Resistance to EU integration? Norm collision in the coordination of development aid

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the contemporary foreign policy debate about how norms influence policymakers’ behaviour. Hypotheses of norm-driven action are frequently dismissed when norms are inconsistently followed. However, values may collide, which might provide an explanation for such apparent inconsistencies. Drawing on recent constructivist literature on the contestation of norms, I discuss why integration in EU development policy was resisted. I ask if resistance was due to the wish to maintain national control over policies or if the so-called like-minded countries’ resistance was due to a conflict of normative concerns regarding how to best achieve coordination. The study contributes by developing an empirically relevant hypothesis of norm collision which lends itself well for theoretical generalisation. In addition, the article provides new empirical knowledge about EU development policy by identifying the tension between securing country ownership and donor involvement as a crucial factor contributing to resistance to EU integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Norm collision
• EU development policy
• like-minded countries
• constructivism
• donor coordination
• norm contestation

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the GLOBUS workshop on trade, development and global justice 30 May 2017 in Johannesburg and the EISA Conference 30 September 2017 in Barcelona. I thank the participants in these workshops for their comments. Also, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and extend a particular thanks to Helene Sjursen for excellent advice and comments on several drafts of this article. This article is part of the EuroDiv project at ARENA, a research project financed by the Research Council of Norway’s research initiative ‘Europe in Transition’ (EUROPA).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In line with Hill and Smith (2005, 8) I define the EU as ‘a set of international institutions and arrangements within which the interests and preferences of member states and other actors can be coordinated for international purposes’.

2. See two special issues which discuss resistance to integration in development (Bodenstein, Faust, and Furness 2017; Orbie and Carbone 2016) as well as the special issue on the Union’s Policy Coherence for Development (Carbone 2008).

3. The like-minded are Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Netherlands. They are also known as the Nordic+ Group (including Norway and Canada). Scholars usually make a distinction between the like-minded and a group of southern member states (the founding members except the Netherlands and the new member states (ms)), whom I will refer to as the southern ms (Orbie and Lightfoot 2017). Some scholars use a three-fold distinction between the like-minded, the clubmed (southern ms, including France, and new ms) and the ‘fence-sitters’, that is, Belgium and Austria (sometimes Ireland). I use the distinction between the like-minded and the southern ms since that was the two main groupings during the negotiations of the EU’s donor coordination initiative. See also Carbone (2007).

4. Other common hypotheses for resistance to integration in the field of development is the existence of competing donor identities (Delputte and Orbie 2014) and a general resistance to more supranational legislation. See below for a discussion of existing hypotheses.

5. Similar hypotheses assuming that countries resist EU integration because they consider their own policy to be ‘better’ or because of a principled concern for national sovereignty could also be captured by such an identity conception.

6. FOI requests were conducted by e-mail to the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) 19.08.2016 (id: F2016–258) and Denmark’s development cooperation programme (Danida) 22.09.2016 (id: 2016–39,406/ 1,541,946).

7. Interviewees were EU and member state representatives to CODEV in 2006 and 2007, which is the period when the code of conduct was negotiated as well as aid effectiveness staff from the capitals. Their institutional affiliation reflects the position they held when working with the code of conduct and not the position they held when interviewed. See a list of interviewees at the end of the article.