Stumbling among Giants: Europe's Frustrated Solidarity with Guatemala, 1979–1996

In the 1980s, Central America became the Cold War's centre stage as Western solidarity committees rushed to shine a global spotlight on the region's revolutionary movements. Drawing on archival research and activist testimony, this article explores the uncharted European solidarity movement with Guatemala (1979–1996) and its transnational structural weaknesses. Additionally, this contribution aims to revisit recent transnational approaches to solidarity movements that highlight the purposive role of actors of the Global South in generating and shaping solidarity. Instead, it argues that restricted political spaces severely constrained Guatemalan agency domestically, affecting the strategies and tactics deployed on the international front.     

United in diversity? Analysing behaviour expectations of the European Union as a non-state member of the OECD’s development assistance committee

The European Union (EU) frequently accentuates its position as the largest provider of Official Development Assistance (ODA). Together with the EU institutions, EU Member States represent 21 of the 30 members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) that sets out rules and standards for what can be reported as ODA. Following the EU Treaty’s requirement for the EU to work together in international organisations, research has detected a tentative yet positive trend to this end in different international organisations (IOs). This article’s empirical analysis shows no such trend can be detected in the EU’s engagement in the DAC. Explanatory factors include divergent development cooperation approaches inside the EU, discrepancies between the established image of and everyday practice in the DAC, and the EU’s full DAC membership. The findings add to the literature on international organisation governance by exploring different behaviour expectations of non-state membership vis-à-vis that of states.     

Once a member,always a member? Assessing the importance of time in the relationship between the European Union and the Development Assistance Committee

This article examines the European Union's (EU's) full membership of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). More specifically, we address (1) why the EU became a full member of the DAC in 1961, long before the EU was granted legal competences for development policy, and (2) why this membership status has remained unaltered over the past half-century, despite persistent dissatisfaction among both EU and non-EU members of the DAC. By applying historical institutionalism, we find that the initial decision on the EU's membership status in the DAC created a path dependence that was impossible to reverse afterwards, despite changing internal and external circumstances.     

Rethinking cross-border Euregionalism as self-organising system

Studies of cross-border regions in the European Union have struggled conceptually with an apparent ambiguity of Euregionalism: namely that cross-border regions seem to be the manifestations of reterritorialising state governance on the one hand, but have clearly failed to substantially challenge the Westphalian state territorial system on the other. The aim of the present paper is to develop a conceptual framework that helps us understand this paradoxical nature of cross-border regions. To this end, we draw on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and propose to regard Euregionalism (and regionalisms more generally) as a self-organising system. Self-organisation entails the process in which self-referential communication, rather than a set of actors, employs spatial concepts, such as the region, to enable system-specific entanglements with physical space, either short-lived or enduring, and possibly – but not necessarily – involving governance.