The Exercise of International Civil Power

Abstract

The words 'power' and 'influence' are unusually frequent in literature on international politics, but despite this, these terms represent an area where intensified research still seems necessary. Power is too often considered synonymous with military power, and so certain aspects of international power have been neglected. There is little known about how power is exercised by means of non-coercive methods through the exploita tion of a non-military power base. What, for instance, are the conditions that will enable a nation to negotiate successfully about the international monetary system in the IMF and other organizations? Civil power is exercised when one nation makes another behave in accordance with its own preferences by employing only the non-military components at its power base. Civil power is a theoretical concept which only rarely exists in reality.

Still Punching below Its Weight? Coherence and Effectiveness in European Union Foreign Policy*

“…Despite the EU's coherence on this issue, its collective effort to blunt the American quest for BNAs had little observable positive effect. This finding indicates that achieving ‘actorness’–‘the capacity to behave actively and deliberately in relation to other actors in the international system’ (Sjöstedt, 1977, p. 16) – is no guarantee that the EU will be able to ‘punch its weight politically’.…”

“…The importance of speaking and acting as one is a prominent theme, both explicitly and implicitly, in the scholarly literature on EU foreign policy and especially EU ‘actorness’ in world affairs (Sjöstedt, 1977; Jupille and Caporaso, 1998; Jupille, 1999; Meunier, 2000; Missiroli, 2001; Bretherton and Vogler, 2006; Lerch and Schwellnus, 2006; Smith, 2006; Groenleer and Van Schaik, 2007). Yet contributors to this literature disagree on how to define and measure the concept.…”

“…To that end, this article develops and illustrates the use of a parsimonious and generalizable framework for analyzing the relationship between coherence and effectiveness in EU foreign policy – that is, whether becoming a more coherent foreign policy actor will enable the EU to play a role in world affairs commensurate with its vast resources. In so doing, it casts new light on the meaning and dynamics of EU actorness, understood as the Union's ‘capacity to behave actively and deliberately in relation to other actors in the international system’ (Sjöstedt, 1977, p. 16).…”

The Geoeconomic Turn of the Single European Market? Conceptual Challenges and Empirical Trends

“…One of the measures for examining the implications of the geoeconomic turn for the EU's international role is through the concept of actorness , classically understood as the ‘capacity to behave actively and deliberately in relation to other actors in the international system’ (Sjöstedt, 1977). The concept resembles the notion of strategic autonomy, defined by the EU as the ‘ability to act and cooperate with international and regional partners wherever possible, while being able to operate autonomously when and where necessary’ (European Union, 2016, p. 19).…”

Between conflict management and role conflict: the EU in the Libyan crisis

“…However, much of this literature focuses on the constitutive elements of EU actorness and less on the inter-subjective co-constitution of its role (Harnisch 2011, p. 7). Accordingly, standard definitions of European actorness concentrate more heavily on EU cohesion, capabilities and autonomy than on the recognition or perception by others (Sjöstedt 1977, Jupille and Caporaso 1998, Bretherton and Vogler 1999, 2006.…”