Abstracts and papers
Abstracts for workshop on "Competing or Complementary"
Peter Abrahamsen
The overall thesis of the study to which this paper contributes is that globalization currently shows itself as increased regional integration. That is the case for Europe, North Central and South America, and, probably also, for East Asia. Additionally, it is hypothesized that increased economic (trade) integration spill over into enhanced social rights and entitlements. That has been the case for Europe and Latin America, and the paper aims at testing this thesis against the East Asian case. Since the end of the cold war and particularly since the former financial crisis of the late 1990s East Asian nations have experienced an increase in regional integration /and/ a simultaneous increase in social citizenship rights. The paper tries to demonstrate if, and possibly how, these processes are inter connected.
Philippe De Lombaerde and Fred Söderbaum
'The Mic-Mac Problem': Theorizing the Linkages between Cross-Border Micro-Regionalism and Macro-Regionalism
Sharp distinctions are often made between different scales or levels of regionalism, resulting in a lack of understanding how macro-regions (e.g. European Union or SADC) and micro-regions (e.g. Øresund or Maputo corridor) hang together. We refer to this as 'the mic-mac problem', and argue that it constitutes one of the missing links in the study of regionalism as conducted so far. The paper takes stock of the relatively isolated studies that have dealt with the issue and constructs a conceptual and theoretical framework for the study of a phenomenon in search of theory. Apart from the possibility that micro-regionalism and macro-regionalism may not be related at all, three main relationships are identified: complementarity, competition and a more complex systemic approach. A number of theoretical approaches from various disciplines (political science, international political economy, economics, geography) are identified that give substance and explain the underlying dynamics of particular relationships between micro-regionalism and macro-regionalism. The paper concludes with a series of theoretically predicted mic-mac relationships with a corresponding set of hypotheses that can form the basis for further comparative empirical research.
Wolfgang Zank
Cooperation or Silent Rivalry? US Policy and the European Neighbourhood Policy in the Mediterranean – The Case of Egypt
For decades the US has had a hegemonic position in the Middle East. A key country in this respect has been Egypt. The Camp David Accord and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979 was brokered and buttressed by the US. So was the Oslo Process in the beginning of the 1990s. The European countries – before the Second World War the dominant powers in the region – were widely sidelined.
Egypt has been the second biggest receiver of US foreign aid (surpassed only by Israel), mainly military aid. This transformed the Egyptian army into a force which can operate together with the US army – as it happened in 1991 in Kuwait. But Egypt has also received very substantial economic aid. However, US Congress has turned sceptical to this kind of aid, perceived as being ineffective because Egypt has not reformed its economy sufficiently. Consequently, US economic aid has been scaled down considerably.
In May 2003 the Bush administration even proposed the establishment of a US Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) billed as part of the fight against terrorism. But the announcement has not been followed up in any systematic fashion, progress has been modest. In spite of explicit Egyptian interest in such an arrangement, negotiations remained inconclusive, to be formally put “on ice” in 2006. Allegedly as a response to a government crack-down on opposition groups, but more likely due to a protectionist turn in US Congress. This has proven to be a severe obstacle to an intensification of US-Egyptian transactions. Other sources of alienation have been the invasion of Iraq, the perceived biased US-position as regards Palestine, and the unilateral character of US aid policy. Apart from the on-going military cooperation, US diplomacy does not seem to have much leverage to influence Egyptian affairs.
In the meantime the last decades Europe has made a re-entry into the region. Stepwise the EU has been able to build up a huge comprehensive Internal Market, which exerts a strong gravitational pull to neighbouring countries.
Furthermore, EU policies became much more coherent, also on fields such as foreign and security policy. Beginning already in the 1970s, the EU has formulated a Mediterranean policy, aimed at comprehensive economic integration and the strengthening of cooperation in practically all fields. Major steps were the launching of the Barcelona Process in 1995 and the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2004, promising neighbouring countries a “stake in the Internal Market”. Relations became based on new Association Agreement, in the case of Egypt signed in 2001 and in force since 2004. The agreement will establish mutual free trade in manufactured goods within 12 years, but also many other forms of cooperation and assistance on practically all fields were agreed upon, for instance regulatory adaptation to the EU. This long-termed and comprehensive cooperation agenda makes a marked difference to US policy. Cooperation with the EU has provided tangible benefits. For instance, EU-Egyptian trade has expanded substantially. Furthermore, the EU positions on international relations, aiming at establishing binding multilateral rules, finds much more resonance on the Egyptian side than the US approach, often perceived as being arbitrary.
Are the US and the EU rivals? Both favour a free-trade and pro-democracy approach. The US is comparatively hampered due to the protectionism in US-congress, but EU and US do not in principle work against each other. However, if current trends will go on, the US will experience a decline of relative influence. Countries such as Egypt seem to be set on a course to becoming to a large extent integrated into EU’s Internal Market, with many regulatory and administrative adaptations, increasing transaction in many fields and presumably further convergence of views.
Steen Fryba Christensen
Argentina and Brazil's relations to the EU
The strategic partnership of Argentina and Brazil is at the core of the Mercosur regionalist scheme and it is of essential importance to regionalism at the continental level of South America in Unasur.
In 1995, the EU and Mercosur signed a framework agreement and in 1999 they agreed to work towards an agreement of bi-regional association. This idea has not progressed much since 2004, while a new "Strategic Partnership" between the EU and Brazil was agreed in 2007.
The paper focuses on the background for this new development and what it means for Argentina's and Brazil's relations to the EU. A number of questions are addressed such as, "is the strategic partnership between the EU and Brazil really strategic to the EU and to Brazil?" and "what influence, if any, does this strategic partnership have on EU-Mercosur relations".
Roberto Castaldi
The relationship of the European communities (and then Union) with EFTA and the Council of Europe
The issue of European unity was discussed after WWI but actually entered the political agenda after WWII. There were competing theories and visions about European unity, both with regards to the institutional framework envisaged, and about the strategy to create it. All main grand theories – realism-intergovernmentalism, neo-functionalism and federalism - actually started as normative visions and revolve around the issues of what are the European Communities and then Union, what can/should it become, how can the goal be achieved, by what dynamics, and by what actors. With the historical unfolding of the process they all had to deal with the reality of the process which challenged some of their main tenets, bringing about successive phases of theoretical revision for all theories.
The first fundamental divide regards to what is unity and what division. Federalism and neo-functionalism consider unity the ability to decide and act together. Therefore they put emphasis on the powers endowed to supranational institutions and on their decision-making procedures. Realism-Intergovernmentalism considers national sovereignty as an attribute which the nation-state will never renounce, and therefore unity is provided by the greatest possible number of states deciding to cooperate together. All visions were to a certain extent put in practice at the beginning of the process.
The Council of Europe represented the realist form of unity. It had very limited competences and power, and is definitely not the core of the European unification process. The European Coal and Steel Community was a fundamentally neo-functional form of European unity. The proposed European Defence Community and the linked European Political Community - whose Treaty-Constitution was to be drafted by a parliamentary assembly called Ad Hoc Assembly not to use the word constituent assembly - was essentially an attempt to build a federalist form of European unity.
There are several reasons why all were tried at the beginning. In this abstract it will suffice to propose a conceptual scheme to analyse the unification process which will be used to explain the beginning of the process and its later developments: crisis-initiative-leadership. For a decision advancing the unification process to be taken these three conditions must be present. For crisis I intend a supranational problem which cannot be solved by any European nation-state acting alone, and socially perceived, so that it remains high on the political agenda. The crisis constitute a catalyst for a decision, and it essentially determines the area or sector in which an integrative proposal can be successfully proposed. The initiative is the proposal of a solution to the crisis via an advancement of the unification process – which implies a transfer of competences and/or of powers to the European level. This role has historically often been played by committed individuals and their supporting groups – such as Monnet and the Action Committee for the United States of Europe or Spinelli and the federalist organizations. Leadership can be provided only by formal actors such as national governments – prime ministers and/or foreign ministers – and/or European institutions, such as the Commission or the Parliament.
Depending on the intensity and area of the crisis different opportunity were available for the strategies proposed by the different theories. For several specific reasons, the neo-functionalist initiative proposed by the Schuman Declaration was the only successful one. This proposed a limited unity, but still unity. It spelt the beginning of the unification process and deeply influenced its later development through path-dependence. On the one hand it provided the basic institutional design for the following communities. On the other it shaped the way European unity is conceived by the political class, the intellectual elites, mass media and public opinion. All this helped similar gradualist ideas to be taken up when a new crisis arose, notwithstanding the availability of other integrative ideas, even in areas where gradualism implied higher costs – such as monetary union.
The success of neo-functionalism, i.e. a vision of limited unity also determined the path of the alternative integrative scheme. The European Coal and Steel Community was built on the precondition of a willingness to devolve parts of sovereignty to the supranational institution, and explicitly proposed by the Schuman Declaration, as “the first step towards a European federation”. The British rejection of this precondition, together with the success of the ECSC and then of the European Economic Community was at the basis of the birth of the European Free Trade Area. EFTA institutional weakness compared to the EEC contributed to its poor economic performance. This eventually brought most of its members, starting with Britain, to seek entrance into the EEC.
EFTA was devised as an integrative scheme alternative, and thus implicitly opposed, to the EEC. It failed. The European Communities were born earlier, and their policy towards both the Council of Europe and EFTA was essentially of benign neglect. The economic performance of the EEC was enough to make it a catalyst and a core of European unification, de facto emptying EFTA of much of its significance. Eventually most EFTA members joined the EU and the others found with it an agreement to create the European Economic Space, de facto joining the Single Market.
The pre-federal character of the ECSC institutional framework had a fundamental impact on its ability to cope with following crisis and ensuring higher economic performances than alternative integrative scheme. An analysis of the various crises which brought about new integrative decisions and the consequent enlargement of the competences, the powers, and the members of the European Communities and then Union helps to identify a wide range of important actors at political and economic level, and also the importance of path-dependence in the development of the unification process.
Li Xing and Zhang Shengjun
The article argues that regionalism in East Asia since the end of the Cold War has been largely shaped by the interactions of China-US relations, influencing and determining the development and transformation of economic and political cooperation and integration in the region. The paper intends to offer a framework of understanding the historical inter-connections between China-US relations in East Asia during different periods and their dynamic nexus with the evolution of regional integration process. The theoretical reflection of the paper posits that the neo-functionalism theory, which is largely generated and shaped by the historical evolution of the EU political project, cannot be applied as an overall conceptual framework in understanding regionalism in East Asia. Conventional theories of international relations with a central logic embedded in power rivalry, realism, geopolitics, political economy, balance of power, etc, still have a deterministic effect East Asia in defining “functions”, influencing the process and determining the outcome.