Abstract
ABSTRACT While there is increasing evidence in the literature of politicisation in the area of European foreign policy, we know less about how this has affected the dynamics of cooperation among EU member states and, specifically, the procedural norms that govern this policy. This article is concerned with how politicisation and contestation manifest at the micro-level and how they might shape everyday EU foreign policy negotiations. It seeks to establish to what extent politicisation – resulting from the emergence of a new political cleavage centred around issues of identity and supranational integration – has driven normative contestation within EU foreign policy negotiations and whether this has led to the erosion of long-standing procedural norms in European foreign policy. Our findings suggest that despite CFSP Council committees being an institutional arena, characterised by intergovernmental, relatively insulated, and technical decision-making, current processes of politicisation linked to the rise of populism and the increasing transfer of authority to the EEAS have increased contestation of norms within this setting. However, procedural norms have remained relatively resilient to these challenges.
Highlights
That European integration is increasingly politicised and contested is a well-established argument in the scholarship (de Wilde and Zürn 2012, Grande and Hutter 2016)
The Brussels-based committees, which constitute the focus of this article, should, in theory, be relatively insulated from politicisation as public mobilisation is more difficult (Costa 2019, p. 794). This is related to a third point, here we focus on the lowest level of decision-making, Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) committees, including CFSP geographical and thematic working groups and the Political and Security Committee, which are often perceived as less politicised and more amenable to compromise than higher levels of decision-making such as the Committee of Representatives and the Council of Ministers
We proceed in three steps: we first examine the extent of normative contestation of procedural norms in CFSP; second, we investigate whether this is linked to politicisation and polarisation; third, and we assess how this has affected the robustness of procedural norms in this policy area
Summary
That European integration is increasingly politicised and contested is a well-established argument in the scholarship (de Wilde and Zürn 2012, Grande and Hutter 2016). At the European level, continuous progress in authority transfer from the nation state to the EU has resulted in politicisation in the post-Maastricht period, including in the area of foreign and security policy.
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