Amelie Kutter Chair

Madalena Meyer-Resende Discussant

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Peripheral Sovereignties in Caribbean Europe

For a long time, mainstream historiography and social science viewed the rise of nation-states as the gradual overcoming of multinational political organizations and multiethnic empires throughout the world. The resulting conceptualization of empires and nation-states as mutually exclusive and chronologically discrete political formations and of the nation-state as the modern norm generated its own anomalies. Today, peripheral state formations such as the European and U.S. overseas countries and territories (OCTs) continue to be viewed as exceptions from the above trajectory from empire to nation and as anomalies in a modern world of sovereign nation-states. A growing literature tries to capture the paradoxical logic behind the functioning of state structures in such peripheral territories using concepts like “extended statehood” (De Jong/Kruit 2005), “postcolonial sovereignty games” (Adler-Nissen/Pram Gad 2013), “the myth of sovereignty” (Lewis 2013) or “non-sovereign futures” (Bonilla 2015). Drawing on a previously developed notion of multiple and unequal Europes (Boatcă 2010, 2013, 2015), the paper explores the history and the concept of Caribbean Europe as a way to shed light on the role of peripheral sovereignties in European OCTs for an understanding of modern statehood under global capitalism. The paper ultimately argues that a rethinking of Europe from its Atlantic and Caribbean borders successfully challenges Occidentalist notions of Europeanness and the modern nation-state, as well as related notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and modernity.

Manuela Boatcă

University of Freiburg

 

World systems theory and European semi-peripheries: the case of Portuguese foreign and security policy

The security and defence policies of the member states of the European Union (EU) result from a combination of a national agenda and EU strategy. The latter is outcome of negotiations conducted in the intergovernmental framework, in which both the foreign and security policies of the individual member states and the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU as an international actor come into play. However, the formation the security and defence agenda is not isolated from the overall process of European integration and the different leverage member states have on it according to their economic and geopolitical standing. Borrowing from Wallerstein, the paper argues that such asymmetries, and the relations between core and semi-peripheral states within the EU, more particularly, also influence an individual state’s security and defence agenda. In an analysis of the strategic concept of Portugal and related documents, the paper explores features linked with Portugal’s semi-peripheral position within the EU. It concludes that the conception of being compressed in between a national agenda and the EU framework from an unfavourable position instructs Portuguese security and defence policy to a large extent.

Pedro Ponte e Sousa

Nova University Lisbon / IPRI

 

Peripheriality in the European Neighbourhood Policy: a view on official and academic discourses

In the aftermath of its 2004 enlargement, the European Union launched the so-called European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) to address relations with neighbouring countries in the South and East of the European Union. This paper investigates what notion of peripherality emerged from discourses related to ENP, looking into official statements issued by representatives of EU bodies and the member states, on the one hand, and academic literature on the ENP, on the other. It highlights that, in official statements, peripherality is defined by the projection of the EU as a regional power. In that projection, the EU builds the centre of regional power, while the neighbourhood qualifies as its periphery and appears as either a target of the EU’s ‘smart’ or ‘soft power’ or a ‘ring of friends’ and ‘ring of fire’. The paper further highlights how academic literature has reacted to this official discourse, by either taking it over and influencing it (e.g. in debates on soft, smart, civilian and transformative power) or by rejecting it in a critical way (e.g. empire approach), but eventually perpetuating the image of (EU) centre and (neighbourhood) periphery. The paper suggests that this dichotomy stands in the way of a deeper understanding of how relations between the EU and its neighbourhood form. It suggests adopting an approach, instead, which foregrounds interactions between the EU and its neighbourhood and combines methodological tools from critical research (such as discourse analysis) with a sociology of actors.

Elsa Tulmets

European University Viadrina

 

From fragmentation to polarization: positions about membership in European parliamentary discourse

Building on the comparative analysis of over 200 debates at the European Parliament between 2004 and 2017, this paper traces and maps the rise of contestation in European membership discourses. It shows (a) a steady fragmentation of positions at the party level, (b) a movement towards the centre of positions traditionally held by marginalized parties from the right and (c) a convergent stream of positive positions about the enlargement process itself, mitigated by a sharp polarization of positions on specific countries cases. By further mapping the arguments used by political actors to support dissenting positions about membership, the paper exposes cleavages in EU’s dominant narratives about membership. When questioning the inclusion principle, European actors find themselves split between hardliners (using exclusive identity arguments), and moderate (using conditional normative and procedural arguments), crossing traditional partisan lines. Salience of competing sociological, strategic and geographical factors is explored. Relying on discourse network analysis, we investigate these changing trends and patterns of positions and arguments of European actors about membership across the region through time.

Marie-Eve Bélanger

ETH Zurich