European Union and regional and global order
This guest web log has been written by Professor Elzbieta Stadtmuller, from the University of Wroclaw in Poland and Visiting International Fellow at the Alworth Institute.
The European Union is seen as a well-established international actor which is able to shape the regional and global order. On the other hand it is under pressure from a range of significant contemporary problems. What are these problems? How does the EU react to those processes which are shaping the contemporary world, such as globalization, fragmentation, regionalization and governance? What, if anything, is the European Union model of governance?
The interdependencies and challenges facing the international order to which the EU has to relate contain a long list of items: political, economic, military, cultural and legal. Among them: the role of super-powers, organisations, and international/global/civil society. There are choices between: multilateralism versus unilateralism, domination versus co-operation, free trade versus market protection. There are threats: stemming from disparity of global development, mass-migration, religious fundamentalism, environmental pollution; the prevailing new types of conflicts (intrastate, failing states, not interstate), terrorism, humanitarian intervention, conflict and post-conflict management, mass destruction missiles. New chances and obligations stemming from new technologies and science, the concept of international law and human rights and their protection, must also be included.
The EU is a globalising as well as a globalized actor. It gains economic profits from the free market, being one of the biggest world traders. It is challenged by cheaper labor from outside Europe and from new economic powers such as China. Immigration is both warmly welcomed as the savior of a shrinking population but also creates a desire to build a protective fortress; cultural meetings with others leads to acceptance of a hybridisation process but also arouses fears about the loss of homogeneity or of being uprooted from European culture. The Union’s response towards all these old and new security threats accelerated by globalisation is: involvement in conflict resolution and management, EU humanitarian aid, environmental protection, development policy, and interregional cooperation.
There is a similar response to the disintegration processes afflicting the world including the nearest neighbourhood of the EU. However the states that make up the EU are not always unified enough to meet the challenges and divisions of the contemporary world and its international conflicts. Moreover, Europe is itself divided into sub regions, nations and minorities. It suffers social disparities – the EU tries, on the one hand, to preserve differences which are enriching Europe (according to the slogan: unified in diversity) and on the other hand to offer various aid programs which can protect and assist the development of the socially excluded.
The EU, at the heart of regionalization processes, is considered to be a model for the new regionalism. It has a strong community approach exemplified in its Single Market; its non-economic areas of integration; its network of governmental and non-governmental actors sharing common values and interests; and its attempt to develop cooperation with its neighbourhood (via enlargement and the neighbourhood policy). The EU, as such ‘a multilevel governance system’, can be seen as a potential model for the successful initiation of regional governance in a regionalized world. However it is only potentially so because the EU members have problems with creating a common approach towards the serious foreign and security policy problems listed above. Moreover, the institutional system faces a fundamental dilemma: should it seek more efficiency or greater democracy? Politicians have to find a way of legitimizing governance in a non-state entity like the EU. On the other hand, if one looks at contemporary Europe, one has to say that the EU has made a real and positive difference to the regional order. This Community may also be seen as a sort of laboratory of supranational governance. But can this European model really be adapted everywhere? In North America, for example, there have been calls for a more developed NAFTA, partly organized along European lines. This question remains open.