The European Union Program at Princeton

Co-sponsored by TU Dresden and Princeton University, this workshop is designed to provide feedback on eight papers that will be part of a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy 2014 (21) 3. This special issue aims to contribute to the debate about EU “actorness” by examining specifically whether the cohesiveness of the EU’s message (speaking with a single voice) affects its effectiveness (ability to influence outcomes). When acting as a regional power, the EU is able to speak with one voice and to succeed in imposing many of its norms and principles on its neighborhood countries. When acting as a global political actor in international organizations, however, we do find a more complex picture. Sometimes the EU acts as a cohesive actor with a unified position (e.g. in the IMF), while in other cases (e.g. in the WTO or UNO) we rather observe a cacophony of voices, in which the EU is unable to develop common positions and the authority of the European Commission is undermined by member states. Sometimes that cohesive position is accompanied by the EU imposing its will internationally, sometimes it is not. This Special Issue asks why and when this happen and why and when this does not. To do so, we highlight three exogenous features that do influence the way in which internal cohesiveness impacts external effectiveness: 1) Who: how many, and which, players in the external negotiation (bilateral, regional, or multilateral); 2) What: characteristics of the policy area; 3) When: path dependence and the weight of history. We will try to combine all the internal (negotiating autonomy, cohesion of preferences) and external factors (recognition, number and identity of players in negotiations, nature of the policy area, and time it took for the EU to reach the single voice) into hypotheses that will be tested in the papers, which are the following:

1. Eugenia da Conceicao-Heldt and Sophie Meunier: “Speaking with a Single Voice: Internal Cohesiveness and External Cohesiveness of the EU in World Politics”
2. Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt: “A Cacophony of Voices? The European Union’s Cohesiveness in the Negotiation of Bilateral and Multilateral Trade Negotiations”
3. Sophie Meunier: “Divide and Conquer: How China Can Exploit the Multiplicity of Investment Rules in the EU”
4. Tom Delreux: “Revisiting EU Actorness in Environmental Affairs”
5. Tanja Börzel and Vera van Hullen: “Political Dwarf or Global Governance Player? The European Union’s Regional ‘Ordnungspolitik’”
6. Michael Smith: “The European Union and the United States: Competition, Convergence and the EU’s Changing Role in Transatlantic Relations”
7. Diana Panke: “The European Union in the United Nations. Effectively Speaking with One Voice?”
8. Kalypso Nicolaidis: “Beyond the One Voice Mantra: Global Europe’s Engagement with its Own Diversity”