Political Identity, Legitimacy and EU Foreign Policy

Ricerca coordinata nell’ambito del Network of Excellence Global Governance, Regionalisation and Regulation: the Role of the EU (GARNET) VI Programma Quadro 2005-10. La ricerca, avviata nel 2005, prosegue nel 2006 e 2007 con la pubblicazione di un volume collettaneo curato da S. Lucarelli e F. Cerutti, con la csa editrice Routledge, garnet series (contratto firmato a febbraio 2007). The literature on European foreign policy and on European identity tend to be kept separated as if the process of identity formation had only an internal dimension or it was not related to the external behaviour of an international actor. Quite to the contrary, not only key actors of European foreign policy frequently make reference to values that should provide the basis for Europe’s role in world politics, but the EU frequently challenges the principles adopted by other international actors (particularly the United States) in international politics. Can all this be simply liquidated as the result of different sets of interests on the two sides of the Atlantic, as many would claim? We claim that there is more to this and we want to investigate what type of political identity emerges from the analysis of EU foreign policy and at the same time how foreign policy behaviour feeds back into the EU’s self-identification process. We equally want to investigate if and how problems of legitimacy influence both the external transposition of EU’s values into foreign policy behaviour, and the feed-back of actual foreign policy behaviour into EU self-identification process. More in detail, this research group deals with three steps of the process though which EU foreign policy contributes to the construction of EU’s political identity and legitimacy: 1. The EU’s self-representation as an international actor, as it emerges in official documents and speeches; 2. actual EU foreign policy, with an aim to identify (i) the main values at work and their peculiar European interpretation, and (ii) the various challenges to the EU legitimacy as an international political player which arise from EU foreign policy formulation (i.e. problems related to the transparency of the decision making procedures) and implementation (i.e. problems related to EU policies’ effectiveness, coherence etc.); 3. the image that relevant others remand of the EU: how is the EU perceived and to what extent is this in line with, and influenced by, EU’s self-representation and EU’s actual behaviour in foreign policy? In order to reach these aims, we conceived European Foreign Policy as a set of political actions that are regarded by external actors as “EU” actions and that can be considered the output of this multilevel system of governance in foreign policy (therefore including Pillar I, II and III policies). Furthermore, we adopt a multidisciplinary perspective and draw from the expertise of economists, political scientists, political philosophers, and generally EU experts. We subdivide our work into a theoretical section and a section with case-studies - either focused on the global governance of specific policy problems, or on some key values. The perception of the others will be mainly analysed through an ad hoc explorative survey of existing sources on EU’s image in the world (see Preliminary survey on the existing sources on the External Image of the European Union, attached project). Given budgetary constraints, this survey will be inevitably limited in scope, but might contribute to shed light on a rather under-analysed area. Research Group: The research group is based at the Forum on the problems of Peace and War in Florence. The members of the research group are: Sonia Lucarelli (Director of research) Arlo Poletti Luigi Pellizzoni Rosa Balfour Rodolfo Ragionieri Lorenzo Fioramonti Diletta Latini