Evasion,Reinterpretation and Decoupling: European Commission Responses to the ‘External Dimension’ of Immigration and Asylum

Since 1999, the European Commission has been responsible for ‘integrating’ immigration and asylum goals into the EU's external relations. This article explores how different Directorates-General have responded to this requirement. Rejecting prevalent rationalist theories, it draws on organisational sociology to argue that administrative organisations are preoccupied with internal social and psychological tasks, and only selectively read and respond to signals from their political environment. Depending on characteristics of the organisation and policy area, one can hypothesise four ideal-typical responses: full adaptation, evasion, institutional decoupling, and reinterpretation. An analysis of Commission responses suggests that DG Justice, Liberty and Security fully adapted to the agenda, while DG External Relations adopted a strategy of institutional decoupling. DG Development shifted from initial evasion to reinterpretation, contributing to the rather incoherent mix of goals that emerged in the 2005 Global Approach. The article considers the implications of this account for theories of policy change.     

Forgeries and Spies: The Foreign Office and the ‘Cicero’ Case

This article seeks to analyze the Foreign Office reaction to the Cicero spy affair. Papers newly released in 2003 and 2005 provide some fascinating insights into leaks that were occurring at the Ankara embassy long before Cicero, how diplomats tried to trap the notorious spy and how the Foreign Office sought to block any outside interference in its investigations, particularly from the Security Service (MI5). The article also sheds light on how the Foreign Office attempted to deal with the fallout when the full scale of the Cicero leak became publicly known. At the time, the Foreign Office investigation into the leak failed to identify Cicero but it did highlight that Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to Turkey, was culpable in allowing documents in his possession to be photographed. It appeared, however, that Hugessen had got off lightly when he was rewarded with the ambassadorship at Brussels in September 1944. Why had this situation come about? Was the Foreign Office closing its ranks to protect one of its own? And, did this confirm oft-repeated accusations that as an institution, the Foreign Office could not be trusted when it came to security?     

Ethnic party competition beyond the segmented market

The outbidding model of ethnic politics focuses on party competition in an ethnically perfectly segmented electoral market where no party appeals to voters across the ethnic divide. The power sharing model retains this assumption, yet tries to prevent outbidding through moderation-inducing institutional design. Empirically, imperfectly segmented electoral markets and variance of ethnic party strategies beyond radical outbidding have been observed. To provide a stepping stone towards a more complete theory of ethnic party competition, this article introduces the notion of nested competition, defined as party competition in an imperfectly segmented market where some – but not all – parties make offers across ethnic divides and where competition in intra-ethnic arenas is nested within an inter-ethnic arena of party competition. The notion of nested competition helps explain why ethnic outbidding is not omnipresent in contemporary multi-ethnic democracies. A moderate position on the ethnic dimension that appears inauspicious from the perspective of intra-ethnic competition can turn into the strategically superior choice once ethnic parties take the whole system of competitive interactions within intra- and inter-ethnic arenas into account. A case study of nested competition for Hungarian votes in the Vojvodina region of Northern Serbia illustrates the conceptual innovations.     

“A Very Great Clerk”: Sir Ronald Campbell and the Fall Of France,May–June 1940 1

Sir Ronald H. Campbell was the first British ambassador during the Second World War to manage a key bilateral relationship with a wartime ally. When the Germans invaded France in May 1940, Campbell's Embassy was transformed from a diplomatic reporting post into a frontline base that had to brief London not only on the political situation in France but also on strategic military matters. However, the British ambassador would constantly struggle to register his authority in the overall management of the Franco-British relationship, and more often than not, was bypassed by Whitehall departments, special advisors and senior ministers. Campbell only found himself in a more pivotal role as communications between the British and French Governments disintegrated and the latter moved to Bordeaux. It then fell upon Campbell to make some of the most dramatic decisions in twentieth century Franco-British history.     

Creating the Ideology of Al Qaeda: From Hypocrites to Salafi-Jihadists

This article investigates the rationales of different explanatory models that have been utilized to explain the ideology of Al Qaeda. From perceptions of madmen and religious hypocrites to Wahhabis of the twenty-first century and Salafi-Jihadists, what these approaches have in common is an “outside-in” perspective that assumes a concept of the underlying logic of Al Qaeda without sufficient reference to primary sources. It is argued that particularly those explanations that seem to have become the official wisdom regarding the fundamental logic of Al Qaeda, Wahhabism and the Salafi-Jihadist discourse, are concepts that are poorly understood and subject to much controversy. In the anxious quest to explain Al Qaeda, the terrorism studies community seems to have deviated from the guidelines of academic conduct and restricted itself to re-assuming for its own use oversimplifications of the complexity of Islamic thought, thereby granting those oversimplifications a new lease on life. The risk of such conduct is that one ends up with a misrepresentation of the very issue he or she seeks to comprehend.     

Fighting Al Qaeda in Yemen? Rethinking the Nature of the Islamist Threat and the Effectiveness of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy

This article evaluates U.S. perception of and response to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) operating in Yemen. It evaluates the empirical evidence on which the present understanding of the group is based, the implications of the sociopolitical context in which it operates, and the uneasy position of the Yemeni government in the War against Terror as it has been affected by U.S. policy from the early 1990s to the present. In the contested Yemeni state, AQAP is competing for political legitimacy and is increasingly dependent on public support. The U.S. kill-or-capture response, the “on–off” nature of its support that has made Yemen vulnerable to the influence of Al Qaeda in the past, and the actions of the Yemeni government itself, which depends on the continued existence of the threat to secure financial support vital for political survival, means that none of the measures being taken has the potential to defeat AQAP.