The study of enlargement: political relevance and theoretical neglect

Eastern enlargement is a defining process in the international politics of the New Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, the major West European regional organizations – the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and, to a lesser degree, the Council of Europe (CoE) – have become the fundamental institutional structures in the “architecture” of the new Europe. They have developed into the centers of gravity in pan-European institution-building and into the dominant loci of decision- and policy-making for the entire region. The borders of these organizations have replaced the East–West line of the Cold War as the central cleavage in the European system. “Europe” has increasingly come to be defined in terms of these organizations, the “Europeanization” or “Europeanness” of individual countries has come to be measured by the intensity of institutional relations with these organizations and by the adoption of their organizational values and norms.

Immediately after the dissolution of the Eastern bloc, all European organizations began to create a diversified array of institutional relationships with the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) – reaching from observer status to some form of association. A few years later, the Western organizations set out to expand their membership to the East in the biggest enlargement rounds in their history. The membership of the Council of Europe grew from fourteen to twenty-two members between 1950 and 1988. Since then, it has doubled.

As war in the Middle East threatened to erupt during the first week of June 1967, leaders of the Six were settling down into one of their periodic intergovernmental summits only a few hundred miles away in Rome. Although fully aware of the different preferences among EU states regarding this volatile region, and of the apparent intractability of the political problems in the Middle East, Germany suggested the Rome summit might be a rare opportunity for the Europeans to speak with a single voice about the tense situation. However, France, under the leadership of de Gaulle, proposed instead a four-power summit (France, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US) to discuss a settlement to the conflict, but this offer was rejected by the Americans. This failure on the part of the EU even to attempt coordination on its own during such a major crisis, and the rejection of French leadership, both eased the way for the creation of EPC three years later. As German chancellor Kurt Kiesinger recalled, “I felt ashamed at the Rome summit. Just as the war was on the point of breaking, we could not even agree to talk about it” (Ifestos 1987: 420).

The dynamics of the Rome summit during the 1967 Six-Day War also illustrate three important circumstances facing EU governments as they began to think more seriously about coordinating their foreign policies.

Once EPC began generating its own norms and rules in the late 1970s, the stage was set for a far more comprehensive approach to EU foreign policy cooperation a decade later: the CFSP. Before examining the CFSP, however, we must digress for a moment to consider the role of permanent organizations in EU foreign policy. These organizations comprise budgets, professional staffs, buildings and facilities, unique policy goals, and a host of other features which affect both policy performance and institutionalization. As I noted in Chapter 3, although the Luxembourg Report briefly acknowledged the Commission and the European Parliament (EP) as supporting players in EPC, most EU states generally preferred EPC to remain a decentralized system dominated by national governments. Their strong preference for intergovernmental foreign policy cooperation created a barrier to both the involvement of existing EC organizations and the creation of any permanent organization to administer EPC.

However, this barrier gradually broke down and EC organizations began to affect the development of European foreign policy cooperation. Organizations that have achieved some level of permanency, legitimacy, and competent authority are more likely to influence the policy process, thus increasing the prospects for cooperative outcomes and institutional growth. Organizations have the capacity for coordinated, purposive action; as their permanent staffs are established, as their institutional memory develops in a particular policy area, and as policy norms are preserved and followed by these organizations, cooperative outcomes will be affected.

On November 19, 1970, Europe's novel experiment in regional economic integration quietly delved into uncharted territory. In Munich, at the former Prussian embassy to the Kingdom of Bavaria, European Union (EU) foreign ministers met for the first time under the rubric of a new institutional framework, “European Political Cooperation” (EPC). This meeting represented the latest in a long series of efforts to coordinate the foreign policies of EU member states in areas other than economic affairs. The EU's previous attempts to coordinate such policies, such as the European Defense Community and the European Political Community of the 1950s, and the Fouchet Plans of the 1960s, had failed miserably because of fundamental disagreements about the means and ends of European foreign policy cooperation. Thanks to this legacy, EPC was greeted with considerable uncertainty and skepticism when the EU foreign ministers met in Munich. The meeting aroused little public attention, and EPC participants themselves expected the profound differences in their foreign policy traditions, domestic political cultures, administrative capacities, and global relationships to inhibit their attempts to find a collective voice in world politics.

In addition, not only was EPC's scope of action so indeterminate that it threatened to invite more conflict than cooperation, but its mechanisms to induce such cooperation were feeble and peculiar. It was not based on a treaty, nor did it have any permanent organizational machinery. Its rules were extremely vague and its instruments for collective action few.

The SEA represented a significant step forward for European foreign policy, yet the EU, like much of the world, was caught off-guard by the momentous events of 1989–91, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ending with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. There is no doubt these exogenous changes prompted major reforms in a number of institutions, including NATO, the EU, the WEU, and the CSCE, and helped create entirely new ones, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (Keohane, Nye, and Hoffman 1993). However, it is also clear that the specific institutional reforms of EU foreign policy resulting from these events largely reflected endogenous, path-dependent processes. Rather than a decisive break with the past, the CFSP represented a natural, logical progression by both clarifying what had been achieved through EPC and building only a few truly innovative goals and procedures onto that mechanism. Virtually all elements of EPC described in previous chapters were affected, and they clearly laid the foundation for the CFSP at Maastricht.

Yet a closer examination of both the treaty-based provisions of the CFSP and its early performance suggests that European foreign policy has in fact reached a new level of institutionalization. In particular, we can describe this evolution as moves toward a system of governance, broadly defined for the moment as the authority to make, implement, and enforce rules in a specified policy domain.

European foreign policy cooperation has expanded considerably since the first tentative steps made under EPC in the early 1970s. Compared to the situation then, the CFSP today involves a far more sophisticated institutional structure and has produced a greater variety of complex common foreign policy actions. Moreover, compared to other regional organizations, such as the Organization of American States or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the EU's progressive and determined efforts to cooperate in foreign policy are highly unique. Despite these positive results, however, many observers and EU officials remain dissatisfied with the CFSP's procedural elements and its substantive output. We can describe these limitations as part of the “unfinished business” of the Maastricht era, where certain issues were raised but ultimately sidestepped owing to both general political differences and more specific questions about institutional architecture. These issues have intensified the pressures for institutional change since the late 1990s and deserve some attention here, given the EU's own growing ambitions and the major challenges faced by the CFSP since its implementation.

This chapter explores these difficult institutional questions, focusing in particular on the EU's goal to make its external relations functions more coherent. Improving the effectiveness and coherence of the EU's external capabilities was a key motivation behind the TEU and its single institutional framework. As we saw in the previous chapter, substantive coherence in the CFSP has clearly improved compared to EPC.

Foreign and security policy cooperation has long been one of the most ambitious goals of those who favor a more united Europe, yet the original mechanism to achieve this goal, European Political Cooperation, was vague in its scope and severely limited in terms of institutional design. By the time of the Treaty on European Union twenty years later, however, the limited “talking shop” of EPC had been formally institutionalized into a legally binding policymaking process capable of producing common positions and joint actions on a wide range of global problems. Today virtually no major foreign policy issue goes unexamined by the EU, and cooperation is under serious consideration in related areas such as security and defense. How can we explain this cooperation, and in what ways did institutionalization affect EU foreign policymaking? The key challenge here is to understand the various processes by which an informal, extra-legal, ad hoc, improvised system gradually fostered the achievement of cooperative outcomes and progressively enhanced its own procedures to improve the prospects for those outcomes.

As much of this activity took place outside the institutions and procedures of the European Community, an explanation of EU foreign policy may benefit from more general explanations of institutional development rather than other theories, such as functionalism, specifically developed to explain European economic integration. This means taking into account the reciprocal links between institutional development and the propensity of states to cooperate to achieve joint gains.

The previous chapter argued that institutionalization promotes international cooperation and suggested several general causes of institutionalization, but did not offer precise empirical measurements of either institutionalization or cooperation. This chapter attempts to operationalize these concepts and apply them to the historical record to justify further the merits of an institutional analysis of EPC/CFSP. Although my institutional approach to cooperation is not as parsimonious as theories that focus on single causes (such as the interests of powerful EU member states) or events (such as Intergovernmental Conferences), it has the potential to capture equally important, though subtle, processes concerning the development of EU foreign policy. Institutionalization is often a contentious political process, yet with every major setback the EU has attempted to strengthen its foreign policy procedures to improve the chances of future cooperation. In general, the relationship between institutions and individual foreign policy outcomes will vary over time and across specific foreign policy actions, depending on the costs, states, and EU organizations and policies involved. However, if institutions “matter” we still should at least be able to observe a general intensification and expansion of EU foreign policy cooperation as its institutional mechanisms expand and stabilize.

EPC provides us with an interesting and theoretically useful example of such institutional development, as it began as an informal, extra-legal agreement among EU member states in an ill-defined issue-area.

Hamilton's concise case for replacing the weak Articles of Confederation with a federal union of the American states helped inspire support for ratification of the US Constitution. Over two hundred years later his argument seems increasingly pertinent to the debate over European integration. The links between European economic and political objectives, both internal and external, are now extremely difficult to disentangle, and EU foreign/security policy coordination represents a major achievement for a regional economic organization. However, although a union of some unique type, federal or otherwise, may ultimately result from these efforts, I have instead framed this study in terms of cooperation among independent, sovereign states. For European states remain the ultimate locus of authority in developing the EU's institutional future, which has involved a variety of complex behaviors since the 1970s: bargaining, information-sharing, leadership, the establishment of formal organizations, the generation of norms, and delegation to technical specialists. The EU continues to strengthen its intergovernmental elements during key episodes of institutional reform, and EU states still must approve, tacitly or explicitly, any major expansion of EU competencies, such as the ESDP .

Given the vague provisions of the Luxembourg Report it rapidly became clear that EPC's participants would have to improvise their cooperation. As we have seen, although senior government officials played a leading role during EPC's formative years, even then the system involved an embryonic lower-level infrastructure – the Political Committee, European Correspondents, and working groups – to assist foreign ministers with foreign policy coordination. Fundamentally, EPC at this time was little more than a system of “regular exchanges of information and consultation” on “great international problems,” primarily involving periodic summits among EU member governments. This aspect of European foreign policy reflects one of the most fundamental functions of institutions: information-sharing. As May (1984) has pointed out, perspective-taking alone cannot always enable actors to predict each other's behaviors, and predictable behavior is the essence of cooperation. In a world of uncertainty regarding the behavior of states, institutional mechanisms that make it easier for states to communicate with each other are highly valued.

The cooperation-inducing effects of regular communication can vary, ranging from confidence-building (at a minimum) to providing a shared understanding of, and potential solutions to, certain problems (at a maximum). However, there can be an enormous amount of variation regarding the ends and means of communication. With respect to EU foreign policy, I stress four aspects of communication: the actors involved, the types of information they share, the channels through which this information is shared, and the effects of that communication on cooperation and institution-building.