Determinants of regional leadership: is the European Union a leading regional actor in peace and security?

Abstract

This article introduces a conceptualization of regional leadership, including an analytical framework where regional leadership is considered to be based on three necessary ‘determinants’. Regional leadership is defined as a concept used to describe the power of an actor to influence certain aspects of the international relations and/or the internal functioning of an actor in its neighbourhood. The aforementioned necessary determinants are: (i) the actor’s willingness to act as a leader; (ii) the actor’s capacity to act as a leader and (iii) the acceptance of the leadership actions by followers and external actors. Each of these determinants will be applied to the European Union (EU) in the area of peace and security to assess whether the EU is a regional leader in this domain.

Keywords:

• regional leadership
• willingness, capacity and acceptance
• EU
• peace and security

Notes

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ and in no way reflect the views of the United Nations. This research acknowledges the support of the FP7 large-scale integrated research project GR:EEN – Global Re-ordering: Evolution through European Networks European Commission Project Number: 266809.

1. For the study of regions, see for instance: Fawcett and Hurrell (1995), Hettne, Inotai, and Sunkel (1999) and Van Langenhove (2011). Concerning leadership, much of the literature has focused on global hegemonic exercise of leadership, often with a bias toward the USA as exemplified by the work of Kindleberger (1981) who has argued that a single leader is necessary for the provision of the public good of international stability (cf. Hegemonic Stability Theory).

2. For a discussion of the regional/global actorness of the EU, see for instance: Söderbaum and Van Langenhove (2006), Van Langenhove and Costea (2007) and Van Langenhove and Marchesi (2008).

3. Although actors such as international institutions, non-governmental organizations and transnational corporations might have a relatively influential role at the regional and even at the global level, they are not (yet) in the same league as states in terms of relative power. We however argue that, next to states, some ROs can increasingly be considered very influential regional actors.

4. The region-building argument is developed in detail in Van Langenhove (2011).

5. Chayes and Chayes (1994, 65) are cited by Hurrell (2002, 143) who has defined norms as ‘a broad class of prescriptive statements – rules, standards, principles, and so forth – both procedural and substantive’ that are ‘prescriptions for action in situations of choice, carrying a sense of obligation, a sense that they ought to be followed’.

6. Contrary to transactional leadership where the request is rather linked to self-focused concerns, transformational leadership ‘occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality’ (Burns 1978, 20). Transformational leadership is concerned with values, emotions, ethics, standards and long-term goals. It involves a form of influence that moves followers to do more than is expected from them (Northouse 2010, 171).

7. See Lake (1993) for further information on the theory of hegemonic stability.

8. Most contemporary available power indices use this information (see for example the Correlates of War Project) (Baldwin 2002, 181).

9. The term ‘secondary powers’ is here used as a synonym for ‘regional followers’. Secondary powers are states or regional organisations in the regional hierarchy of the regional leader which are potential cooperation partners for external powers and which can claim regional leadership in certain issues beyond the region (Flemes and Wojczewski 2010, 6).