EU immigration policies have incrementally evolved from a purely intergovernmental to a deeply integrated EU policy area. In practice, EU immigration policies and EU secondary legislation still leave significant discretion to the Member States, as witnessed by key developments in the various subfields of immigration policies—including policies on border protection, return and irregular migration, as well as labor migration and family migration policies. The key academic debates on EU immigration policies have mainly focused on explaining the decision-making processes behind the adoption of EU policies as well as their impact on national policies. While scholars find that these EU policies have led to liberalizations in the areas of family migration or labor migration, the irregular migration and border policies of the EU have gradually produced more restrictive outcomes. Policy liberalizations are usually based on the impact of EU institutions, which tend to have more liberal positions than Member States. Lowest common denominator output at the EU level, such as on the Blue Card Directive, is usually due to a resistance of individual Member States. With deeper integration of the policy area over time and qualified majority voting, however, resistant minorities have been increasingly outvoted. The stronger politicization of some areas of immigration, such as family migration, has also led the European Commission to curb its legislative proposals, as it would be much harder to adopt a piece of legislation today (2019) that provides adequate protection standards.
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Immigration Policy and European Union Politics
Natascha Zaun and Christof Roos
Article
Migrants and Refugees in Africa
Aderanti Adepoju
Intraregional migration of cross-border workers, unskilled and temporary contract workers, undocumented migrants, highly skilled professionals, and refugees characterize the migration landscape in Africa and is reflected in distinctive and changing configurations in the different subregions: labor migration in the west and central areas, movement of refugees in the eastern and southern areas, and migration of skilled professionals from west and east to southern Africa. Migrants and refugees in Africa share a number of common features: both are caused in large part by a set of interrelated factors—conflicts, underdevelopment, poor governance, and economic and social deprivation—and movements are confined largely to the continent. Youth unemployment, a major trigger for irregular migration, together with emigration of skilled professionals, pose serious challenges for many countries; remittances from the diaspora, though a lifeline for poor families left behind, do not compensate for the loss of skills. The refugee situation is highly dynamic and fluid. The sheer numbers of refugees in Africa, their composition, and the challenges they face and the limited success obtained thus far in the search for a permanent solution require sustained efforts in what is regarded an African problem requiring essentially an African solution.
Article
Infectious Disease as a Foreign Policy Threat
Rebecca Katz, Erin Sorrell, and Claire Standley
The last 30 years have seen the global consequences of newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, starting with the international spread of HIV/AIDS, the emergence of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers, SARS, MERS, novel influenza viruses, and most recently, the global spread of Zika. The impact of tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases on society are now better understood, including how these diseases influence the social, economic, and political environment in a nation. Despite international treaties and norms, the specter of intentional use of infectious disease remains present, particularly as technological barriers to access are reduced. The reality is that infectious diseases not only impact population health, but also have clear consequences for international security and foreign policy.
Foreign policy has been used to coordinate response to infectious disease events and to advance population health around the world. Conversely, collaboration on infectious disease prevention, preparedness, and response has been used strategically by nations to advance diplomacy and improve foreign relations. Both approaches have become integral to foreign policy, and this chapter provides examples to elucidate how health and foreign policy have become intertwined and used with different levels of effectiveness by governments around the world. As the scope of this topic is extensive, this article primarily draws from U.S. examples for brevity’s sake, while acknowledging the truly global nature of the dynamic between infectious diseases and foreign policy, and noting that the interplay between them will vary between countries and regions.
In 2014, U.S. President Barak Obama called upon global partners to, “change our mindsets and start thinking about biological threats as the security threats that they are—in addition to being humanitarian threats and economic threats. We have to bring the same level of commitment and focus to these challenges as we do when meeting around more traditional security issues”. With world leaders increasingly identifying disease as threats to security and economic stability, we are observing infectious diseases—like no other time in history—becoming an integral component of foreign policy.
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Migration Causes, Patterns, and Consequences: Contributions of Location Networks
Justin Schon
The interdisciplinary field of migration studies is broadly interested in the causes, patterns, and consequences of migration. Much of this work, united under the umbrella of the “new economics of migration” research program, argues that personal networks within and across households drive a wide variety of migration-related actions. Findings from this micro-level research have been extremely valuable, but it has struggled to develop generalizable lessons and aggregate into macro-level and meso-level insights. In addition, at group, region, and country levels, existing work is often limited by only considering migration total inflows and/or total outflows. This focus misses many critical features of migration. Using location networks, network measures such as preferential attachment, preferential disattachment, transitivity, betweenness centrality, and homophily provide valuable information about migration cascades and transit migration. Some insights from migration research tidily aggregate from personal networks up to location networks, whereas other insights uniquely originate from examining location networks.
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Immigration and Foreign Policy
Anna Oltman and Jonathan Renshon
Immigration has taken on renewed prominence in both domestic and international politics. Typical approaches to this pressing theoretical and policy problem, however, focus on either domestic politics (e.g., filling labor needs and integrating migrants into society) or international relations (e.g., international law or norms regarding the treatment of migrants). In this sense, work on immigration has coalesced around two ways of seeing this problem, one micro, one macro, and neither one related to foreign policy. This is particularly unfortunate given that a foreign policy approach—grounded in “mid-range theory,” an “actor-specific” approach, and a sensitivity to factors both above and below the state level—has the potential to add a great deal to our understanding of immigration in IR. A review of the literature reveals two approaches to immigration in IR. The first, largely grounded in the methods and assumptions of political economy, focuses on the “pull” or demand factors that incentivize and regulate migration to a receiving country. The second focuses on “push” factors that drive people from their homelands. This latter approach concentrates on displaced populations, human rights norms, and institutions and cooperation among states. Both approaches contribute a great deal, but are, unfortunately, isolated from each other: an outcome that is at least partly attributable to an arbitrary and politically expedient distinction between “refugees” and “ economic migrants” that countries found it in their interests to make in the aftermath of World War II.
This discussion of immigration and foreign policy thus begins by surveying the theoretical and empirical landscape and providing a framework with which to understand contributions thus far. The following section will highlight three major themes emerging in an innovative new body of research. Fundamentally, these themes revolve around integration: whether it is the integration of security into immigration studies (typically dominated by an economics-based approach), of identity concerns into the public’s immigration preferences, or a focus on the multiple actors located in between the domestic public and international regimes. Suggestions for future research will conclude our discussion.
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The EU Migration Crisis: A Crisis Analysis Case Study
Peter Slominski
The European Union (EU) migration crisis has been part and parcel of a conglomerate of crises that have affected the EU since the late 2000s, as have the financial and sovereign debt crisis, “Brexit,” the Russia–Ukraine conflict, as well as tensions within transatlantic relations. Scholarship on the EU has devoted much attention in assessing what the migration crisis means for EU integration at large. In particular, EU scholars are interested why the migration crisis has led to political gridlock and a renationalization of border controls rather than a deepening of integration. While they differ in their explanations, these explanations shed light on different aspects of the crisis and are far from mutually exclusive.
Scholars who are more interested in the area of EU Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) largely agree with EU theorists that the field suffers from an incomplete governance design, the dominance of EU member states, and weak supranational capacities. Their analysis also focuses on intra-EU dynamics but offers a more nuanced empirical assessment of relevant EU institutions and decision-making in the course of managing the migration crisis. This growing body of research produces valuable insights and largely confirms existing scholarship, including that on the growing securitization and externalization of EU asylum and migration policy. The EU’s understanding as a norm-based power is particularly challenged by the migratory movements in the wake of the crisis. A small but growing scholarship analyses how the EU is balancing its non-entrée policy with its legal obligation, and what kind of governance arrangements result from that.
While this scholarship has enriched our understanding of the EU migration crisis, it has not generated a major refinement of the standard approaches of EU theorists and JHA scholars. To further enrich the literature on the migration crisis, scholars should go beyond studying the dynamics of EU decision-making and the role of EU institutions. Such an approach should engage more systematically with international actors and institutions that have the capacity to influence EU migration policy. At the same time, global phenomena such as war, poverty, or climate change should also be taken into account in assessing the EU’s room for maneuver in handling migratory pressures. Future research on the migration crisis as well as on migration challenges should thus not only connect with other subfields of political science, such as policy analysis or international relations, but also open up to other disciplines such as law, demography, or environmental studies.
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Switzerland and European Integration
Clive H. Church
Despite its economic importance, Switzerland is surprisingly little studied. Hence it can be misunderstood. For many, it seems to have a successful relationship with the European Union (EU). In reality, Europe has become a problematic issue for the Swiss. Swiss policy has been reactive and largely driven by a conflict between pragmatic Swiss, inspired by traditional views of the needs of a neutral and federal country, and a growing body of populist Europhobes. The former are doubtful about the “European idea” but know that a price has to be paid for vital economic advantages. The latter detest the EU and want little involvement with it, regarding identity and political independence as more important than economic gains. The conflict between the two views can be bitter, and destabilizing.
Because of this, the key aim of Swiss policy has been to achieve some kind of third way, combining non-membership with deep economic integration. Achieving this has become increasingly difficult despite the country’s central geographical and cultural position. This means transport links and population movements are important elements in Swiss relationships with the EU, alongside its economic and legislative involvement. Yet, at the same time, Switzerland has preserved a notable detachment from Europe’s political institutions.
Swiss relations with the EU have been evolving since 1945. The present difficulties are merely the latest, as well as perhaps the most challenging, phase of a long-standing attempt at integrating Europe. There have been five phases in Swiss postwar relations with European integration. Initially, there was considerable reluctance to get involved, but, after some hesitation, the country entered the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and secured a free trade deal with the European Community (EC). This worked well, bringing Switzerland into what the Swiss liked to see as quasi-membership.
This began to change in the mid-1980s, when Swiss needs and EC change led to a second phase, of seeking a deeper relationship. This led to the European Economic Area (EEA) negotiations and, when this was judged to be insufficient by the government, to a membership application. The defeat of the EEA proposal on December 6, 1992, by an emerging populist force unleashed increasing contestation over Europe. It also forced the country into a third phase of seeking bilateral makeweights for exclusion from the EEA. By the early years of the new century, this led to the present situation, which is more complicated than is often realized and is driven by indirect Europeanization. At the same time, the bilateral approach became both increasingly popular with a majority and sometimes contested on the right.
Moreover, a fourth phase saw bilateralism increasingly contested by the EU as well as by the Right, causing a long, drawn-out impasse. This was partly because the “Stop Mass Migration” initiative of February 9, 2014, and the Limitation Initiative of September 27, 2020, both threatened to undermine the existing bilaterals. The first was bypassed by a parliamentary implementing bill and the second was roundly defeated in 2017. Then, the country faced a new decision over whether to ratify a proposed Institutional Framework Agreement designed to regularize its sprawling range of EU deals. The sudden rejection of this agreement by the Swiss government on May 26, 2021, has propelled Switzerland into a fifth phase of great uncertainty, during which it is likely that it will rethink the whole range of its possible policy options on Europe, which could involve challenging choices and possible political conflicts and realignments at home.
Article
Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies
Christopher Hill
Scholarship on the domestic sources of foreign policy has focused on parties, interest groups, and a generalized notion of public opinion, but it has neglected the societal dimension. This is a mistake given the multiethnic and multinational makeup of many of the world’s states. The focus here is on those European states which imagined themselves settled in the aftermath of war, empire, and the Cold War, yet now find themselves surprised by the new challenges of migration and multiculturality—meaning the growth in ethnocultural diversity as a form of everyday life. These states have adopted varying strategies—or none—in order to address the problems which arise, but did not at first realize the extent to which the domestic realm had become inextricably entangled with external relations—whether through the transnational activities of diasporas or through blowback from their own foreign policies in regions of the world where some of their minority communities have intimate connections.
The subject of foreign policy and multicultural societies is thus a new but important one, politically as well as intellectually. To approach it we need both a grounding in foreign policy analysis and an understanding of the debates in political theory and sociology about multiculturalism, given that practitioners have increasingly to face inwards as much as outwards and that the distinction between the external and “homeland” dimensions of security is now blurred. Although the world has not fallen into a simple “clash of civilizations,” the challenges of managing diversity certainly now present themselves in a set of interlinked levels, crossing national boundaries and therefore significantly changing the context of foreign policy and its making.
Article
Forced Migration and Political Violence
Kerstin Fisk
There has been renewed academic interest in the security impacts of forced migration since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011 generated more than 5 million refugees, most of whom fled to neighboring countries and to Europe. Researchers are, for instance, increasingly working to identify how the type, severity, and perpetrator of political violence affect patterns of displacement, such as whether forced migrants cross borders or remain in their home country. Though much of the discussion in the security studies context continues to center on forced migration flows as a conduit for civil war, international terrorism, and refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) as perpetrators, scholars also have begun to focus attention on the ways in which refugees and the internally displaced can become the targets of political violence in the receiving state. Following the path of earlier qualitative research recognizing that displaced populations rarely become militarized, studies of a more quantitative orientation are now working to isolate the conditions under which forced migration leads to varying forms of political violence. Another important and growing area of focus is on how resettlement of the displaced affects the dynamics of violence in the origin country, including the potential for conflict recurrence. Efforts to study security impacts of forced migration more systematically have increased alongside the availability of new data and more diverse analytical tools and methods. Still, many important dimensions of the forced migration–conflict connection remain to be explored, and innovative research as well as new data collection efforts are necessary. Integrating insights from other fields, including economics, psychology, and sociology, and returning to the task of theory-building based on case-study research offer a promising path forward.
Article
Citizenship of the European Union
Willem Maas
Citizenship is usually conceptualized as a unitary and exclusive relationship between an individual and a sovereign state; yet the European Union (EU) has developed the most advanced form of contemporary supranational citizenship. Citizenship of the European Union guarantees EU citizens and most members of their families the right to move, live, and work across the territory of the EU. It also guarantees the right to vote in local and European elections in the member state of residence, the right to consular protection outside the EU when the member state of nationality is not represented, the right to access documents or petition Parliament or the Ombudsman in any of the official languages, and the right to be treated free from nationality-based discrimination. Though on the political agenda since the postwar origins of European integration, EU citizenship was not formalized into EU law until the Maastricht Treaty. Since then, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has declared that “EU Citizenship is destined to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member States” and there are ongoing discussions about the relationship between EU and member state citizenship. In terms of identity, increasing numbers of Europeans see themselves as citizens of the EU, and questions of citizenship are at the heart of debates about the nature of European integration.
Article
Malta and the European Union
Roderick Pace
Fifteen years ago Malta joined the European Union (EU) and four years later in 2008 it joined the Economic and Monetary Union. Throughout this period its economy performed exceptionally well, to the extent that it managed to escape the worse ravages of the Great Recession. In general, the majority of the Maltese people support EU membership. Rapid economic growth has produced a general “feel good” sentiment, which is not, however, shared by everyone.
The Maltese political system has been dominated for many years by two parties, the Partit Nazzjonalista and the Labour Party, the only ones to elect candidates to the national parliament since 1966. In 2003, the Labour Party, which had opposed EU membership for many years, changed its policy. This brought the curtain down on parliamentary Euroscepticism in the country. In the meantime, economic success has meant that populist small parties have not been able to gain much traction with the electorate, and the established political parties were not dethroned by populist upsurge as happened in most of the rest of southern Europe. Growth has not led only to benefits, however. The construction sector is putting pressure to bear on scarce land resources, and the influx of foreign labor and a growing demand for housing have inflated rents and housing prices, often beyond the reach of lower income households. Unemployment stands at a low 3.8%, but more people are close to the poverty line. Malta is failing on some of the national targets of the Europe 2020 strategy. These challenges will have to be watched more closely in the years to come should this rate of growth be maintained.
Article
Hurricane Maria: Disaster Response in Puerto Rico
Havidán Rodriguez and Marie T. Mora
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico with great ferocity. The impact and outcomes of this event were devastating for the population of over three million American citizens. The electrical grid was decimated, the transportation infrastructure was significantly impacted, and an already deteriorating healthcare system was further eroded. Furthermore, the local, islandwide, and especially the federal response to Hurricane Maria failed to meet the emerging and critical needs of those impacted by the catastrophic event and left island residents and isolated communities on their own. Official estimates placed the death toll close to 3,000. Hurricane Maria also accelerated the largest migratory movement in Puerto Rico’s history from the island to the continental United States and decimated an already weak and deteriorating economy after more than a decade of a severe economic crisis. Recovery efforts remained slow in many parts of the island, and the social, economic, and healthcare impacts of the hurricane will be felt for decades to come.
The disaster research literature shows the disasters are not “natural,” but socially constructed or produced events. Indeed, a number of preexisting factors contributed to the disaster situation in Puerto Rico, including the severe economic crisis, which was also reflected in high levels of unemployment and poverty; the island’s complicated relationship with the U.S. mainland; massive net outmigration; and a frail and deteriorating healthcare system. Furthermore, the political relationship between Puerto Rico and the mainland affected federal-level disaster response and recovery efforts after Hurricane Maria.
Article
Greece and the European Union
Spyros Blavoukos
Based on negative publicity related to the financial turmoil and the migration crisis one could perhaps classify Greece as a problematic EU partner. This contribution argues that this static approach does not fully describe the complexity of EU-Greece relations. Looking at the historical evolution of this relationship from a more macroscopic point of view it identifies periods of convergence and divergence. It reinstates the limits of the European adjustment pressures in inducing modernization and accounts for the crises episodes by reference to some idiosyncratic features of the domestic sociopolitical contestation. The contribution discusses the valuable lessons learned by the handling of the crises both for Greece and the EU. It stresses that the Greek public disenchantment with the EU that is inexorably linked with the extreme societal burden of the adjustment process is not an isolated phenomenon. Like in many other EU countries, much of the criticism is directed toward the current scope and direction of European integration rather than on the merits and value of the integration venture per se. What is urgently required for the whole European demos is a new “grand bargain” that will provide the necessary vision for the years to come. This will condition the future evolution of the EU-Greece relationship.
Article
LGBTQ Migration Politics
Erin Mayo-Adam
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) migration is significantly understudied in the field of political science. The discipline has historically siloed the study of minority communities into different subcategories that have very little intellectual crossover. LGBTQ experiences are mostly absent in scholarship on migration, while scholarship on LGBTQ people tends to focus on white lesbian and gay citizens. As a result, there is a gap in political science scholarship when it comes to intersectionally marginalized people like LGBTQ immigrants. However, there is a burgeoning, interdisciplinary field that examines the politics of queer migration and spans a multitude of humanities and social science fields, including ethnic studies, American studies, history, anthropology, and sociology.
Like other humanities and social science fields, political science scholars should engage more directly with the interdisciplinary study of queer migration politics. Queer migration research encompasses overlapping subject areas that include studies on migration and gender and sexuality norms; queer complicities and migration; and queer migration and political movement formation. Scholars who study the politics of queer migration analyze how anti-normative sexualities and gender identities are constituted through migration processes and institutions. Thus, queer migration politics research is a sprawling field with studies that range from critiques that reveal how contemporary queer asylum seekers are marginalized and criminalized by the immigration state apparatus to historical studies that contemplate the formation of anti-normative identities in 19th-century Gold Rush migrations. Political science research can more actively engage in this area of interdisciplinary study by bringing queer migration studies concepts like homonationalism and homonormativity into transnational and comparative politics research, by expanding scholarship on prisons and mass incarceration to include the experiences of queer and trans migrants of color in immigration detention, and by examining how queer complicities are at work in LGBTQ social movement politics.
Article
Citizenship Law as the Foundation for Political Participation in Africa
Bronwen Manby
The question of membership and belonging is widely recognized to have been at the root of many political crises in Africa since independence. The legal frameworks for citizenship were largely inherited from the colonial powers and still show strong affinities across colonial legal traditions. However, most African states have enacted significant amendments to citizenship laws since independence, as they have grappled with issues of membership, aiming to include or exclude certain groups. Substantive provisions have diverged significantly in several countries from the original template. African states have shared global trends toward gender equality and acceptance of dual citizenship. In relation to acquisition of citizenship based on birth in the territory (jus soli) or based on descent (jus sanguinis), there has been less convergence. In all countries, naturalization is inaccessible to all but a few. Manipulation of citizenship law for political purposes has been common, as political opponents have at times been accused of being non-citizens as a way of excluding them from office, or groups of people have been denied recognition of citizenship as a means of disenfranchisement. Moreover, even in states where a substantial proportion of residents lack identity documents, it seems that the rules on citizenship established by law have themselves had an impact on political developments.
The citizenship status of many thousands of people living in different countries across Africa remains unclear, in a context where many citizens and non-citizens lack any identity documentation that records their citizenship. The content of the law is arguably therefore less influential than in some other regions. A rapid development in identification systems and the increasing requirement to show identity documents to access services, however, is likely to increase the importance of citizenship law.
In response to these challenges, the African continental institutions have developed, through standard setting and in decisions on individual cases, a continental normative framework that both borrows from and leads international law in the same field.
Article
Islam and Islamic Studies in Scandinavia
Susanne Olsson and Simon Sorgenfrei
Islam in the Scandinavian countries—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—has a long history. There are evidences of contacts between Scandinavia and the Muslim world at least since the Middle Ages. The presence of Muslims in Scandinavia is however of a later date and more established from the 1950s, when immigrants arrived, mainly due to the needs in the labor markets; they successively established congregations and mosques, as they realized that they were to stay in their new countries. Following this period, Muslim migrants have arrived due to geopolitical factors, such as war, which have increased the number of Muslims and their presence and visibility in public space and public debate, which in turn has affected the media image of Islam and Muslims and influenced research. The research on Islam and Muslims has a long history in Scandinavia as well. With the increase of Muslim inhabitants in Scandinavian countries, scholarly interests have also related more to the present and to the study of their own Muslim populations, as well as case studies related to Islamophobia, media images, Muslims in the school systems and labor market, and specific incidents, such as the cartoon crisis and its aftermath.
Article
Justice and Home Affairs in the European Union
Florian Trauner and Ariadna Ripoll Servent
Justice and home affairs (JHA) is one of the most salient policy fields at European Union (EU) level. It deals with issues closely related to the sovereignty of member states including immigration, borders, and internal security. This article takes stock of the policy’s development and current academic debates. It argues that EU justice and home affairs is at a crossroads. Most EU actors underline the value added of European cooperation to tackle transnational threats such as terrorism and organized crime as well as the challenge of international migration. Indeed, the EU has increased its operational cooperation, data-sharing and legislative activities. The EU home affairs agencies, notably the European Police Office (Europol) and European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), have been substantially empowered. Yet JHA has also become a playing field for those attempting to politicize the European integration process. Therefore, recent years have seen major conflicts emerge that risk fragmenting the EU. These include controversies over the distribution of asylum seekers within the EU and the upholding of rule of law standards in some Eastern European states. Scholars have followed these developments with interest, contributing to a multifaceted and rich literature on aspects such as the dynamics of EU decision-making and the policy’s impact on the member states’ respect for fundamental rights and civil liberties. Promising avenues of further research include the implications of the politicization of the field and the consequences of ever more interconnected internal security databases and technologies.
Article
African Union and European Union Politics: The Veiled Account of Long-standing Interregional Relations
Christopher Changwe Nshimbi
Africa turned the corner of marginalization in international affairs at the beginning of the 21st century. The end of the Cold War and global shifts in power toward the end of the previous century were closely followed by “Africa rising.” This contrasted previous decades-long narratives of a hopeless, war-ravaged, and plague-ridden continent. The Africa rising mantra followed reforms implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s that improved institutional capacities and established African countries on firm business, economic, and political trajectories. This promised improved business environment, economic vitality, and positive democratic outlook.
Africa has thus become important to major powers. They court it for its support to govern challenges that necessitate international cooperation and to enhance the major powers’ influence in global institutions and on the world. Rising Asian economies such as China and India compete for Africa’s natural resources against traditional global powers like the European Union (EU).
The EU has long been economically and politically involved with Africa and has generally dominated these relations. Leading theories, discussions, and research that examine the historic, economic, and geopolitical factors at play in the evolution of African Union (AU)-EU relations suggest that elements of dependency are a calculated creation of colonialism and encounters that occurred between Africa and Europe before the advent of colonialism. Dependency continues to characterize these relations, as shown by formal AU-EU pacts. Decolonial scholars argue that the dependency is real, as Africa did not demolish colonial structures at independence. Some critical scholars further argue that the history of colonialism is also pertinent to the history of the EU in that the history of European integration was partly influenced by the history of colonialism. That is, the history of colonialism contributed to the political creation of the EU, and attempts by Western European countries to form a pan-European organization coincided with early 20th-century efforts to stabilize colonialism in Africa. The European countries could only efficiently exploit Africa by combining their political and economic capacities.
AU-EU relations face many challenges in the 21st century. Influence in the relations is predominately unidirectional, with the EU determining the terms of engagement even on issues peculiar to Africa or the AU and where the latter appears to have the upper hand. The challenges show that the AU and EU are interdependent, but the onus is on the AU to set priorities right and enhance capabilities for engaging the EU. This would be easier if the EU were not continuously devising ways to maintain its dominance in the “partnership.” An overarching challenge in the partnership, therefore, is finding common ground and leveling the playing field.
Article
Piracy and Maritime Security in Africa
Jatin Dua
In a seemingly virtual era, maritime commerce and shipping retain a central role in contemporary global capitalism. Approximately 90% of global imports and exports currently travel by sea on around 93,000 merchant vessels, carrying almost 6 billion tons of cargo. Oceanic mobility and long-distance networks of trade are made possible and sustained by the life and labor of over 1.25 million seafarers currently working at sea as well as regimes of global security and governance. Yet, this oceanic world and its role in shaping politics, sociality, and regulation remains, for the most part, obscured and hidden out of sight in everyday life. As one of the oldest perils at sea, maritime piracy is not only a daily threat to seafaring and global shipping but makes visible this oceanic world and the larger networks of security and regulation that govern maritime commerce.
In recent years, coastal Africa, specifically the waters off the coast of Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea, has seen an unprecedented rise in incidents of maritime piracy. The geopolitical and global trade importance of these areas has led to numerous national, regional, and international military and legal responses to combat this problem. While often seen as a seaborne symptom of failed states or criminality, maritime piracy has a more complex relationship with land- and sea-based governance. Occurring primarily in spaces that are politically fragmented but reasonably stable maritime piracy is better understood as a practice of extraction and claim making on mobility that emerges from deeper historical contexts and is linked to land-based economies and politics. Emphasizing maritime piracy in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea within these wider historical and geographic contexts highlights the imbrication of the political and economic in shaping the emergence and transformations of this practice. This is not to deny the violence that constitutes maritime piracy, but to locate piracy within larger processes of mobility, governance, and political economy on the African continent and beyond. In addition to impacting local communities, seafarers, and global shipping, maritime piracy is key to apprehending challenges to global governance from the vantage point of the world’s oceans.
Article
Liberal Intergovernmentalism
Andrew Moravcsik
Liberal Intergovernmentalism (LI) is the contemporary “baseline” social scientific and historiographic theory of regional integration—especially as regards the European Union. It rests on three basic assumptions, which in turn support a three-stage theoretical model of integration and the elaboration of numerous distinctive causal mechanisms. Considerable historical and social scientific evidence supports the LI view, but room also remains for scholars to extend and elaborate its framework in promising ways. Three prominent criticisms of LI exist. Some scholars of “administrative politics” charge that it applies only to treaty-amending decisions and other rare circumstances. “Historical institutionalists” charge that it overlooks endogenous feedback from previous decisions. “Post-functionalists” and “constructivists” revive discredited claims from the 1960s that functional theories neglect the central role of identity claims and ideology in explaining national interests. While each criticism contains some truth, LI possesses rich theoretical resources with which to address them fruitfully and musters compelling evidence to support its empirical claims. This confirms LI’s preeminent role in scholarly debates and suggests a soberly optimistic future for European and regional integration.
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