Civilian or Military Power?: European Foreign Policy in Perspective by Helene Sjursen

Author:Helene Sjursen [Sjursen, Helene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9780415568531
Google: pYQrQAAACAAJ
Goodreads: 9012184
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-09-22T07:22:50+00:00

The Eu – a cosmopolitan polity?

Erik Oddvar Eriksen

INTRODUCTION

The European Union (EU) has for a long time been described as a ‘civilian power’ (Duchêne 1972).1 It has been reluctant to use coercive means in order to solve conflicts and achieve its goals. This has been an integral part of its identity from the very start of European Political Cooperation (EPC) in the 1970s. It is contended that present efforts to establish military capability will endanger the ‘civilian’ aspects of the EU (cf. Manners 2006). The enhanced military capability at the European level through peace-keeping and conflict-preventing missions will make the EU an actor like other actors in the world system. But is coercion foreign to a ‘humanitarian polity’? Can absence of coercive means be the defining characteristic of a normatively justifiable political entity?

I would like to address this problem from a Kantian perspective which, unlike what is often believed, implies the need for coercive means because only with the threat of sanctions can the law compel compliance. From this perspective the defining characteristic of a ‘civilian power’ cannot be the absence of coercive means and merely the pursuance of honourable goals, but rather whether it respects basic humanitarian principles. Every organized community acts on their interests and on preferences that may be good or bad in ethical terms. The propensity to act on honourable motives cannot itself represent the criteria for judging the polity’s normative quality because they may very well be arbitrary. A policy based on good intentions may very well neglect others’ interests or values or fail to give them due consideration. A robust criterion can only be derived from the constraints set by ‘international law’, here taken to mean the cosmopolitan law of the people which depicts a possible community based on certain universal principles (Kant 1797: 172). From this perspective, it is only by subjecting its actions to a higher ranking law – to human rights and criteria of justice – that the EU can qualify in normative terms.

I suggest as a criterion of a legitimate foreign policy that the EU does not aspire to become a world organization – a world state – but subscribes to the principles of human rights, democracy and rule of law also for dealing with international affairs, hence underscoring the cosmopolitan law of the people.2 In such a perspective the borders of the EU are to be drawn both with regard to what is required for the Union itself in order to be a self-sustainable and well-functioning democratic entity and with regard to the support and further development of similar regional associations in the rest of the world – that is, with regard to the viability of the Organization for African Unity (OAU), Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), etc. In this perspective, the borders of the EU should be drawn with regard to functional requirements both for itself and for other regions, all within the framework of a democratized, rights-enforcing United Nations (UN).

The

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