Working Group 1: New Realities
Our Purpose
The international environment is changing rapidly and the power, balance and order in world politics are all up for reconsideration. EU foreign policy has to adapt to these new conditions and to the speed of change. The purpose of Working Group 1 is to understand and conceptualize the main features of the external environment in which the EU is cultivating its foreign relations and analyze the connections with internal EU challenges. The success of EU foreign policy depends on the EU’s ability to match stimuli and pressures originating from external with EU-domestic features. Against this backdrop, we are keen to reverse the traditional inside-out research agenda that tends to analyze EU foreign policy as a projection of European values and interests, and add a fresh and effective approach which can address the new realities of the new world order.
Join Us
If you would like to join us please get in touch with the working group leader Dr. Feride Asli Ergul Jorgensen.
Our Outcomes (selection)
For more information on the work of our COST ENTER-Working Groups, see “Publications” and “Events and Grants” on this website.
Knud Erik Jørgensen (Ed.) (2021): The Liberal International Theory Tradition in Europe, Palgrave Pivot, 10.1007/978-3-030-52643-6
This book examines how the liberal international theory tradition evolved in Europe. It includes nine chapters focusing on both historical and contemporary branches of liberal IR theorizing. The combined portrait of the prominent IR theory orientation shows a long and rich theoretical tradition but also a tradition that the scholarly community rarely fully recognize. It is currently somewhat challenged and therefore in need of further advances. Concerning the historical branches, the authors present a truly European tradition that thus was not only present in a few countries. The contributors introduce examples of liberal theorizing that IR scholars tend to dismiss and they trace the boundaries between the liberal and other theoretical traditions. Given the prominence of the tradition, the book is surprisingly among the first to present a transnational perspective on the development of the liberal international theory tradition in Europe.
Conceptual history in the European space, edited by Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden, and Javier Fernández-Sebastián, New York, Berghahn Books, 2017, 311 pp., $149.00/£110.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-78533-482-5In search of European liberalisms: concepts, languages, ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Javier Fernández-Sebastián, and Jörn Leonhard, New York, Berghahn Books, 2019, 346 pp., $135.00/£99.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-78920-280-9
The realist theoretical tradition has never enjoyed a strong position in Europe. During recent decades, although it is commonly claimed otherwise, it even seems to have lost its limited traction and most of its relatively few representatives. The aim of the article is to analyse this evolution, highlight how realist theorists have contributed limited conceptual or theoretical innovation, been unable to adjust their research agenda to current analytical challenges, and produced relatively few comprehensive empirical studies informed by one or more realist theories. Instead, we observe three main activities. Some realists do meta-studies on realist theory. Others do retrospectives, for instance, (re-)discovering the qualities of classical realist scholars or classical concepts such as the security dilemma. Still others practice ideology that may enjoy certain functions in legitimising national foreign policy orientations but has limited theoretical quality. Thus, textbooks are probably the only remaining context in which realism is presented as constituting a dominant orientation; a fact that highlights the complex and problematic relationship between reality and representation.
This study explores the reciprocal perceptions, main tendencies, prejudices and expectations of the societies in Turkey and North Cyprus. To this end, 160 participants from both societies were interviewed. The specific social processes that result in various judgements, thoughts and tendencies observed in the semi-structured interviews were evaluated by the discourse analysis method. Although the research findings and analyses are not representative of the whole populations, they still shed light on common perceptions. In fact, the results counterintuitively revealed that people from both societies exhibit increasing suspicion, if not negativity, about each other despite the widely accepted nationalist narrative of ‘motherland-babyland’, which is believed to be the main dynamic of the relations.
Arikan, Gizem; Günay, Defne (2020): Public attitudes towards climate change: A cross-country analysis. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. September. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120951013 Addressing climate change requires international effort from both governments and the public. Climate change concern is a crucial variable influencing public support for measures to address climate change. Combining country-level data with data from the Pew Research Center Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey, we test whether perceived threats from climate change influence climate change concern. We distinguish between personal threat and planetary threat and we find that both threats have substantive effects on climate change concern, with personal threat exerting a greater influence on climate change concern than planetary threat. The effects of both types of threats are also moderated by Gross Domestic Product per capita, such that threats have stronger effects on climate change concern in high-income countries than in low-income countries. Our findings contribute to the existing literature and open up new debates concerning the role of threats in climate change concern and have implications for climate change communication.
