Suchergebnisse

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century the European Union has promoted more explicitly than in earlier decades, the view that security and development policies are inextricably linked. Yet trying to dismantle the walls erected around the two policy domains has proved very difficult. The launch and implementation of the African Peace Facility (APF), meant to support the African Union in the promotion of security in Africa, exemplifies some of these tensions. While existing analyses have emphasized the role of interests -- in a sort of accidental convergence of the bureaucratic interest of the European Commission and those of the Member States -- this article concentrates on the normative aspects of the initiative. In particular, the three principles underpinning it -- promotion of ownership, solidarity, and a virtuous development-security nexus -- make the APF different from any other EU security initiative. Whilst boosting the AU's clout in the field of peace and security and as an actor in the international arena, the implementation of the APF has nonetheless presented some problems. First, a larger number of resources have been devoted to the peace missions than to capacity building. Second, its alleged success has diverted attention from other important areas in EU-Africa relations. Finally, the EU's rhetoric on the Africanization of security, paradoxically, has risked undermining the legitimacy of the African Union in Africa. Adapted from the source document.

This article argues that, by acting autonomously and cohesively, the European Union (EU) was able to shape the global agenda on foreign aid throughout the 2000s, particularly on the issue of donor complementarity and division of labour. By contrast, its ability to promote aid effectiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa was significantly constrained by national aid bureaucracies and by the complex aid architecture. More generally, to fully understand whether or not the EU is an effective actor, it is necessary to take into account how EU actorness contributes to the issue being discussed. At headquarter level, the European Commission sought to enhance EU actorness, which was seen as key to aid effectiveness. On the ground, national aid bureaucracies resisted EU actorness in the name of aid effectiveness.

This article analyses the substance of EU democracy promotion in the Pacific members of the African, Caribbean, and Pacific group (PACP) in the first decade of the new century. The PACP region represents a compelling, yet overlooked, case for several reasons: The EU has limited commercial and political interests but has strongly committed to the promotion of democracy in the region; the South Pacific represents a unique case of regional integration, including two larger countries like Australia and New Zealand and fourteen smaller states like the PACP countries and integrating traits typical of liberal democracies with more traditional forms of governance. Drawing on published and unpublished documents and confidential interviews, this article finds that by promoting inter-regional political dialogue with the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), the EU has been entrapped by its own commitment to regionalism and has (unwillingly) delegated the substance of democracy promotion to Australia and New Zealand. This situation slightly started to change towards the end of the 2000s, when the EU sought to project an autonomous approach on democratic governance.

This article discusses the domestic politics of treaty reform in the European Union, from the failed referendum on the Constitutional Treaty held in France in May 2005 to the failed referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon held in Ireland in June 2008. A meticulous examination of the national level, it is argued here, helps us to better understand the European level and why some Member States manage to influence outcomes more than it would be expected. In particular, this article looks at the role played by actors beyond national governments, the impact of the political system and the general context on preference formation and inter-state bargaining, and the use that national negotiators made of ratification hurdles to receive extra concessions. More generally, by looking at the preparatory, negotiation and ratification process of the Treaty of Lisbon, this article aims to make a contribution to an emerging literature, which argues that we can no longer explain the evolution of the European Union without understanding the increased politicisation of the European project.