Reconsidering 'EU Actorness' in Changing Geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean Region.

• Author: Latif, Dilek

Introduction

The discovery of natural gas resources in the Eastern Mediterranean within the offshore territories of Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Cyprus reshaped the existing foreign policies and political alignments on both the international and regional levels. The new strategic equation in the Eastern Mediterranean started to develop in line with the domestic and regional dynamics. Regional actors such as Turkiye, Israel, Iran, Egypt, and Greece, together with the global powers, the U.S., Russia, the European Union (EU), and China, influence the present-day conditions and the reconfiguration of the future of the region. The geopolitical dynamics in the region have been evolving around the exploitation of regional energy sources, the creation of new strategic cooperation, rising competition, and tension over energy resources. (1) The long-term implications of these factors will determine the regional balance of power and the future place of the Eastern Mediterranean within a global context.

Like the broader Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean region has a challenging environment, surrounded by protracted conflicts, tension, and geographical instability that restrains its energy potential. (2) The geopolitical and energy concerns are generating many new challenges and opportunities for the local and global actors in the region. The impact of the new developments within the Eastern Mediterranean context has extended beyond the regional borders. They created unprecedented geopolitical consequences for the whole region, leading related states to develop new strategies and policies to extend their position, power, and influence. The global actors significantly impact the shifting dynamics of the Eastern Mediterranean. To a large extent, the presence of many players contributed to the complexity and tension. The region has been filled with warships, tankers, natural gas drilling, and various project proposals for subsea cables and pipelines. (3)

Against this background, this study evaluates the role of the EU in the shifting geopolitical order of the Eastern Mediterranean and questions whether the EU can extend its influence beyond its borders. The conceptual framework of the article is built on the EU's global role. In recent years, a renewed academic interest has arisen in the conceptual debates over the EU's global actorness. Over the past four decades, numerous academic studies tried to conceptualize and understand the nature of the EU in world affairs. Since its foundation, the EU has faced challenges to act as a united actor in global affairs due to the lack of consensus among the member states on a common EU foreign policy and the resulting inconsistency between the domestic and supranational levels.

Early academic literature on the EU's actorness focused on 'actor capability,' mainly referring to the structural characteristics and 'actor behavior,' which indicated the features and performance. The subsequent academic studies developed more detailed and comprehensive categories for actor capacity, actor characteristics, and effectiveness of the EU's actions. (4) Burgeoning academic attention began considering the context that frames and shapes the EU action for a comprehensive understanding of the EU's global role. Newly emerging literature based on several case studies, such as the EU's policy toward Iran (5) and Kosovo, (6) the EU's involvement in Ukraine (7) and Georgia, (8) and the EU's actions in Mali, (9) examine and shed light on the EU's growing role in international affairs. No academic study has examined the EU's impact on the Eastern Mediterranean. Thus, the main goal of this study is to contextualize the EU's engagement in the Eastern Mediterranean region vis-a-vis the current geopolitical factors and the tensions over the sharing of hydrocarbon resources. In that context, this article focuses on how the EU is involved in the region and seeks to provide new insights into the literature on the bloc's international role. It aims to evaluate the presence and influence of the EU on regional dynamics and how this reflects on the EU's global role. The time frame of the research covers the past decade, starting from the discovery of natural gas resources in the late 2000s until now. The primary research questions are i) whether and how the EU influences regional dynamics and ii) whether it can facilitate cooperation and stability in the region. The study's main hypothesis suggests the potential of the EU's policy implementation through diplomatic, economic, and political instruments such as political dialogues, declarations, economic incentives, and the threat of sanctions in the Eastern Mediterranean. By this means, the EU may enhance its position, exert influence and promote cooperation and regional stability.

Many scholars have analyzed the methodological challenges in measuring the EU's role in international affairs. Previous studies have based their criteria for evaluating the EU's global actorness on the concept of normative power, constructivist approach, geopolitical context, legal framework, use of sanctions, and state-building. Identifying the difficulties encountered by the scholars, Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler propose a useful approach to measuring the actorness of the EU. To assess whether and how the EU impacts the shifting geopolitics of the Eastern Mediterranean, this study adopts the conceptualization of Bretherton and Vogler outlined as the capacity to utilize policy instruments, namely diplomacy, negotiation, and economic tools. (10) In this direction, the research process follows qualitative empirical research based on textual analysis. The data is collected from public declarations, bilateral and regional treaties/agreements, press conferences, European Commission reports and documents, the European Council conclusions, and newspaper articles. The data analysis was based on the indicators representing the EU's position in the region. In the following sections of the article, a conceptual framework on the EU's role in international politics, an overview of the current regional developments, and the EU's presence in the Eastern Mediterranean region is provided; in addition, in what ways the EU can facilitate cooperation and stability in the fragile context of the Eastern Mediterranean are explored.

Conceptualizing the EU's Role in Global Politics

The EU's role in international affairs has long been the subject of many academic papers, policy briefs, and commentaries. The state-centric and traditional international relations theories underestimate the EU's role in world politics. The rationalist approach counts the EU's role based on its global impact. Institutionalism emphasizes the significance of institutions in international relations and their ability to influence state behavior. Other approaches refer to the EU's role in global affairs to promote regional cooperation, liberal values, human rights, democracy, conflict prevention, and crisis management. (11) The unique character of the EU as a hybrid entity, which is regarded as neither an intergovernmental organization nor a state but operates globally in different policy areas, problematized the conceptualizations of the scholars.

Francois Duchene's civilian power description was one of the initial attempts to conceptualize Europe's role in the world. (12) The civilian power notion focused on the possibility of an actor being a power without military means. As introduced later by Joseph S. Nye, the concept of soft power works through economic incentives and diplomatic persuasion. (13) This refers to persuading or attracting other actors to change their preferences and behaviors without coercion or the fear of coercive power. During the Cold War, the EC emphasized particularly the civilian aspect of its role in the international scene, which also aimed at contributing to international conflict resolution. After the failure of the European Defense Policy (EDP), the debates and questions around the conception of the soft power of the European Community (EC) started, specifically with regard to its capacity to become a global player. In the late 1970s, Gunnar Sjostedt's pioneering book The External Role of the European Community has further taken the theoretical and conceptual approaches to the EU actorness. (14) Sjostedt tried to develop a criterion to measure the extent the organization could constitute an actor in the international system. By defining the necessary conditions and elements of being an actor, Sjostedt introduced the concepts of actor capacity and autonomy, which paved the way for later work on the EU's global role.

In the 1980s, the debate on the EC's role in world affairs re-emerged when the organization began to implement conditionality in its foreign relations and promoted norms in exchange for assistance and trade preferences with third states. (15) This led to academic discussions on the organization's normative power that asserts a role "in the international arena through the exportation of its norms and values." (16) A new turn in the EC's role or presence in global politics started after the initiation of both the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in 1992 and the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) in 1999. Concurrently, these instigated renewed discourses on the formulations of the civilian and normative character of the union. In this context, Hans Maull further developed the idea of civilian power and redefined the EU's influence in the global arena as a civilian power based on the prospects of membership and association, economic and financial incentives, sanctions, diplomatic skills, conflict management capacity in conflict prevention and peace-building tasks. (17) Similarly, Mario Telo argued that a political unit can be regarded as a civilian power if it can obtain "international peaceful objectives using other methods." (18)

The end of the Cold...