Abstract
The European Union (EU) states in its 2016 Global Strategy that it intends to be a “responsible global stakeholder” and to “act worldwide to address the core causes of war and poverty, as well as to promote the indivisibility and universality of human rights” (European Union Global Strategy, 2016, pp. 5–8, 18). However, the Global Strategy is silent on the credentials or prerequisites that give the EU the authority to act globally and address conflicts and violations of human rights, including through the use of sanctions against non-EU states. How far the EU has the authority to use sanctions, which are essentially coercive measures, is especially relevant when the EU resorts to unilateral sanctions based on obligations owed <em>erga omnes</em>, namely measures without explicit United Nations Security Council authorisation and based on obligations owed to the international community as a whole. Drawing on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, this article introduces an analytical framework—the “moral dimension” of EU authority—which maps the substantive and procedural standards to guide the assessment of whether the EU has the appropriate credentials to qualify as an authority with the right to intervene forcibly into the internal affairs of non-EU states. The analytical value of the framework is examined empirically in the case study of the EU’s restrictive measures (sanctions) imposed in response to state violence against anti-government protests in Uzbekistan in 2005.
Highlights
This article set out to examine how far the European Union (EU) meets the standards of moral authority that allow it to resort to unilateral coercive measures against non‐EU states
It has been argued that little attention has so far been given to better understanding the sources of and standards for the EU’s authority to resort to unilateral coercive measures such as sanctions, and, in particular, legally and politically controversial measures in reaction to violations of obligations erga omnes
When assessing the EU’s moral authority, analysing dynamics within decision‐making processes has been found crucial: It makes a difference if EU deci‐ sions have been determined by only the most power‐ ful member states using bargaining, coercion, manipula‐ tion, or deception to enforce their strategic interests, or if decisions are derived from fact‐based, inclusive, and non‐coercive deliberations geared towards acting in the general interest of the international community
Summary
This article aims to examine how far the European Union (EU) has the authority to resort to unilateral sanctions against non‐EU states (third countries) and, if so, based on which standards. An enquiry into the EU’s authority to use coercive actions against third countries is rel‐ evant in the wider context of ongoing scholarly discus‐ sions about the moral responsibilities of states, IOs, and non‐state actors to intervene in human rights emergen‐ cies when a UN authorisation is prevented due to power politics among the veto players in the Security Council (e.g., Brown, 2004; Erskine, 2004, 2014) In some of these discussions, the EU is often viewed as a likely candidate to assume such responsibilities because societies that are “evolving in post‐national and post‐sovereign direc‐ tions may have...the skills that are needed to build toler‐ ant societies elsewhere” and “promoting more humane forms of national and global governance”
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