1st Edition
Small States in EU Policy-Making Strategies, Challenges, Opportunities
Small States in EU Policy-Making analyses how small states try to impact European Union policy-making through a range of strategies.
With the last rounds of enlargement and Brexit, the number and weight of small states in the European Union have steadily increased. At the same time, small states face distinct challenges in different institutions, which may impact their strategies. Nonetheless, the existing literature primarily focuses on the Council of the European Union and the European Council and offers few insights into how small states navigate the other institutions. The contributions to this volume examine how small states can wield influence in different institutions, arguing that they do indeed pursue different strategies depending on institutional context. The policy case studies on the EU’s foreign and security policies confirm these findings: small states can have influence in EU policy-making and can create situations where their needs are met. They are most likely to succeed when they build foreign policy coalitions, when they anticipate major economic developments and when they manage to acquire a high level of expertise in a policy area. However, the case studies also show that there is a risk of small states becoming policy-takers in cases where they cannot provide leadership in terms of ideas and expertise and/or fail to build political weight through coalitions.
This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners of European politics and the EU in particular, as well as policy-makers and practitioners working on small states.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
1. Introduction: The Challenges and Opportunities of EU Membership for Small States, Anna-Lena Högenauer and Matúš Mišík. Section I: Small states in the EU's institutions and policy processes. 2. Small Member States in the European Commission of the 21st Century, Lukáš Hamřík; 3. Small States in the European Parliament: Does Size Make a Difference? Anna-Lena Högenauer; 4. Bringing the European Parliament: Does Size Make a Difference? Ieva Grumbinaitė; 5. Small states coalition building in EU policy-making: the cases of the Nordic and Baltic countries, Tobias Etzold; 6. Small-State Veto Power in the European Union? National Interests and Coalition-Building Capacity of the Member States in Central and Eastern Europe, Boyka Stefanova. Section II: Small states in foreign, security and trade policy. 7. The Economic Diplomacy of Luxembourg within the European Union framework: between agility and stability, Helen Kavvadia;. 8. Small states, subregional minilateralism, and European foreign policy, Marion Foster and Michael Mosser; 9. Small State Influence in EU Security Policy-making: PESCO, Frontex, and the Integration Dilemma, Béranger Dominici, Olivier Lewis and Sebastian Steingass; 10. Challenges and Opportunities: Estonia's Role in Shaping EU Cybersecurity Policy, Xinchuchu Gao; 11. Conclusion: Size Is Not Everything, Anna-Lena Högenauer and Matúš Mišík
Biography
Anna-Lena Högenauer is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Luxembourg. Her research focuses on questions of multilevel governance, EU politics and parliamentary democracy. She is Associate Editor of PRX and a member of the editorial boards of Politics and Governance and of Small States & Territories.
Matúš Mišík is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Comenius University Bratislava. His research interests include small states and energy security in the EU. He is the author of External Energy Security in the European Union (Routledge, 2019), co-author of Energy Transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (2024) and has published articles in journals including Nature Energy, Energy, Energy Policy and Geopolitics.
