In the last decade, due to both institutional developments and external pressures resulting from the growing unpredictability of the EU’s security environment, EU’s foreign policy practices have grown increasingly complex. Among other institutional practices, instances of both internal and external differentiation have increased. Scholarly attention has focused on the value – or lack thereof – of differentiation for the coherence of the EU’s foreign and security policy, as well on the various forms that differentiated integration (DI) can take in this policy field (e.g. Permanent Structured Cooperation). Yet, despite the growing debate on DI in EU’s foreign and security policy, there is a general lack of scholarly work offering convincing theoretical explanation underpinned by empirical data. Additionally, existing literature generally overlooks the reasons why the existing Treaty-based mechanisms that can enable differentiation in this policy sector, such as constructive abstention, have hardly been used. Against this backdrop, the aim of the workshop is to advance the scholarly debate, and to grasp the complexity of differentiation in EU’s foreign and security policy by providing a more comprehensive understanding of this increasingly important phenomenon, its underlying logic, manifestations, and the consequences for the coherence of this policy area.

PROGRAMME & REGISTRATION

 

In 2003, the Hu Jintao administration optimistically argued that China would achieve a ‘Peaceful Rise’ in the global order and promoted cooperative multilateral diplomacy. However, when Hu Jintao retired as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, China was surrounded by hostile neighbours across the sea, who were deeply suspicious about China’s maritime ambitions. The change in situations was brought about by the regular law enforcement activities in the South and East China Sea carried out by the China Marine Surveillance under the State Oceanic Administration (SOA). The SOA was a small, low-profile organisation in the late 1990s but grew rapidly in the 2000s by inflaming anti-Japanese nationalism over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Island issue in China. This seminar will review the SOA’s organisational history until its dismantlement in 2018 and discuss how domestic factors can affect external relations in China.

Speaker: Chisako T. Masuo (Kyushu University)
Organiser: Giulio Pugliese (University of Oxford and European University Institute)

PROGRAMME & REGISTRATION

In recent years, Xi Jinping has been calling both for China’s people and the global population to ‘stand on the right side of history’. On the basis of the Communist Party’s unique Marxist understanding of history, Xi believes that he is carrying out an important historical mission to ‘win’ the next age by achieving advanced high-tech innovations that will be the foundation for the next generation of human society. For this purpose, China has been building a huge ‘National Spatial Infrastructure’ that covers the entire globe with a network of satellites, enabling the government to obtain, monitor, and communicate various data on human activities and global conditions from the sky.

Speaker: Chisako T. Masuo (Kyushu University)
Organiser: Giulio Pugliese (University of Oxford and European University Institute)

PROGRAMME & REGISTRATION