Pami Aalto

1. Europe’s North: Historical Geopolitics and International Institutional Dynamics, 2-5 ECTS3. European integration in the North: is the EU the leading power?Autumn 2011 Pami Aalto Jean Monnet Professor/Director, Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on European Politics and European-Russian Relations, University of Tampere pami.aalto@uta.fi <http://www.uta.fi/jkk/jmc/index.html>

2. Towards a mixed geopolitical/institutionalist approach • The late 1990s underestimation of EU’s power in NE, although: • EU included the Baltics as part of its CEE enlargement against all odds • EU moved closer to the sphere of influence that Russia more or less willingly inherited from the Soviet Union • Beyond conventional notions of political agency: • ‘No’ to traditional-geopolitical, pure state-centrism; locking of imagination into the category of Westphalian nation states/Westphalian-federal states. In an ideal-typed Westphalian nation-state, the power of the centre is uniformly distributed across all territorial and functional dimensions. The power of the centre reaches all corners of the state equally and is not territorially and functionally differentiated unlike in the case of the EU. In Westphalian-federal states (e.g. GER, USA), the constituent units maintain more independence, but their ties to the centre are identical to each other across both territorial and functional dimensions • ‘No’ to regionalist analyses taking the EU as an organization/framework for regional co-operation of NE states. International intergovernmental organizations consist of nation-states, or of federal or other type of states that are all equally bound by the common rules typically pertaining to a limited sector of policy. IGOs thus have limited autonomy from their members. In the EU, member states remain variably integrated with the common rules whilst remaining greatly affected by EU integration practically across all sectors of policy (30-70% of national legislation originate in European law) • The thesis of the EU as the main geopolitical subject of northern Europe

3. For the EU, DEN EU membership (1973), GER re-unification (1991), and FIN, SWE memberships (1995) opened up a new view onto NE. They gradually engaged the Union into their efforts of overcoming the remaining Cold War era divisions in northern Europe by regional co-operation The Baltics, POL sought membership in the mid-1990s, joining 2004 Russia bound to the EU direction by a ‘strategic partnership’ with the Union NW-Russia tied to the northern EU and EEA area by the 2006 renewed Northern Dimension (ND) based on equal partnership (EU, RUS, ICE, NOR) USA mostly withdrawn from NE after Soviet troops pull-outs from the Baltic states, 1997 NEI, 1998 Baltic charters, Baltic/POL NATO memberships In all, a powerful north European opening to the EU due to the pressure for EU accession states and applicants to converge with EU legislation and policy priorities, whilst a less binding but clearly observable pull applies to the EU’s neighbours with market and other interests in the EU area The EU has become the entity towards which the minor, small and great powers in the European north, and many regional agents and organizations there tend to look before anything else, and towards which regional political and economic activities increasingly tend to gear But it is not taking the traditional great power place of RUS/GER! The opening up of EU’s wider northern Europe

4. The geo-economy of EU’s North at the time of the 2004 enlargement Estonia’s foreign trade with the EU-15 and CIS, 1993-2003 (% of value) • With the exception of Russia, and slightly less so, Norway, the countries of the region have from one half to two thirds of their EU-bound trade with other northerners • Germany occupies a central role in these regional patterns • North European countries’ extra-EU trade for example to the US and Asian directions • Northern Europe economically a European sub-region. Despite notable degrees of regionality, it is clear that economically northern Europe does not stand alone, and even less does the post-Soviet north with its vulnerable small Baltic economies and export-geared natural resources industries of Russia • Cohen (1991): CEE from buffer to gateway region; from geopolitics to geoeconomics

5. The EU’s wider northern Europe • Due to strategic reorganisation of northern Europe, EU has been invited into making what can be termed its ‘wider northern Europe’, and has also increasingly exploited the opportunity to this this • How wide such a project can ever be? Even after the breaking of the Cold War era bipolar division of the world, we continue to live in a world of boundaries and frontiers, where ‘wide’ always remains a relative term • Need to conceptualise the EU’s rule in more detail

6. Traditional European integration theories functionalism/neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism/liberal intergovernmentalismfocus on the character of EUintegration as such and deal with the degree to which already existing member states decide to co-operate or compete: internal dynamicsn The Westphalian claims: lack of a common European identity (Smith, Hoffmann) vs. common and consistently pursued values e.g. in enlargement; erasing ‘postcommunism’, ‘post-Soviet’ and changing identity political context of northern Europe member states’ ability to formulate common political interests (Duchene: ’civilian power’; Medrano: ’economic giant, political dwarf; Rynning: not a ’strategic actor’) vs. new treaty, solidarity clause, ESDP, crisis management troops? Hill’s ‘capability-expectations gap’ thesis (1993) vs. its closing Towards a broad view of EU foreign policy and beyond rigid distinction between what used to be the EU’s I, II, III pillars before the Lisbon treaty: what is said and done to others under the EU flag, either by representatives of the Union institutions or member states, and what these ‘others’ take as EU action, can conveniently be understood to connote EU foreign policy Focus on the regional policy impact of various EU activities Away from Westphalia

7. In search of new theories: network governance and boundaries (I) • Part of the new multi-level governance approach of European integration studies, comes from comparative politics, not IR • Conceptualizes the EU’s system of rule as mixing elements of foreign and domestic policy, and relying on partnerships, networks and interactive dependencies; the application of the principle of subsidiarity • The EU’s system of rule argued to represent a more complex form of political agency than in Westphalian entities. This leads to portraying the EU’s policy activities as prone to incoherence due to the various levels and actors involved, which often makes the policies difficult to grasp to their target groups • The EU’s system of rule is not very often unidirectional, but rather a non-hierarchical, fragmented one that uses a mixture of levels and actors • Complex network governance odten makes it unclear for outsiders to figure out who is doing what within the EU, and where do the EU’s boundaries eventually reach • EU’s network: e.g. NOR, ICE, NATO, CBSS, NCM, BEAC, OSCE • EU’s policy-export to its network partners, receiving states and regions, is the subsequent construction of fuzzy, differentially constituted, partly overlapping and partly separate boundaries around the Union along geopolitical, institutional/legal, transactional and cultural divisions

8. In search of new theories: network governance and boundaries (II) • Geopolitical boundary: avoidance of ‘fortress Europe’ scenario in NE. The EU’s multi-level and multi-agent, regionalist engagement of the Baltics and NW-RUS has supported webs of de-centralized cross-border co-op which has helped to reduce a little some of the previous tensions • Institutional/legal boundary: soft security challenges from the Baltics/RUS in the form of organized crime, money-laundering, and trafficking of arms, drugs and human beings, create a need for a considerable alignment of legal frameworks between the EU and its network partners • Transactional boundary: efforts to reduce trade barriers among north European countries. Notable advances regardless of Russia’s rather complex economic transition problems; some signs of voluntary, though yet partial adaptation to EU market and trade principles in Russia • Cultural boundary: youth and student exchange, and town twinning programmes to spread European social and institutional cultures • This literature challenges the Westphalian notion of sovereignty, and envisions a multi-perspectival/postmodern European polity • Fuzziness and messiness in the Union’s geopolitical form; several ‘grey zones’ such as the post-Soviet north, where EU, its members, and its network members and target territories meet and mingle with each other • Yet, the result is a model that eludes goal-oriented action and responsibility into the multiple layers of EU governance; could ‘incremental progress’ in fact account for identity and interest building?

9. In search of new theories: geopolitics, ES and ’empire’ • Empire literature relates to critical geopolitics and the English School • Introduces power and responsibility much more explicitly into the analysis • Suggests historical analogies for the contemporary European order by looking at pre-Westphalian world systems; ‘neo-medievalism’, ‘neo-sumerianism’ (Wæver 1998) • Imperial centredness is about complexity, overlapping authority, and a diffused nature of the distribution and exercise of power from the EU-centre. This means that the power of the loosely defined EU-centre gradually fades when one moves away from it, first towards the inner circles, and then towards the outer circles and the fringes of the metaphorically understood EU-empire. We end up with a gradated or concentric model of European integration • Christiansen et al.: EU’s own ‘near ‘abroad’ in the BSR region • Compared to many other historical empires, the EU-empire commands a striking amount of legitimacy among the Balts, Poles, and others, as they voluntarily approach the Union as a means of taking distance from Russia + the support of Baltic Russophone populations towards the EU accession of their countries of residence • Tunander: the fuzziness of borders that is implicated in the EU’s and Russia’s efforts in the 1990s of creating a greater space for themselves within the Baltics, in fact connotes the prospect of dialogue, which did not exist in a similar sense in the sharply bordered Cold War era Europe

10. Concentric EU order (‘EU empire’) with a focus on northern Europe • The circles of the concentric model are best understood as a theoretical organizing device. • In practice there is movement and tension between the circles when member-states take the lead or strive towards the centre along some policy sectors whilst expressing reservations along some other sectors • ‘Magnetism’ • Continuous strengthening and expansion of the EU empire until it found its limits in the case of Russia in the early 2000s

11. EU’s northern policies: universalising trends (vs. the more regional approach of the ND) • Enlargement policy and the Union’s 1993 Copenhagen criteria: • Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and the protection of minorities • Functioning market economy capable of coping with competitive pressures and market forces within the Union • Candidates must take on the Union’s acquis (80,000-odd pages), and the goals of political, economic, and monetary Union • Extension of the Union’s Schengen borders regime eastwards: lifts internal border controls, but introduces tighter visa and other control procedures in the external borders in order to tame the ‘soft’ security threats seen as emanating into the Union from the post-Soviet space • Accession states required to start applying Schengen practices on their eastern borders already before their EU accession • In practice, EU required unilateral abolishment of the 1990s simplified border crossing practices from the EST—RUS and LIT—KAL borders • The 1999 Common Strategy on Russia (CSR) and the 1994/1998 EU—Russian Partnership and Co-operation Agreement (PCA) proceeded from ‘common values’, since then more pragmatic approach • The EU-Russia 2003 ‘common spaces’ and the roadmaps of 2004: common EU—Russian socio-economic space and a free market area still a goal in addition to international/external security co-op • PCA still gives institutional framework for EU-RUS co-operation: summits, Cooperation Council and Committee (officials level)