Conference Agenda

The pervasive claim in EU external action studies and policy that the EU should adopt a unitary form as a global actor by ‘speaking with a single voice’ has not proven fruitful in practice. The CFSP/CSDP represents an attempt at creating a unified foreign policy while preserving the diversity of its Member States’ national foreign policies. This is achieved through unanimity in decision-making. Whenever MS disagree, the EU’s action is seen to fall short. This paper develops a new theoretical framework to understand how, on the contrary, CFSP/CSDP is made and implemented without consensus, resulting in diverging patterns of foreign policy implementation that are not captured by unitary models and concepts built on the Westphalian state. It seeks to capture and analyse the strategies of action that the EU employs at operational and bureaucratic levels whenever agreement on CFSP/CSDP matters is politically unachievable.

To do so, it builds on the concept of ‘multiplicity’, the property of being multifaceted, multi-method, multi-level and multi-actor, which creates a diverse and dense system of EU foreign policy with variable geographies and relationships. Drawing on a pragmatist, ‘problem-solving’ approach to governance, the paper hypothesises that multiplicity allows the EU to assume different external forms as a function of the level of internal consensus, and the international power configuration in the issue at play. These forms represent an alternative way through which the EU’s action is enabled, opening spaces of power that would not be available otherwise. It will then present preliminary case evidence built via interviews.

Why did populist parties seek to politicise the European response to the Ukraine War in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Slovakia, but not in Poland or the United Kingdom? Such disparity among party positions is surprising given evidence that right wing populist governments are less enamoured with the broader Western strategy of containment than their centrist counterparts. While existing approaches have focused on the Atlanticist and anti-Russian sentiments of Poland and the United Kingdom and their strategic culture, such explanations have not taken into account key partisan dynamics. Drawing on theories of party competition and politicisation, this article argues that the crucial factor informing the degree of politicisation is the ideological position of the government in power at the time of Russia’s invasion. Where populists were already in power, they were forced to own the national response to the War and benefited from the spike in pro-Ukraine public opinion. Liberal and centrist governments following in their wake lacked any incentive to challenge this position, with which they were broadly aligned. In contrast, where populists were in opposition at the time of the invasion and centrist forces owned the response, an easy pathway to politicisation as differentiation (Cadier 2024) presented itself, empowering partisan factions more sympathetic towards Russia. Empirically the article demonstrates the validity of this argument through case studies of the Netherlands, France, Italy, the UK, Slovakia and Poland.

This paper advances the concept of ‘soft’ hostage-taking and examines its effectiveness in EU policymaking. Hostage-taking relates to situations where an individual member state (the hostage-taker) combines its veto-power in intergovernmental domains with a strategy of tactical issue-linkage to extract concessions in a not functionally related negotiating context. Soft hostage-taking does so whilst simultaneously denying issue-linkage in public communications. We argue that the effectiveness of (soft) hostage-taking depends on the credibility of a hostage-taker’s veto-threat, the cost of complying with hostage-taking demands by the other side, as well as the latter’s mitigating capacity. Empirically, we explore the relevance of our theoretical claims for the role of Hungary’s Populist Radical Right government in EU policymaking, which has increasingly relied on veto-threats on key EU foreign policy decisions to gain concessions in its rule of law conflict with EU institutions. We show that whilst Hungary’s soft hostage-taking strategy initially benefited from favourable conditions, its effectiveness has become more circumscribed in line with an altered context.

Following the Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been an increasing amount of discussion about the geopolitical EU both in academia and policy circles. Among policy circles, there are calls for the EU to be more “geopolitical” while in academia, there are claims that the EU is indeed becoming more “geopolitical.” On the other hand, little light has been shed on what exactly “geopolitical” means, scholars sometimes referring to the concept as an empty signifier, and what the motivates the “geopoliticization” of the EU. In this paper, we focus on the European Parliament (EP) and interventions of MEPs during two sets of debates. On the one hand, we focus on how MEPs talk about the invasion, and, on the other hand, we examine how the Crimean annexation was discussed in the EP. This approach allows us to trace changes by comparing the two cases to understand what exactly has changed since 2014 in the language of the MEPs. We employ a mixed-methods design. Based on the hand-coded EP debates, we first measure each MEPs position on a constructed dimension bounded with two poles: geopolitical EU and non-geopolitical EU. We use regression analysis to probe into what explains MEPs’ positions on this dimension. Second, we conduct qualitative text analysis of the same coded data to unpack what MEPs mean when they talk about the “geopolitical” EU, thus giving substance to the analytical category of the “geopolitical.”