Values in EU Foreign Policy

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is on the role played in the EU’s foreign policy by those values which the EU claims as (in some sense) ‘its own’, and the legal instruments and processes through which values are both imported into, and exported from, the EU legal order. Values may be presented both as characteristic of the Union’s identity, and as the key to achieving specific Union objectives, especially security and stability within Europe and its neighbourhood. The external dimension of the EU’s values, which is the subject of this chapter, reflects both these constitutive and instrumentalist aspects. The aim is not to discuss the nature and content, or the ‘European’ or universal character, of specific values. Indeed, we shall start from the position that in order to lead to concrete outcomes, the ‘values’ which have a symbolic significance for the EU must find practical expression in legal norms. These norms, whether derived from the Treaties or imported into the EU legal order, may take on a foundational or constitutional character and thus become constitutive of the Union’s identity and its self-perception (and self-projection) as an international actor. The need to justify and to conceptualise the increasingly important role played in particular by human rights, the rule of law and democracy in the Union’s external policy has led the Union to define itself in terms of values to its citizens as well as to the world. Basing itself on this identity the EU commits itself to ‘uphold and promote its values in its relations with the wider world’. Further, the EU participates increasingly actively in the process of developing norms at the international level, norms which it then integrates into its own legal order and which it also promotes in its relations with third States. In what follows we shall examine the ways in which values are connected with EU foreign policy from three perspectives: (a) values as identity-defining and constitutive; (b) the promotion of values; and (c) the EU’s contribution to building values, spear-heading or influencing the production of new norms, their adoption, interpretation and enforcement through diplomacy and participation in international organisations and agencies, including the UN. Its aim is two-fold: first, to illustrate the wide range of instruments and methodologies available to and used by the Union in adopting, integrating, promoting and developing international (multilateral) norms; and, secondly, to begin to explore the reiterative processes whereby international norms are imported into, and exported from, the Union’s legal order, helping both to form and to instrumentalise its values.