The International Spectator, Vol. 54, No. 1, March 2019

Unintended Consequences of EU External Action
Olga Burlyuk and Gergana Noutcheva
There is a gap in IR and EU scholarship concerning unintended consequences in an international context, leaving this important phenomenon understudied. To fill this gap, a conceptualisation of unintended consequences is offered, and a set of common research questions are presented, highlighting the nature (what), the causes (why) and the modes of management (how) of unintended consequences of EU external action. The Special Issue contributes to the study of the EU as an international actor by broadening the notion of the EU’s impact abroad to include the unintended consequences of EU (in)actions and by shedding new light on the conceptual paradigms that explain EU external action.
Keywords: unintended consequences, international relations, EU external action; foreign policy
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The Unintended Consequences of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Negotiations
Ferdi De Ville and Niels Gheyle
Although stalled since 2016, the negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have had major unintended consequences. The TTIP led to demands from third countries to upgrade their trade relationship with the EU and to unprecedented politicisation. As second-order effects of the latter, it endangered the EU-Canada trade agreement and brought about reform of EU trade governance and amendments to EU trade policy positions. These unintended consequences occurred because of inflated expectations about and insufficient awareness of the different nature of TTIP with regard to scope and partner compared to other trade negotiations. In the meantime, EU trade policy has adapted to the new politics of trade, making unintended consequences less likely.
Keywords: EU trade policy, unintended consequences, trade negotiations, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
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Horizontal and Vertical Diversity: Unintended Consequences of EU External Migration Policy
Natasja Reslow
Unintended consequences arising from EU external migration policy are a result of the multi-actor nature of this policy and of policy interactions. In addition, scholars face serious methodological challenges in establishing what the EU’s ‘intent’ is in external migration policy and, therefore, in determining which consequences are intended and which are unintended. The literature on the implementation and evaluation of EU external migration policy is in its infancy, and future work should take into account all policy outcomes – both those that were intended and those that were not.
Keywords: EU migration policy, unintended consequences, policy interactions, multilevel governance
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Purposefully Triggering Unintended Consequences: the European Commission and the Uncertain Future of the EU-ACP Partnership
Maurizio Carbone
The EU’s proposal to renew the EU-ACP Agreement in spite of a number of signals pointing in the opposite direction is, inter alia, the unintended consequence of independent decisions taken in three different policy areas (trade, environment, and foreign and security affairs). The common unintended consequence that the three decisions shared would not have materialised if the European Commission had not purposefully triggered it to justify its vision of future EU-ACP relations. These findings challenge the prevailing and superficial usage of the notion of the unintended as a synonym for unanticipated and undesirable, and demonstrate that unintended consequences do not necessarily presuppose lack of anticipation, but may well be the result of calculation by policymakers.
Keywords: unintended consequences, EU-ACP relations, Cotonou Agreement, Paris Agreement, Economic Partnership Agreements, EU Global Strategy
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The Unintended Consequences of the EU’s Rural Development Programme in the Arab Countryside
Christos Kourtelis
After the Arab revolts, the EU designed a new regional rural development programme to address the various political and economic threats in the Arab Mediterranean countryside. Although the programme is based on a new cognitive framework, it has generated unintended consequences that undermine its effectiveness. These consequences were predictable. They are a product of path dependency and the inability of policymakers to draw lessons from previous EU initiatives with similar aims and to contextualise the relationship between small farmers and political elites in the Arab countryside.
Keywords: ENP, ENPARD, rural development, North Africa, unintended consequences
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The Unintended Consequences of a European Neighbourhood Policy without Russia
Tom Casier
After Russia’s retreat from the European Neighbourhood Policy, the EU’s policy towards its eastern neighbours was split up. The internal unintended consequence of the EU’s choice to leave its policy unaltered was a tension between the objective of privileged relations with ENP countries and a promise to recognise the interests of Russia as an equal partner. Externally, the unintended outcome was that this fostered two opposing strategic environments: a cooperative one for the EaP and a competitive one with Russia. In terms of the management of unintended consequences, the EU has actively sought to reinforce its normative hegemony towards EaP countries, while at the same time mitigating certain negative unintended effects.
Keywords: EU-Russia relations, European Neighbourhood Policy, Eastern Partnership, unintended consequences
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Unintended Consequences of State-building Projects in Contested States: The EU in Palestine
Dimitris Bouris
The existing literature on state-building has focused mainly on post-conflict cases and ‘conventional’ examples of statehood, without taking into consideration the particularities of states that remain internally and/or externally contested. The EU’s engagement in Palestinian state-building through the deployment of EUPOL COPPS and EUBAM Rafah has generated various types of unintended consequences: anticipated and unanticipated, positive and negative, desirable and undesirable, some of which fulfill and some of which frustrate the initial intention. These have important reverberations for the EU’s conflict resolution strategies in Israel and Palestine, the most important being the strengthening of power imbalances and the enforcement of the status quo.
Keywords: State-building, contested statehood, unintended consequences, EUPOL COPPS, EUBAM Rafah, EU, Palestine
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Unintended Consequences of EU Democracy Support in the European Neighbourhood
Assem Dandashly and Gergana Noutcheva
The European Union’s (EU) impact on the political governance of the European neighbourhood is varied and sometimes opposite to the declared objectives of its democracy support policies. The democracy promotion literature has to a large extent neglected the unintended consequences of EU democracy support in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. The EU has left multiple imprints on the political trajectories of the countries in the neighbourhood and yet the dominant explanation, highlighting the EU’s security and economic interests in the two regions,cannot fully account for the unintended consequences of its policies. The literature on the ‘pathologies’ of international organisations offers an explanation, emphasizing the failures of the EU bureaucracy to anticipate, prevent or reverse the undesired effects of its democracy support in the neighbourhood.
Keywords: Democracy promotion, ENP, unintended consequences, bureaucracy, Eastern Europe, MENA
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EU External Action, Intention and Explanation
Frank de Zwart and Karolina Pomorska
“Unintended consequences” is an umbrella concept. It comprises phenomena that differ in crucial respects and consequently, without refinement, it remains a rather blunt instrument for policy analysis. The contributions in this volume, however, show that disentangling unintended consequences by making clear distinctions between various types, makes the concept much more useful for policy analysis. Assessing the impact of EU foreign policies as studied in this volume, we show that “bonuses”, “windfalls”, “accidents”, and “trade-offs” – all unintended – are very different when it comes to the explanation of policy outcomes, or to allocating responsibility for them.
Keywords: EU External Action, foreign policy, unintended consequences
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Book Reviews

Palestine in World Society: Beyond Middle East Exceptionalism
Ali Bilgiç
Review of: Deconstructing the dynamics of world-societal order : the power of governmentality in Palestine, by Jan Busse, Routledge, 2018
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The Search for Meaningful Democracy in the Balkans
Daniela Lai
Review of: Hunger and fury : the crisis of democracy in the Balkans, by Jasmin Mujanovic, Hurst, 2018
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Libya and the US: A Fatal Nexus
Roberto Aliboni
Review of: The burning shores : inside the battle for the new Libya, by Frederic Wehrey, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018
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Deepening Mutual Understanding: Mission Impossible for China and the EU?
Wang Shichen
Review of: Deepening the EU-China partnership : bridging institutional and ideational differences in an unstable world, edited by Mario Telò, Ding Chun and Zhang Xiaotong, Routledge, 2018
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