WHEN SOUTHERN EUROPE BECAME A DISTINCTIVE PART OF THE EU István Szilágyi HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AND GLOBALISATION The European Union (EU), as a sui generis political system, is a multifaceted entity. It is a macroregion linking several regions, areas, systems, and countries to the notion of Europe, within which there are significant political, economic, social, cultural, linguistic, and foreign policy tradition differences, manifesting themselves in various priorities. It is intergovernmentalism that fundamentally characterises the union’s foreign and security policy, its ties to the other parts of the world, as well as its actions to resolve international conflicts. The formation of this foreign policy system is highly influenced by the eastern enlargement,1 the Barcelona Process launched in November 1995,2 and the European Neighbourhood Policy introduced in 2003.3 Links between the EU’s Mediterranean countries and the so-called Third World date back half a millennium; however, when examining the European Union’s relations with Latin America and the Caribbean,4 we must consider the changes that occurred after the end of the bipolar world (c. 1991), while the emergence of a multiplayer, global political system has also brought significant changes to it. In the last third of the 20th century, the termination of organised East–West conflicts, combined with the significant shift of focus in international relations, resulted in the fact that foreign policies, political actions, and the room to manouvre for states, intergovernmental organisations, and regional integrations are now increasingly dominated by non-traditional forms and means of international relations. Within the extended framework of a “transnational foreign policy,” the role of “civilisations” is enhanced,
and the network of relations, virtual or real, between regional and subregional entities is extended. The importance of non-national, non-governmental social actors, institutions, organisations, and movements in foreign policy is growing. Globalisation and the influence of civilisations on foreign policy are not new. Joaquím Aguiar, in line with Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept, links the first wave of globalisation to the great European expansion of the 16th–17th centuries.5 The trade of various products in this world system transcended national and European borders early on; internationalisation and global contact as a process linked regions with the sphere of cultures and civilisations. The second wave of globalisation, stretching from the second half of the 19th to the first half of the 20th century, witnessed the circulation of capital and the emergence of US hegemony. “The present type of globalisation, however,” according to Aguiar, “which, from the 20th, leads up to the 21st century, manifests itself as a higher-level synthesis of the previous two: as a network of eternal changes and movements, a neverending and uninterrupted circulation of products and capitals.”6 In this era of postnational globalisation, politics, and foreign policy, the territorial fundamentals of power are largely replaced with a web of processes, networks, currents, as well as control over cyberspace. Despite global movements of a transnational nature, collective existence in the 21st century has several divergent modalities and forms. Geographical factors, borders symbolising territoriality, as well as classic nation states, ethnic, cultural, and civilisational differences behind integration and disintegration tendencies, and strategic cooperation representing the new regionalism of continental–integrational POLITICS
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