The ‘Oops!’ of EU Engagement Abroad: Analyzing Unintended Consequences of EU External Action

Abstract

The mainstream scholarship assessing EU external action frames the subject in terms of success or failure to achieve the intended effects, the latter generally defined against the EU's own stated objectives. Resting on a tacit assumption that EU engagement in third states is a good thing, these analyses are framed as ‘positive impact or no impact’ and tend to neglect the wider effects of EU policies. This article maintains that EU external action may and often does have unintended consequences, thus expanding the study of EU impact beyond the sheer study of EU effectiveness. Drawing on broader literature on unintended consequences, the article proposes a framework for analyzing unintended consequences of EU external action. It synthesizes and adapts to the EU context a classification of unintended consequences and, in order to illustrate its utility, applies the proposed framework to three empirical examples derived from EU neighbourhood, migration and trade policies.

Unintended Consequences of EU External Action

“…The mainstream literature frames EU external performance in terms of success or failure to achieve the intended effects (usually defined on the basis of the EU's own declared objectives). Resting on a deeply embedded and uncritical liberal assumption that EU engagement abroad is a good thing, these analyses are framed as 'positive impact or no impact', reducing the study of EU impact to what is essentially a study of EU effectiveness and neglecting frequent, multiple and varied unintended effects of EU policies (Burlyuk 2017(Burlyuk , 1009(Burlyuk -1010. The empirical reality, however, suggests that EU external action often changes matters in unintended ways, pushing the notion of unintended consequences to the forefront and begging for a revision of our models for analysing and assessing EU impact.…”

“…While the term 'unintended consequences' is self-explanatory and refers to outcomes of purposive action(s) that are not directly intended by an actor, its standard meaning today has been reduced to unwelcome unanticipated policy outcomesan extremely partial understanding of the concept reflecting but one of its possible variations. In an earlier publication, Olga Burlyuk (coeditor of this issue) makes a plea for (re)introducing the notion of unintended consequences into our understanding of impact abroad and putting it firmly, and indeed urgently, on the scholarly research agenda (Burlyuk 2017). This Special Issue seeks to help close these three clear analytical gaps.…”

“…To approach the 'what' question formulated above, this project departed from a shared baseline conceptualisation of unintended consequences as found in the literature on unintended consequences in sociology and beyond, and as synthesized for the purposes of IR and EU studies by Burlyuk (2017). Fundamentally, this conceptualisation challenges the standard understanding of unintended consequences as unwelcome unanticipated effects which, we argue, reflects only one of the concept's possible variations.…”

“…At the most general level, the concept-and-term unintended consequences refers to outcomes of purposive action(s) that are not directly intended by an actor. As argued elsewhere, when unpacked, unintended consequences may vary with respect to (at least) nine parameters, including: mode of knowledgeability, relationship to the initial intention, value attached, type of action, strength of causal links, type of outcome, who is impacted by it, mode of acknowledgement and, finally, the temporal dimension (for a detailed discussion see Burlyuk 2017Burlyuk , 1011Burlyuk -1017. Several of these analytical categories fall victim to their seemingly self-evident nature, and their casual use breeds conceptual conflation.…”

“…While an unintended consequence can be unanticipated in instances when an actor did not foresee it at all (which is the standard understanding and most frequent usage), it can also be anticipated in instances when an actor foresees the possibility of this outcome but follows through with the initial action and intention nonetheless (which is arguably the variation of unintended consequences most frequently observed in politics and international relations, and prominent in the contributions to this issue). The key message here is that unintended consequences are not by definition unknown to the actor undertaking the action (Baert 1991, 201;Burlyuk 2017Burlyuk , 1013. Consequences that are both unintended and anticipated are a real category of the phenomenon, and arguably the most interesting and least studied in IR and EU studies.…”