The Unintended Consequences of a European Neighbourhood Policy without Russia

ABSTRACT

After Russia’s retreat from the European Neighbourhood Policy, the EU’s policy towards its eastern neighbours was split up. The internal unintended consequence of the EU’s choice to leave its policy unaltered was a tension between the objective of privileged relations with ENP countries and a promise to recognise the interests of Russia as an equal partner. Externally, the unintended outcome was that this fostered two opposing strategic environments: a cooperative one for the EaP and a competitive one with Russia. In terms of the management of unintended consequences, the EU has actively sought to reinforce its normative hegemony towards EaP countries, while at the same time mitigating certain negative unintended effects.     

Master of the Game: The Relationship between the United States and Iran Revisited, 1969-1972

ABSTRACT

How and why did the Richard Nixon Administration end up with an Iran policy more in line with the preferences of the Shah of Iran than of the United States? At its onset, the Administration did not have a clearly defined or formalised Persian Gulf policy. Attempts to create over-arching guidelines regarding American conduct toward Iran were of little consequence, as the pro-Iranian inclinations of leading decision-makers led to day-to-day decisions that strongly favoured the Shah. This limited room for manoeuvre amounted to little more than acceptance of what was already established procedure. The Shah’s strenuous lobbying of American decision-makers, using their common Cold War considerations to his advantage and the effective sidelining of critical voices within the Nixon Administration, explain this outcome.     

The Unintended Consequences of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Negotiations

ABSTRACT

Although stalled since 2016, the negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have had major unintended consequences. The TTIP led to demands from third countries to upgrade their trade relationship with the EU and to unprecedented politicisation. As second-order effects of the latter, it endangered the EU-Canada trade agreement and brought about reform of EU trade governance and amendments to EU trade policy positions. These unintended consequences occurred because of inflated expectations about and insufficient awareness of the different nature of TTIP with regard to scope and partner compared to other trade negotiations. In the meantime, EU trade policy has adapted to the new politics of trade, making unintended consequences less likely.     

Unintended Consequences of EU External Action

ABSTRACT

There is a gap in IR and EU scholarship concerning unintended consequences in an international context, leaving this important phenomenon understudied. To fill this gap, a conceptualisation of unintended consequences is offered, and a set of common research questions are presented, highlighting the nature (what), the causes (why) and the modes of management (how) of unintended consequences of EU external action. The Special Issue contributes to the study of the EU as an international actor by broadening the notion of the EU’s impact abroad to include the unintended consequences of EU (in)actions and by shedding new light on the conceptual paradigms that explain EU external action.     

Unintended Consequences of EU Democracy Support in the European Neighbourhood

ABSTRACT

The European Union’s (EU) impact on the political governance of the European neighbourhood is varied and sometimes opposite to the declared objectives of its democracy support policies. The democracy promotion literature has to a large extent neglected the unintended consequences of EU democracy support in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. The EU has left multiple imprints on the political trajectories of the countries in the neighbourhood and yet the dominant explanation, highlighting the EU’s security and economic interests in the two regions,cannot fully account for the unintended consequences of its policies. The literature on the ‘pathologies’ of international organisations offers an explanation, emphasizing the failures of the EU bureaucracy to anticipate, prevent or reverse the undesired effects of its democracy support in the neighbourhood.     

The Political Economy of Reform Under the UPA, 2004–14: The Tension Between Accumulation and Legitimacy

Electoral success during the reform process requires maintaining a prudent balance in meeting the requirements of the two basic state functions of accumulation and legitimacy. Initially, the Congress-led UPA government was the unintended beneficiary of the economic acceleration resulting from a global boom and the earlier economic reforms in aid of accumulation. The growth acceleration, however, also escalated rising expectations. In the effort to advance its legitimacy in order to assure continuance in power, the UPA government emphasized a distributive strategy to the neglect of accumulation. However, the rupture in growth acceleration because of external shock and internal economic mismanagement aggravated the loss of legitimacy stemming from a series of corruption scandals. The consequence was the emergence of an enormous “gap” between rising expectations and the existing reality of economic stagnation and high inflation. It is in the context of this gap that the Congress Party suffered its most severe electoral defeat in history.     

EU External Action,Intention and Explanation

ABSTRACT

“Unintended consequences” is an umbrella concept. It comprises phenomena that differ in crucial respects and consequently, without refinement, it remains a rather blunt instrument for policy analysis. The contributions in this volume, however, show that disentangling unintended consequences by making clear distinctions between various types, makes the concept much more useful for policy analysis. Assessing the impact of EU foreign policies as studied in this volume, we show that “bonuses”, “windfalls”, “accidents”, and “trade-offs” – all unintended – are very different when it comes to the explanation of policy outcomes, or to allocating responsibility for them.     

The Unintended Consequences of the EU’s Rural Development Programme in the Arab Countryside

ABSTRACT

After the Arab revolts, the EU designed a new regional rural development programme to address the various political and economic threats in the Arab Mediterranean countryside. Although the programme is based on a new cognitive framework, it has generated unintended consequences that undermine its effectiveness. These consequences were predictable. They are a product of path dependency and the inability of policymakers to draw lessons from previous EU initiatives with similar aims and to contextualise the relationship between small farmers and political elites in the Arab countryside.     

A justice philosophy of public relations management

ABSTRACT

From a justice perspective, strategic publics may be viewed as victims who have been harmed by the organisation and now seek reparation. Long-term relationships are only formed with organisations that treat strategic publics fairly. For public relations to be viewed as just, it must incorporate all three dimensions of justice theory, viz: distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. When all three dimensions are incorporated, public relations stands a better chance of the organisation being viewed as just and trustworthy by strategic publics. Only when strategic publics experience the relationship with the organisation as trusting and dignifying will they be able to feel committed to the organisation and its decisions; feel attached to the long-term relationship; and be less hostile when outcomes of strategic decisions are unfavourable.

Justice theory provides public relations with a philosophy of how to conduct themselves with strategic publics that influence the goal attainment of organisations.     

Horizontal and Vertical Diversity: Unintended Consequences of EU External Migration Policy

ABSTRACT

Unintended consequences arising from EU external migration policy are a result of the multi-actor nature of this policy and of policy interactions. In addition, scholars face serious methodological challenges in establishing what the EU’s ‘intent’ is in external migration policy and, therefore, in determining which consequences are intended and which are unintended. The literature on the implementation and evaluation of EU external migration policy is in its infancy, and future work should take into account all policy outcomes – both those that were intended and those that were not.     

Democratising Transitional Justice: Transitional Trade-offs and Constituting the Demos

I argue that transitional justice should be democratised and to realise this goal I propose a method by which people can be enfranchised to make such choices. By showing that transitional justice options often involve trade-offs, I lay the groundwork for my democratic account of transitional justice. This article balances three democratic principles, including collective self-determination, the all affected interests principle and the protection of individual rights that are necessary to vote, to argue that victims and potential victims should constitute the transitional justice demos. I propose a new institution that would balance international and local control of transitional justice decision making, and choose the demos. This article does not attempt to construct a theory of how to resolve tensions in transitional justice decisions. Conversely, exactly because these tensions are often present, I develop a theory of who should be empowered to make transitional justice decisions and how their powers should be constrained.     

Incumbency Dominance in Letters to the Editor: Field Experimental Evidence

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment conducted three weeks before the 2017 federal election in Germany. Four different versions of a letter to the editor were sent to all the German daily newspapers that handle letters to the editor independently. The versions differed in the subject matter of the letter, the chancellor Angela Merkel versus the main challenger Martin Schulz, and in the evaluation of this subject, positive versus negative. The experiment was designed to test for three different types of media bias: political bias, negativity bias, and incumbency dominance. We find no political bias in the decisions to print letters, and no statistically significant negativity bias. We do observe incumbency dominance: letters about the chancellor were 40% more likely to be printed.     

New media and strategic narratives: the Dutch referendum on Ukraine – EU Association Agreement in Ukrainian and Russian Internet blogs

ABSTRACT

This article analyses two confronting narratives authored by Ukrainian and Russian bloggers who reported the Dutch referendum held on 6 March 2016, and discussed Dutch citizens’ referendum vote on the Ukraine–EU Association Agreement. The considered narratives, addressed to the Ukrainian and Russian audiences respectively, are viewed as strategic because they specifically portray political actors of the referendum “drama” – the Netherlands, the European Union (EU), Ukraine and Russia. These actors are significant participants of European international relations, and their perceptions of one another are important for European security at the present time of critical diplomacy. In this paper, information about the DUTCH REFERENDUM obtained from the new media texts is regarded as a narrative-based political concept (NBPC). It is argued that this concept has different versions, or images that reflect the narrators’ biased perceptions imposed upon the public. Identification and comparison of such images require a particular methodology. Therefore, the objective of this paper is two-fold: to expose the two confronting versions of a strategically relevant political image, and to develop an authentic, interdisciplinary methodology for its analysis. The proposed methodology is informed by the ontology theory employed in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics.     

Humanitarian futures and adaptive failures

Scientific and technological change will intensify over the next two decades, profoundly affecting the global economy and the environment, as well as demographic trends and political and security structures in most parts of the world. An unintended consequence may be an exponential rise in human exposure to disasters and emergencies. Such humanitarian crises may, in no small part, be due to planners’ inability to anticipate potential hazards and to appreciate their significance, and to decision-makers’ inability to reconcile competing demands for resources. This article suggests that most disasters and emergencies are the result of an individual and institutional failure to respond effectively to change, new information and contending interests. It explores various psychosocial approaches to individual and group dynamics, and utilises a range of organisational and political-science models to evaluate potential constraints on adaptive capacities. Ultimately, it proposes a five-point strategy to assist both policy-planners and decision-makers in thinking in a more ‘non-linear’ fashion and in being more responsive to the direction and implications of change.     

The Europeanisation of Arms Export Policy in the Czech Republic,Slovakia, and Poland

Abstract

The article examines British, French and Italian parliaments’ roles in overseeing the European Union's external military operations, Concordia and Artemis. It shows that a democratic deficit exists in European security and discusses factors shaping differential performance. The British European Scrutiny Committee approved both operations a posteriori. The French Parliament was involved through the use of the emergency examination procedure that required the president of the Delegation for the European Union to approve operations as an individual. The Italian Parliament had no say on Artemis and approved Concordia on the same day the operation was launched, three months after the Italian Government had agreed to its mandate and planning in the European Council. British parliamentarians asked qualitative questions, others did not.     

Implikasies van die keuse van 'n teoretiese benadering vir beslissings oor navorsingsontwerp

SUMMARY

This article sets out to show that and how the researcher's theoretical approach, that is, the view of communication that derives from his/her ontological, anthropological and epistemological assumptions, determines decisions concerning research design and the application of the findings. Two contrasting theoretical approaches, viz. functionalism and phenomenology, are discussed and the consequences of their assumptions for the execution of research illustrated with reference to two empirical studies. The most important issue arising from their contrary positions concerns the truthfulness of research findings. While phenomenologists maintain that findings must be validated by respondents' agreement that their experience of reality has been truthfully expressed, functionalists argue that research must produce general patterns that may be presented by means of predetermined categories. It is finally suggested that the ongoing debate concerning suitable theoretical approaches is of vital importance to researchers since it highlights their ethical responsibility.     

Enkele gedagtes oor die rol van teorie in die wetenskapsbeoefening

SUMMARY

The social significance of television and film as the most powerful means of mass communication in Western civilisation today cannot be underrated. The mass media, and television and film in particular, are not merely neutral carriers of messages. They confer power, legitimate systems and provide ways of looking at the world. They supply the context in which information is learned, attitudes and values formed and decisions made, thereby fulfilling the functions previously filled by the medieval church.

The general functions of the mass media, and television and film in particular, are entertainment, the provision of information and education, socialization and the handing down, or propogation of culture. However, these can be suggested to be merely surface functions and effects of the media's deeper power. There is a hidden role which transcends all surface effects. It may be proposed that it is the media, rather than the church which provides individuals with a worldview which reflects to them what is of ultimate value, and which justifies their behaviour and way of life. Television itself is becoming a kind of religion and has become a prime cultivator of culture, providing the myths, teachings and expressions of religion.

Various authors suggest that television needs to be seriously considered as an operative religious activity. This does not mean that the television and film industry would see itself in religious terms, nor that the mass media can be seen to be replacing theistic religion, but that the correspondence between the content and uses of television and the traditional functions of religion and religious practice is significant.

This article, based on a literature survey, explores the provocative parallel between the traditional functions of religion and the church, and commercial television.     

Introduction: Globalization and change in India

ABSTRACT

This series of papers on Globalization, Institutional Change, and Politics of reforms in India highlights some of the key characteristics of institutional change and globalization in India. This special issue points in the direction of three important conjectures on globalization and change by bringing together a few key aspects of the process of institutional change and engagement with the global in India. First, India’s liberal democracy has embraced globalization and globally influenced institutional change in an embedded liberal way. Second, this is a saga of gradual and largely endogenous change. India is deeply affected by the demonstration effect of global best practices but builds rather more after its own internal consensus. Finally, even though India is not a classic developmental state, the state is an important factor in promoting change.     

Surveillance to Combat Terrorist Financing in Europe: Whose Liberty,Whose Security?

Abstract

This article analyses recent developments in the campaign to combat terrorist financing in Europe and questions the utility of financial surveillance as a method to counter terrorism. A background presentation of surveillance in modern society is followed by an overview of earlier international initiatives to interdict money laundering. The measures used to combat terrorist finance are built upon this foundation of surveillance and criminal investigation. Applying these measures in the ‘war on terror’ has unintended consequences for the financial transactions of citizens and non-citizens alike. The article concludes by considering these problems and their impact on society within the context of a larger concern for the impact to individual liberty from these surveillance practices in pursuit of security in the early twenty-first century.