan 136–7; aid 28; and core labour standards 7; and harmonisation 2; and Human Rights Council 92, 95, 99; human rights resolutions 87–9; as a normative power 40–1; and REACH 8; and UN 83 US–Japan security treaty 43 US–Libya Business Association 129 Uzbekistan 89, 98 van den Hoven, A. 30 Venezuela 31 Venice Commission 60 violence: and oil rent 123 ‘virtuous circle’ 136, 137 Vogler, I. 30 voluntary organizations 159 voting patterns: UN 85–90 Wal-Mart 165 Wang Guangya 169 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) see WEEE Watson, Adam 45 Wæver, Ole 106 Weber, Cynthia 82n11, 82n14 WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) 8 Weiquan (rights protection movement) see rights protection movement Wenaweser, Christian 102n22 Western Balkans 57–61 Whitehead, Laurence 52 Wider Europe (later European Neighbourhood Policy) see ENP Wigen, K. 44 Wilson, Woodrow 40 Wolfers, Arnold 19n22 women’s rights 138 Woods, Ngaire 27 workers’ rights 24 WTO: European strategy 5–6 WTO Conferences: Cancun 6; Singapore 7

Index 201 Yahoo 161 Yanukovych, Viktor 114–15 former Yugoslavia 57 Yushchenko, Viktor 112

Zambia 26, 169 Zielonka, Jan 106 Zimbabwe 26, 169 Zorgbibe, Charles 46