Still Rooted in Maastricht: EU External Relations as a ‘Third-generation Hybrid’

Abstract

This article argues that EU external relations since the Maastricht Treaty have constituted the Union as a hybrid international actor, reflecting a number of tensions built into the roots of the treaty. These tensions — reflected in the international roles and status of the EU — arise from the logics expressed in institutions and policies, and the ways in which those logics interact with each other when confronted with situations in which diplomatic, economic and security concerns are entangled. The result is that the EU has an ambiguous relationship to issues of European and world order. Since Maastricht, successive grafts in treaties and other forms have added elements to the EU’s external relations, but have not resolved the basic issues and ambiguities attending hybridity. The article explores these issues and ambiguities and relates them to four key roles claimed by the EU in the world arena: those of market actor, security actor, diplomatic actor and normative actor.

Key words:

• European Union
• Maastricht
• external relations
• hybridity

Notes

1. This basic dictionary definition of hybridity is adopted for the purposes of the argument here, but it should be noted that there is a significant literature within Comparative Politics on the features and dynamics of hybrid regimes. See for example Diamond (2002), Wigell (2008), Brownlee (2009), Bogaards (2009), Molino (2009) and Levitsky and Way (2010). More recently, this set of approaches has been extended into consideration of issues such as peace-building: see for example the special issue of Global Governance (18(1), 2012) and particularly the articles by Jarstad and Belloni (2012) and Belloni (2012). The comparative politics literature focuses especially on the phenomenon of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ or ‘defective democracy’, where elements of democratic rule such as elections co-exist with a wider authoritarian structure; the peace-building literature focuses especially on related issues of ‘hybrid peace governance’ in political orders where contrary elements coexist and the possibility of violence is high. These approaches also raise the issue of stability — are such regimes or orders in transition, or can they be stable and persist for extended periods? The latter question will be examined with respect to the EU’s external relations in the Conclusion to this article, since it is clearly significant to the argument advanced here.