7 key challenges facing the European Union
Twelve experts come together to discuss the biggest issues confronting the European Union today.
The liberal international order (LIO) faces a great many challenges today, bringing with it serious implications for the European Union. In this blog symposium, in collaboration with The Loop, authors from the November special section of International Affairs unpack what the LIO’s crisis means for the EU. They consider challenges around migration, human rights, climate change and foreign policy, and contestations from Turkey and Russia.
The defensive turn in EU security policy
The EU came into being during the post Second World War development of the liberal international order and, therefore, its interests and identity are inseparable from the emergence of this order. Thus, a crisis of the LIO is perceived as a crisis of the EU, affecting its international role and identity. Indeed, the EU is currently using narratives of crisis and resilience to mobilize support for itself and the LIO.
In the face of perceived existential crises such as COVID–19 and the Russia–Ukraine war, we have witnessed a defensive turn in the EU’s foreign and security policies. This turn prioritizes the protection of European societies against external threats rather than cooperation and interdependence. By building its own resilience, the EU is seeking to be more strategic and selective in the protection of the LIO. However, by becoming increasingly ‘geopolitical’, the EU might also be risking some of the key foundations of the LIO and its own identity as a liberal actor.
Pol Bargués is Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). Jonathan Joseph is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. Ana E. Juncos is Professor of European Politics at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol.
Read their open-access article ‘Rescuing the liberal international order: crisis, resilience and EU security policy’ here.
Turkey’s rising contestation of the EU
The main challenge that the EU faces from Turkey is the latter’s increasing and often unpredictable contestation of the EU at the regional and global level through both discourse and practice. Turkey targets the EU’s legitimacy by highlighting its failure to impartially uphold its moral duties to citizens within and beyond its borders on matters of democracy and human rights, as well as to refugees and former colonized countries of the global South.
Turkey also engages in contestatory practices in various foreign policy areas such as migration, development and security, with a view to pursue its sovereign interests. What makes these contestations unpredictable and often sudden is closely related to the fact that they are mainly driven by the need to attain regime security. Turkey’s contestation of the EU contributes to eroding the latter’s legitimacy both within and beyond Turkey, as well as to silencing the EU’s normative claims through transactional engagements in policy areas such as migration.
Senem Aydin-Düzgit is a Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University, Istanbul and currently a Richard von Weizsacker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy.
Read her open-access article ‘Authoritarian middle powers and the liberal order: Turkey’s contestation of the EU’ here.
Top-down approach to climate change
For some time, the EU has equated the fight against climate change to global justice. Its main approach until the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit (COP–15) was to ‘lead by example’. By adopting ambitious emission reduction targets, it hoped to encourage others to follow suit. The EU also aimed to strengthen the international climate regime by setting legally binding emission reductions targets for large emitter states.
However, the EU’s top-down and binding approach towards climate change led to antagonization within international negotiations, reflected in the subsequent failure to construct a comprehensive post-Kyoto agreement. Furthermore, it also played a role in overlooking the needs of marginalized communities, and the historical legacies and economic practices of EU member states. Because many states — above all, but not only, the US and China — considered the EU’s approach an infringement on their sovereignty, the negotiations in Copenhagen failed. While the EU has now adopted a more inclusive approach that factors in principles of non-domination and mutual recognition, as reflected in the 2015 Paris Agreement, this does not come without its unique challenges either.
Thomas Diez is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Tübingen. Franziskus von Lucke is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen.
Read their article ‘Global justice and EU climate policy in a contested liberal international order’ here.
The EU’s liberal backslide and migration conundrum
The EU’s activities in the field of migration have been hectic over the last few years. However, this has not better equipped it to face complex challenges, nor has it boosted its distinctiveness as a liberal actor. Instead, the EU has become less liberal. Externally, the EU has increasingly shielded itself, alluding to the potential risks that massive numbers of irregular arrivals could pose to its integrity, especially when instrumentally exploited by external and hostile actors for malevolent objectives. In this narrative, third states are either necessary partners to reduce the number of migrants arriving, or pariah states plotting against the Union. ‘Protecting the EU’ has become so urgent that its own protection system and its underlying understanding can be compromised.
Internally, the borders reintroduced since 2015 among member states testify the lack of intra-EU solidarity, which suggests that perhaps there is no EU to protect in the first place. Migration thus profoundly challenges the EU, as it questions its true ontology, underpinnings and the future of the integration process.
Michela Ceccorulli is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. Enrico Fassi is Senior Assistant Professor in Political Science at the Catholic University in Milan. Sonia Lucarelli is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna and a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of International Affairs, Rome.
Read their article ‘An illiberal power? EU bordering practices and the liberal international order’ here.
Between intergovernmental and supranational human rights promotion
The EU seeks to put human rights at the forefront of its foreign policy. Although its track record in promoting human rights is contested, the EU has sought to strengthen human rights by pushing for supranational arrangements in its trade and development agreements with partners around the world. The EU does this by including a human rights clause in agreements which states that cooperation can be suspended if fundamental human rights and democratic principles are not respected.
Yet the EU only has only made a half-hearted effort towards making this clause a supranational mechanism. While the human rights clause allows for sanctioning non-compliance with human rights, it also maintains core features of state-to-state decision-making, because only executives are given the authority to initiate and settle disputes on human rights. This half-step towards supranationalism that neither fully respects states’ sovereignty nor allows for impartial settlements of human rights disputes undermines the EU’s rights-based approach to international order.
Johanne Døhlie Saltnes is an affiliated researcher at ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway and a lecturer and visiting researcher at the University of Brasilia, Brazil.
Read her open-access article ‘Ambiguities in the EU’s rights-based approach to liberal order’ here.
Reassessing the EU’s role in the liberal international order
The liberal international order is expected to have appeal across state borders, thanks to its commitment to the principles of equality and freedom. Yet this order, which the EU is a part of, often overlooks that for such principles to be realized, people must have some say in defining them. The rights deriving from this order may be correct in principle, yet still be difficult to accept in practice, if those affected have not had a chance to have their say. The LIO is structurally biased in favour of western states and faces demands for a sense of collective ownership from various actors.
As the EU’s legitimacy as a global actor is tied to that of the LIO, the EU must reconsider its approach towards the world order and its relations with it. More specifically, the EU faces the two-fold task of contributing to protect democracy from authoritarian forces and acknowledging the right of marginalized voices to take part in important decisions that affect them.
Helene Sjursen is a Research Professor at ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo.
Read her open-access article ‘Rethinking liberal order: the EU and the quest for global justice’ here.
The EU’s Russia challenge
Russia’s large-scale war against Ukraine has unleashed a powerful antagonistic dynamic, reinforcing the black and white view of the world. This might create an impression that democracies have never been more united, now that the liberal world order is challenged by a nuclear power. Unity, however, can be dangerous for democracy. That is, equating any critique of the existing order with Putin’s propaganda mirrors the Kremlin’s tactics of designating opponents as ‘foreign agents’ and ‘national traitors’.
The EU, with its internal diversity and geographic proximity to Russia, faces a particularly difficult task of reasserting the pluralist and inclusive nature of the European project, while securing democracy against external threats. The polarization of the debate creates tensions within the Union, not just between groups of member states, but also between communities differently affected by the war in Ukraine. This presents new challenges to the foundational principles of the EU, from market liberalism to free speech and the freedom of movement.
Viacheslav Morozov is Professor of International Political Theory at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Read his article ‘Russia and the liberal order: from contestation to antagonism’ here.
Read more about this topic in the November 2023 special section ‘Liberal order, the EU and global political justice’, of which many articles are free to access.
The second part of this blog series focuses on how the EU can actively tackle the challenges highlighted in this blog. Read it here.
All views are individual not institutional.
