The European Union As A Global Actor

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book focuses on the European Union as an important actor in international relations and international political economy. The EU negotiates international economic agreements, represents Europe in international organizations, and is a major trading bloc and currency area. To what extent and under what conditions the EU can use its considerable economic power to assert its interests in the international arena is a relevant question for students, researchers and practitioners alike. To explore this question, the textbook introduces the concept of “actorness” and presents an overview of the actorness debate and theories used to explain actorness. In addition, it includes three empirical chapters on trade, finance and climate policy that apply various concepts and theories to study European actorness in the respective policy areas.

Is the European Union a unified actor in world politics? The world’s leading economic power is still struggling to find its role in shaping and maintaining global peace, free trade and commerce. How successful is the EU ́s Common Foreign and Security Policy and its institutions really?

This book examines how the European Union (EU) is perceived beyond its borders in the US; the Middle East: Israel, Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Iran; Russia; China; India; Brazil and South Africa. The book also analyses the main perceptions of the EU in some key international institutions, including the World Bank; World Trade Organization, United Nations, African Union; and transnational actors, including non-Western media such as Al Jazeera. It seeks to provide a thorough analysis of the implications that these perceptions might have for the global role of the EU. By taking this approach and by providing both conceptual and empirical arguments, the volume provides an innovative perspective on the analysis of the EU as a global actor. It also strengthens a research agenda on the EU external image: an underdeveloped area of investigation in which the editors and the main contributors to this volume have played a pioneering role in the past few years. It will be of strong interest to academics and students of international politics, European studies and development studies.

This important collection, edited by Jenő Czuczai and Frederik Naert, covers the key areas of EU external relations law and broader institutional dimensions and principles of Union law. It does so under five headings - institutional dimensions; principles of Union law and legal theory; international law aspects; specific EU external policies (the Common Foreign and Security Policy; the Common Commercial Policy; and Justice and Home Affairs); and EU international agreements. Well-established academics and experienced practitioners from the different EU institutions offer a unique insight into EU practice and academic analysis of the most pertinent legal issues of the post-Lisbon legal environment of the EU, in particular in the external relations area. The contributors are: Paul Berman, Michael Bishop, Thérèse Blanchet, Sonja Boelaert, Marise Cremona, Jenő Czuczai, Álvaro de Elera, Bart Driessen, Frank Hoffmeister, Pieter-Jan Kuijper, Hubert Legal, Gilles Marhic, Stephan Marquardt, Frederik Naert, Esa Paasivirta, Ricardo Passos, Ingolf Pernice, Allan Rosas, Ivan Smyth, Christiaan Timmermans, and Dirk Wouters.

A new look at the European Union's role as a global actor, with special focus on the theme of interregionalism in its relations with key regions around the world: Africa, Asia, South America, North America and Central-Eastern Europe. This new collection clearly shows how, since the end of the Cold War, the European Union has gradually expanded its external relations and foreign policies and become a global actor in world politics. During the last decade interregionalism has become a key component of the EU’s external relations and foreign policies. In fact, the EU has quickly become the hub of a large number of interregional arrangements with a number of regions around the world. Promoting regional and interregional relations not only justifies and enhances the EU’s own existence and efficiency as a global ‘player’, the strategy also promotes the legitimacy and status of other regions, giving rise to a deepening of cross-cutting interregional relations in trade and economic relations, political dialogue, development cooperation, cultural relations and security cooperation. This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading Journal of European Integration.

This book provides a systematic collection of EU actors, EU policy and EU actions in global health. It answers key questions on governance of the EU and its policy processes. The book starts with an introduction to the EU as a global actor and continues to outline the historical development and the Treaty basis for health, including the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties. It also discusses the Commission's global health communication and the subsequent Council Conclusions on global health. Both documents define EU values in global health and identify the future priorities for global health action in the EU. Four of the five priorities are then described from the perspective of a different country experience. The book also considers the opportunities for research and provides an overview of the political, legal and financial instruments available to the EU. It also explores the global health architecture and processes within which the EU is acting, namely at the WHO, in the different multilateral organizations, and in global public health international treaties and regulations. Finally, the book addresses the importance of policy coherence at a national level and provides critical viewpoint on the EU as a global health actor.The book will assist practitioners working in policy making and international negotiations affecting health, as well as students and researchers, to create a better understanding of the European Union, its role in global health, and the uniqueness and specificity of the EU as a global health actor. It provides an overview of how the EU can act in global health and outlines the intersections of health and other sectors, as well as the instruments available to the EU to act effectively at a global level. The collection of contributions in this form and from this health policy perspective are not yet found elsewhere on the market.

This book examines a largely unexplored dimension of the European agencies, namely their role in EU external relations and on the international plane. International cooperation has become a salient feature of EU agencies triggering important legal questions regarding the scope and limits of their international dimension, the nature and effects of their international cooperation instruments, their status within the EU and on the global level, and leading potentially to tensions between EU law and international law. This book fills the existing knowledge gap by scrutinizing the international cooperation legal framework and practice of EU agencies, including their mandate, tasks and instruments, together with their legal status as actors with a global dimension. It sets out a general legal-analytical framework which combines legal parameters from EU and international law to assess EU agencies as global actors, and examines in detail three case studies on carefully selected agencies to shed light on the complexities of EU agencies’ daily international cooperation.

This timely book investigates the EU’s multi-faceted development as a global actor, unpacking its legal mission to be a ‘good’ actor as well as exploring the complexities of fulfilling this objective. It elicits critical reflections on the question of ‘goodness’ in EU external relations from descriptive, analytical and normative perspectives, and examines which metrics of actorness are useful in tackling this subject.

This comprehensive, up to date and theoretically informed text examines the full range of the European Union's external relations including the Common Foreign and Security Policy. It look at the increasingly important part the EU plays in global politics. The authors argue that the EU's significance cannot be grasped by making comparisons with traditional states. Issues covered include: · the status, coherence, consistency and roles of the EU as an actor, and what being an actor means in practice. · how the field of trade relations forms the basis of the EUs activities · the EU in global environmental diplomacy, North-South relations and in relation to the Mediterranean and East/Central Europe · the EUs controversial relationship to the Common Foreign and Security Policy and defence.