Europe of the people or Europe of elites? The influence of citizen discourse on EU foreign policy decision-making
Creators: name: Christou, Andrea
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: EU foreign policy
EU foreign policy decision-making
Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)
permissive consensus
Cyprus
Ireland

description: Citizens, especially as constituents, form integral parts of the internal dynamics of the EU polity. They have the ability to influence policy-making and political action through discourse, which includes intersubjectively constructed dispositions, ideas and beliefs, that determines how they make sense of policies and whether they support or oppose them. Therefore, citizen discourse has the ability to influence processes of deliberation, policy formulation and legitimation in citizen-elite interactions. Nevertheless, the process of foreign policy has largely been assumed to be elite-driven, minimising citizen-elite interactions and constraining citizens from conveying their discourse in the decision-making process. Even more so, the highly composite nature of the EU, including the intergovernmental nature of European Union (EU) foreign policy, means that it has to rely on member state governments to be responsive to citizen discourse which is more likely if national institutions afford opportunities for citizens to share their input throughout different phases of the policy-making cycle. This has put further constraints on policy responsiveness across the EU creating a discursive and legitimation gap which can have negative implications for policies as well as the quality of democracy that citizens can expect from the EU. While support for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is currently stable and relatively high, public opinion remains latent with few citizens prioritising foreign policy. Therefore, given the role of citizen discourse in setting the limits of what can be achieved through political action, policy-makers have an opportunity to capitalise on this support by using citizen discourse as the building blocks for policy decisions, ensuring that policies are understood and supported by the public. As the EU endeavours to become a stronger and more assertive global actor, activating latent opinions and enhancing the acceptability of advancing EU foreign policy amongst its citizens can thus contribute to the development of an active, rather than passive, ‘permissive consensus.’ However, it is essential to ensure that both national and EU institutions are responsive to what citizens want by enhancing citizen engagement and participation. This research is, therefore, concerned with the relationship between citizen discourse and elite decisions in EU foreign policy. In particular, it examines the conditions under which citizen discourse can influence EU foreign policy decision-making. Through a discursive institutionalist perspective, the research analyses the institutional constraints in two different types of democracies, Cyprus (a simple polity) and Ireland (a compound polity), that affect how discourse proceeds and matters for policy changes, potentially acting as barriers to productive engagement. The research is conducted through a discourse analysis to study the effect of discourse on political outcomes and elite and expert interviews to corroborate the sources used. The findings suggest that in polities with (institutionalised) opportunities for citizens to share their input in decision-making, citizens are more likely to support policies and find institutions and the EU legitimate. Therefore, this demonstrates that elites have an incentive to be responsive to citizen discourse and use it as a basis to make decisions and policies that resonate with citizens. Using Habermas’ theories of communicative action and deliberative democracy, the research also makes normative recommendations aimed to renew authenticity in democratic institutions through deliberative approaches.