The EU's Northern Dimension
Rich In Rhetoric, Poor In Substance?
- Art: MA-Thesis / Master
- Autor: Ralf Segeth
- Abgabedatum: September 2002
- Umfang: 32 Seiten
- Dateigröße: 410,9 KB
- Note: 1,0
- Institution / Hochschule: London School of Economics and Political Science Großbritannien
- ISBN (eBook): 978-3-8324-6304-5
-
ISBN (Paperback) :
978-3-8324-6304-5 P - ISBN (CD) :978-3-8324-6304-5 CD
- Sprache: Englisch
- Prämierung:
- Arbeit zitieren: Segeth, Ralf September 2002: The EU's Northern Dimension, Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag
- Schlagworte: Nördliche Dimension, Außenbeziehungen, EU-Rußland, Außenpolitik, Sicherheitspolitik
In den Warenkorb
68,00 €
MA-Thesis / Master von Ralf Segeth
Abstract:
It has been maintained that the European Union can best be considered a political system. Following this argument, foreign policy making in the EU should also be approached from a systemic perspective. Roughly, three main sources of foreign policy can be identified: the Common Foreign and Security Policy under Pillar II, external relations of the EU under Pillar I, and national foreign policies of the member states. The Northern Dimension policy is an interesting case in point because in various ways it touches upon all three areas.
Thus, officially, the Northern Dimension is an EU external relations policy and is therefore located within the responsibility of the Commission. However, it has been adopted as a response to an initiative of one member state, Finland, and it can safely be argued that essentially national foreign policy interests formed the base for this advance by Finland. Furthermore, it has also been suggested that the Northern Dimension can be considered a type of security policy, at least from the point of view of an extended, post-modernist, security policy agenda.
Not only for this reason is the Northern Dimension innovative and challenging for the EU. It is also meant to work and achieve its goals without any new institutional arrangements or additional money being spent. Indeed, these two aspects have widely been considered the main reasons for the relatively quick adoption of the initiative as an EU policy. At the same time, however, they have been the cause for substantial criticism and allegations that the initiative offers little to the Union beyond its rhetoric.
This paper will explore whether there is any basis to such claims. It will be argued that so far the Northern Dimension has indeed been rather poor in substance, at least when taking as a base for judgment the Action Plan it is guided by. Nevertheless, the initiative has considerable potential by virtue of how it is supposed to work. This is not to say that concrete outcomes won’t have to be achieved as well, but the way they might be reached is what could make the Northern Dimension act as a model for the EU’s external relations.
Before looking at the propositions on its functioning, however, I will review the objectives of the Northern Dimension policy, thus summarizing the ‘rhetoric’ about the initiative. In the main part of the work, I will first regard the most salient criticisms against the Northern Dimension, above all the alleged lack of substance. Then, the potential beyond the pragmatic goals of the policy as spelled out in the Action Plan, i.e. in what sense it could still make a positive impact, will be explained.
Table of Contents:
| Introduction | 3 | |
| The Rhetoric | 4 | |
| Diverging Interests between the Commission and the Member States | 7 | |
| The Case against the Northern Dimension | 10 | |
| The Substance | 19 | |
| A Postmodern Vision for the EU | 22 | |
| Conclusion | 26 | |
| Appendix | 31 | |
| Bibliography | 32 |
Not only in terms of actual policy goals can the NDI be seen to be guided by national interests though. Many authors have furthermore claimed that the Finnish government also had in mind more symbolic goals when launching the initiative. The first of these was directed at a domestic audience. Following this argument, the ND was a way for the state to increase legitimacy of EU membership within Finland and to convince the general public that Finland has profited from joining the EU.34 Another motive, this time focussing on a European target group, was to enhance the profile of Finland as a new member state within the EU. Käkönen, for example, argues that there was a perception that ‘without a proactive policy (…) there was a risk of Finland becoming peripheralized’35 in the Union. This might also to an extent explain the Finnish Alleingang in launching the initiative. [...]
In this respect, the most important consideration was with Russia, as the huge neighbouring country that had heavily influenced Finnish foreign policy ever since its independence from it in 1917 and as a country which was now sharing a border with the EU, yet not realistically seen to be joining the Union any time soon. Stable politico-economic development in all of Russia, and above all in the border regions, was thus deemed not only essential for Finland but, since becoming a member of the Union in 1995, directly and indirectly (through Finland’s membership) also of interest for the rest of the EU. Seen in this light, the logic of the Finnish idea of an inclusive regional policy approach based on lowpolitics issues and encompassing all of Northern Europe, with Russian areas participating on equal footing and not as foreign policy objects, becomes clear. Heininen, in fact, maintains that the NDI can be seen as the latest addition to a clear continuity of central elements of Finnish foreign policy – Nordic cooperation, disarmament policy, arctic environmental cooperation, and cooperation in the neighbouring regions of North-Western Russia and in the Barents region.29 Ojanen has coined the term of ‘customizing the Union’30 for this attempt of Finland to find a new channel for its foreign policy, a channel which opened only in 1995. [...]
According to Haukkala, any policy initiative in the EU, in order to be successful, has to enjoy both supranational pull and intergovernmental push.19 It could be held that the ND has so far not enjoyed a large amount of either of the two. In terms of the former, as has been explained above, the Commission, although not obstructive to the NDI, has shown considerable reservations to developing further above all the concept of the multilevel implementation of the policy and to taking the necessary steps to enable it. It has, therefore, maybe not surprisingly, not subscribed to the rather postmodernist element of the NDI as described by Browning20 and Zielonka21. Unless this profoundly changes, supranational pull for the ND, at least in its original form, will also in the future remain half-hearted. [...]
In den Warenkorb
68,00 €
Link zur Arbeit:
http://www.diplom.de/ean/9783832463045
Arbeit zitieren:
Segeth, Ralf September 2002: The EU's Northern Dimension, Hamburg: Diplomica Verlag
Schlagworte:
Nördliche Dimension, Außenbeziehungen, EU-Rußland, Außenpolitik, Sicherheitspolitik