Modes of external governance: a cross-national and cross-sectoral comparison

Abstract

Contrary to the vast majority of studies that try to characterize EU external governance by looking at the macro-structures of association relations, our comparative analysis shows that overarching foreign policy initiatives such as the EEA, Swiss–EU bilateralism or the ENP have little impact on the modes in which the EU seeks to expand its policy boundaries in individual sectors. In contrast, modes of external governance follow sectoral dynamics which are astonishingly stable across countries. These findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies in projecting governance modes from the internal to the external constellation, and question the capacity to steer these functionalist patterns of external governance through rationally planned foreign policy initiatives.

Keywords:

• Composite policy
• environment policy
• European neighbourhood policy
• external governance
• foreign policy
• justice and home affairs
• Norway
• research policy
• Switzerland
• transport policy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was written in the context of the project ‘Inside out. New modes of governance in relations with non-member states’ within the NEWGOV consortium. Funding under EU contract no. CIT1-CT-2004-506392 is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank our interview partners for sharing their insights with us as well as the participants of the ‘EU external governance’ workshop in Lucerne and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of the text.

Notes

The ENP countries are Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia and Ukraine.

For reasons of space, we do not deal with the multilateral dimension of association policies (e.g. the Barcelona process and the newly launched Union for the Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership). These multilateral initiatives supplement the bilateral relationships with the EU fora regrouping the neighbouring regions but do not open additional access to EU institutions.

This information is based on a review of subcommittee documents as well as interviews with participants.

In this section, we do not deal with the special case of Israel which, although part of the ENP, has many specific bilateral arrangements at the sectoral level.

Interviews EU 44–47; Norway 2, 4; Switzerland 8, 10.

Interview Norway 2.

Interview Morocco 2.

Switzerland has only concluded a bilateral agreement on association to the European Environmental Agency. This covers participation in exchange of information, but no obligations of legal approximation.

Interviews EU 43; Norway 2,3; Switzerland 2, 4.

Interviews Switzerland 12–16.

For instance, the TREN-Sub Committees under the ENP are in charge of co-operation in transport, research, the environment and energy questions. It is no surprise that agendas are overloaded and many questions are simply not discussed at this level.