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The European Union was created for the purpose of encouraging peace on the continent, but today is increasingly active globally in areas such as diplomacy, development, humanitarian and consular aid, and civilian and military crisis management. Yet we know little about the forces that drive the Union to interact, influence and intervene outside its borders. This book offers a new theoretical perspective that explains how EU collective action is driven by practice, such as diplomatic routines and crisis management procedures. Using global case studies, Ekengren shows how the EU's representatives perform these routines, or transnational practices, across particular 'locales' around the globe, from Kosovo to Haiti. By connecting transnational and local forces in the explanation of EU foreign policy action, he presents an outline of a practice theory of translocal action. Scholars, policymakers and journalists will find this theoretically ground breaking book essential in understanding the European Union's foreign policy

AbstractThis article attempts to explain why governments are surprised when extreme weather, pandemics and migration crisis hit their own country despite their good knowledge of these global threats. With the help of the contingency concept, the article explores the reasons behind these surprises by introducing a new category of threats that complements the ones in the existing literature on surprise. It adds the concept of 'known—corporally unknown' threats to the list of known‐unknowns, unknown‐unknowns as a way to emphasize the difference between abstract knowledge of 'facts and figures' (of e.g., global warming) and the acquiring of knowledge through personal, bodily experience (tangere) (of flooding and draughts). The article demonstrates how Swedish decision‐makers—despite their good scientific knowledge and warning signals from abroad—were surprised by the migration crisis of 2015 and the Covid‐19 pandemic in 2020 because they had not been in direct touch with massive flows of refugees or pandemics of that scale before. The article ends by discussing new ways of acquiring knowledge about global threats for a deeper, corporally anchored, preparedness for the surprises and contingencies to come.

Examines the success of the 2001 Swedish Presidency of the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers in the area of employment & social policy cooperation. A tension is revealed between the Swedish presidency's goals of deepening the EU in terms of creating new areas of cooperation & actually implementing institutional adaptation to such changes via an "open method of coordination" (OMC). To the goals expressed by the 2000 European Council in Lisbon, Portugal, the Swedes added four new foci: demographic challenges, biotechnology, sustainable development, & environmentally propelled growth. Timetables were established for discussing pensions, health care, & elder care, as well as services for the disabled & children. New employment objectives were set, & standards for evaluating quality of work created. The goal of setting deadlines for the deregulation of the energy (gas & electricity) market was less successful. Several problems with the OMC are identified, highlighting relations between the EU & its institutions & member states. Dimensions of the current balance of power between three pillars -- the EU, the Council, & the European Commission -- are described, & possibilities for the creation of a "fourth pillar" to further elaborate pragmatic sector-specific coordination -- "active subsidiarity" -- are explored. 8 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

This work suggests a new conceptualization of the Europeanization of the central state administrations of European Union (EU) member states. The point of departure is an oversight in most recent conceptual attempts to describe the character of nation-state adaptation due to the integration of national administrations in the EU. Such conceptions have captured only one dimension of the transformation of political and administrative patterns, namely changes in space, such as the emergence of new political levels. What has not been included is the time dimension of integration, i.e. national adaptation to the qualitatively new rhythms of policy-making in the EU. This dimension is as significant as the `spatial' transformation in challenging established theoretical views and conceptual tools.