Europeanisation, Sovereignty and Contested States: The EU in northern Cyprus and Palestine
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148117727534 |
| Author | George Kyris,Dimitris Bouris |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117727534
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2017, Vol. 19(4) 755 –771
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148117727534
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Europeanisation, Sovereignty
and Contested States: The
EU in northern Cyprus and
Palestine
Dimitris Bouris1 and George Kyris2
Abstract
Combining the literature on sovereignty and Europeanisation, this article investigates the
engagement and impact of the European Union (EU) on contested states (states lacking
recognition) through a comparative study of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC)
and Palestine. We find that characteristics of contested statehood mediate EU engagement and
impact: the lack of international recognition limits EU’s engagement but encourages development
promotion, international integration and assistance of local civil society. Lack of territorial
control limits engagement, but ineffective government offers opportunities for development
promotion and state-building. As such, and in addition to offering a rich empirical account of two
prominent contested states, the article contributes to the discussion of international engagement
by developing an innovative conceptual framework for understanding EU’s impact on contested
states—a topic neglected within a literature dominated by conventional statehood or conflict
resolution themes but very important given extensive international engagement in contested
states—and related conflicts.
Keywords
conflict, contested states, European Union, Europeanisation, sovereignty, statehood
Introduction
The post-Maastricht re-launch of European Union’s (EU) international relations, the
2004–2007 enlargement and the subsequent redrawing of its external borders brought
the EU closer to a range of conflicts and a rather awkward type of states: self-declared
states, which are not recognised by a significant part of the international community.
Indeed, the majority of conflicts in the EU’s near abroad relate to such contested
states, like Kosovo, Palestine, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC),
South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh in the post-Soviet
1Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK
Corresponding author:
George Kyris, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham,
Edgbaston B15 2TT, UK.
Email: g.kyris@bham.ac.uk
727534BPI0010.1177/1369148117727534The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsBouris and Kyris
research-article2017
Article
756 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(4)
space or, more recently, separatism in Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine. Further away,
the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Western Sahara, Somaliland and
Taiwan are also invariably important for the international role of the EU, while the
possibility of an independent but unrecognised Kurdistan shows the ongoing signifi-
cance of contested statehood in international politics.
Although the literature has tried to conceptualise the EU’s conflict resolution role (see
Diez et al., 2008; Tocci, 2007; Whitman and Wolff, 2012), the issue of contested state-
hood and its implications for EU engagement remain under-researched. While some
works on contested states have touched upon the so-called ‘engagement without recogni-
tion’ (see for example Caspersen, 2015; Cooley and Mitchell, 2010; Ker-Lindsay, 2015),
EU studies have mainly focused on the impact of integration on the state from which the
contested state attempts secession (Coppieters et al., 2004; Diez et al., 2008), how domes-
tic actors of contested states understand the EU (Popescu, 2007; Vahl and Emerson,
2004), diplomatic issues (Papadimitriou and Petrov, 2012) or the EU’s efforts for state-
building but without taking into account contested statehood (Bieber, 2011; Börzel, 2011;
Bouris, 2014). In this regard, this article addresses this gap in the literature by offering a
comparison of the TRNC and Palestine in order to answer the following central research
question: How do different parameters of contested statehood mediate the impact of the
EU on contested states?
The article focuses on contested states as those entities that have declared independ-
ence, but are not recognised by a significant part of the international community, and
which also display at least some degree of what are conventionally understood as state-
hood characteristics: a certain population, a territory, a government and capacity to enter
into relations with third states (see Geldenhuys, 2009). Conceptually, the article draws
upon debates on Europeanisation and sovereignty, the combination of which helps to
account for how the impact of the EU is mediated by a set of parameters in contested
states, namely, lack of international recognition, effective government and territorial con-
trol. Policy documents, official statements and a series of semi-structured interviews with
EU officials and local elites involved with EU policies in Brussels, Nicosia, Jerusalem
and Ramallah are analysed qualitatively. These interviews, dating back to crucial eras of
EU involvement, help to triangulate the rest of material collected and provide new empir-
ical insights. They also support the key argument of this study: that the role and impact of
the EU are compromised either because the lack of international recognition does not
allow the development of meaningful relations and because the lack of territorial control
obstructs/limits the EU’s ability to apply its policies on the ground. Yet we also find cer-
tain opportunities for the EU, namely that ineffective government allows the promotion
of state-building, while non-recognition encourages the empowerment of civil society
and/or greater international integration.
As such, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, it introduces an innovative
framework that draws upon both international relations and European studies to offer a
systematic conceptualisation of the Europeanisation of contested states, which, although
highly important and topical, remains relatively under-researched. While not exploring in
depth the relationship between Europeanisation process and the conflict trajectory, our
analysis raises a range of questions on this relationship and aims to offer a blueprint for
further research on the links between contested statehood, international engagement and
conflict resolution. Second, the article offers a rich empirical account of the EU’s role in
two prominent contested states. The article is structured as follows. The next section
reflects on the conceptual framework and research design, and it is followed by a section
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