The European Union in the Legacies of Imperial Rule? EU Accession Politics Viewed from a Historical Comparative Perspective

Abstract

International Relations benefits from historical comparative research. Although a historical comparative method can be fruitfully applied to the study of the European Union (EU), it is rarely undertaken. In this article, EU accession politics, particularly its 2004 enlargement, is compared with 19th century `standards of civilization' developed by European states concluding treaties with non-European nations. This article argues that EU accession politics operates in the legacies of 19th-century imperial rule. Understanding the EU in terms of an (new) empire might enrich the discussion of the perception and categorization of the EU as an international order.

Regional standards of membership and enlargement in the EU and ASEAN

“…Redefining the standard was a way of disciplining the accession candidates in line with the existing members' interests. In this sense, the European case echoes the normative mission of the original Bstandard of civilization^ (Behr 2007;Nicolaidis et al 2014), whereas ASEAN's cognitive priors were shaped by its members' desire to fend off interference and in fact reject any Bcivilizational^advances by outside actors-although, paradoxically, the resulting norm of domestic stability does have an intrusive element. Apart from projecting interests into the neighborhood, however, enlargement also hit home and transformed the constitutive foundations of the two ROs.…”

“…Since principles and norms concerning legitimate membership and conduct influence the shape of international regimes and organizations (Spandler 2015), the distinction can legitimize a variety of institutional or legal arrangements which formalize these boundaries-ranging from unequal treaties or mandate systems (Gong 1984, 66-69) to the formal enlargement practices of ROs, as several authors have noticed for the EU case (Behr 2007;Stivachtis 2008).…”

EUrope – History, Violence and “Peripheries”

“…As argued by a distinctively critical body of literature (see amongst others Behr, 2007;Boeroecz, 2001;Burgess, 1997;Diez, 1999;Engelbrekt, 2002;Kovacs, 2001;Kovacs/ Kabachnik 2001;Phillipson, 1992Phillipson, , 2002Ugur, 1995), EU institutions, and foremost the EU Commission and the then commissioner for enlargement, Guenther Verheugen, have initiated a political discourse in the run-up to the Eastern enlargement of the Union (which just recently has experienced another step with the finalization of membership negotiations on June 30, 2011, with Croatia) which constructed a binary reality for Eastern European states consisting of either EU membership or chaos, anarchy, and poverty as future prospects. Thus, a development was portrayed for those states which depicted only one viable and 'rational' trajectory for their future, and this was eventual EU membership.…”

“…the building of international society more generally, and EU integration more particularly -appears as naturalness and historic-political inevitability. EU Eastern enlargement of 2004 appears as the fulfillment of the laws of history and accordingly as the only reasonable and meaningful course of action after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Bloc (for more detailed analysis, see Behr, 2007;Diez, 1999;as examples Prodi, 2000;Verheugen, 2000).…”

Tabula Imperii Europae: A Cartographic Approach to the Current Debate on the European Union as Empire

“…As Hartmut Behr points out, the EU's requirement that all applicant states reform themselves into an image of the Union is at best paternalistic, at worst imperialist, by excluding those states deemed insufficiently 'civilized' to warrant inclusion. 23 However, it is perhaps intellectually unstable to speak of Europe as a defined 'civilisation'. Even Samuel Huntington's reductivist multi-civilisation thesis, claiming that Europe's many complex and nuanced cultures and societies can be corralled into a single transatlantic "Western civilisation", 24 concedes that only the Western European Union can be thought of as sharing a common European culture.…”