The central objective of this study is to investigate the EU’s impact on global climate politics. To do so, a concept has to be designed that is capable of linking an actor-centric perspective, focussed on the EU, to the analysis of global politics. By referring to EU activities in the global climate regime as foreign policy, i.e. an area of politics directed at the external environment with the objective of inf luencing that environment, inf luence was identif ied as suitable to serve as this hinge. The concept captures the relationship between a purposive actor and its surrounding at the global level, at which this actor potentially causes change.
Employing a suff iciently specif ied concept of inf luence has several advantages for the type of study envisaged. F irst, as “all politics is the exercise of inf luence” (Dahl/Stinebrickner 2003: 34), manifold def ini-tions and conceptualizadef ini-tions exist. This makes it not only possible but even necessary to build the concept of inf luence in a manner “appropriate to the substance of the phenomenon” that is studied (Goertz 2006: 16).
Second, several inf luence analysis methods have already been applied to complex decision-making arrangements at the global level and can serve as sources of inspiration for designing an analytical framework capable of determining EU impact (Betsill/Correll 2008; Arts/Verschuren 1999).
F inally, inf luence can be regarded as a “continuous concept” (Goertz 2006: 34): it allows for assessments about the EU’s performance in global affairs in terms of gradations. The Union could, for instance, have abun-dant, substantial, little or no inf luence on specif ic decisions taken in the
global climate regime. Assessing the EU’s performance in terms of grada-tions makes it possible to specify its impact and effectiveness much more precisely than through a concept like leadership (Gupta/Grubb 2000). The latter allows, in essence, only for general, binary yes-no assessments: ei-ther the EU is a leader or not. At the same time, while the attribution of a leadership role demands the fulf ilment of high normative criteria, an actor can be inf luential in global policy-making without necessarily (i) having to be a leader and (ii) having to be benign (Sjöstedt 1999: 228).
When it comes to def ining and analysing inf luence, leading public policy analysts like Dahl and Stinebrickner lament the “absence of stand-ard terminology” (2003: 12). Their own def inition then also incorporates elements of various conceptualizations advanced by other scholars (e.g.
Braam 1975; Nagel 1975). To them, inf luence is “a relation among human actors such that wants, desires, preferences, or intentions of one (…) actor (…) affect the actions, or predispositions to act of one or more actors in a direction consistent with (…) the wants, preferences or intentions of the inf luence-wielder” (Dahl/Stinebrickner 2003: 17). The def inition high-lights the existence of an inf luence-wielder and one or more inf luenced, which stand in some form of relationship to each other, while specifying the changes that the inf luenced is or are undergoing. Coming close to the def inition of relational power as “getting another actor to do what it would otherwise not do” (Dahl 1957), this depiction of inf luence stress-es a key challenge for any study of inf luence, which consists in distin-guishing it from the closely related concept of power. Cox and Jacobson (1973: 3) made this distinction in the most convincing manner, def ining inf luence as “the modif ication of one actor’s behaviour by that of an-other” for the purpose of reaching the latter actor’s aims, specifying that
“[p]ower means capability (…). Power may be converted into inf luence, but it is not necessarily so converted at all or to its full extent”.
This distinction between power and inf luence becomes central when the concept of inf luence is applied in and to foreign policy analyses.
Foreign policy has regularly been def ined with reference to inf luence in international relations (Hudson/Vore 1995: 215), as the “attempts by gov-ernments to inf luence or manage events outside the state’s boundaries”
(Manners/Whitman 2000: 2), as “those actions which, expressed in the form of explicitly stated goals, commitments and/or directives, and pur-sued by governmental representatives (…), are directed toward objectives, conditions and actors (…) which they want to affect and which lie be-yond their territorial legitimacy” (Carlsnaes 2002: 333, emphasis added), or, in the formula that is also adopted here, as an “area of politics which is directed at the external environment with the objective of inf luencing that environment and the behaviour of other actors within it, in order to pursue interests, values and goals” (Keukeleire/MacNaughtan 2008: 19).
Consequently, classical foreign policy analysis distinguishes between
“foreign policy making”, the study of how the objectives of foreign policy are formulated internally, and “foreign policy implementation”, which re-fers in essence to how decisions taken internally by foreign policy actors are expressed in concrete actions aimed at inf luencing others when these
“actors confront their environment and (…) the environment confronts them” (Brighi/Hill 2008: 118; Webber/Smith 2002: 79–104). Against this backdrop of widely used def initions and understandings of inf luence in public policy and foreign policy analysis,1 it becomes possible to under-take the crucial step of building the concept in a manner “appropriate to the substance of the phenomenon” that is studied here, i.e. the EU’s inf luence as a foreign policy actor on the global climate regime. In this process, a distinction is made between two closely related concepts that are successively employed in the study: inf luence attempts and inf luence.
To enhance the analytical sharpness of the concept of inf luence, and to take account of the notion of foreign policy implementation as a set of actions undertaken with the intention of impacting an external context, it is f irst necessary to introduce the concept of inf luence attempts. These can be def ined as acts by an actor exerted with the purpose of bringing about change in the behaviour, preferences or beliefs of other actors in order to attain its aims.2 Inf luence attempts are analytically distinct from, but conceptually complement inf luence. An actor’s inf luence is, in fact, the product of its successful exercise of an inf luence attempt.
Once def ined as such, this concept can be dissected into various
“constitutive dimensions”, which implies that the “preliminary idea (…) formed” through the def inition is expanded via the identif ication of nec-essary and suff icient conditions and/or causal mechanisms that need to be fulf illed to analytically ascertain the presence of an inf luence attempt (Goertz 2006: 6). Two core components can be detected:
1. INTERACTION: Inf luence attempts require some form of direct or indirect relation between a potential inf luence-wielder and one or more inf luence targets (Dahl/Stinebrickner 2003; Cox/Jacobson 1973).
2. PURPOSIVE BEHAVIOUR: The inf luence-wielder acts because it “wants to affect” the inf luence target (Carlsnaes 2002: 333).
Both components must be regarded as necessary conditions. Together, they are suff icient to determine that a foreign policy act qualif ies as inf luence attempt.
1 For a more detailed discussion and critique of common conceptualizations of inf luence, see Schunz 2010: chap. 2.
2 The def inition is inspired by Cox/Jacobson (1973: 3). Inf luence-wielders and inf luence targets can be states, but also non-state entities such as NGOs.
Various techniques of inf luencing have been identif ied in the IR and foreign policy literature. In International Relations, a set of six “acts of inf luencing” has regularly been evoked (Holsti 1995: 125–126): persua-sion, offering rewards, granting rewards, threatening punishment, inf licting punishment and using force. In a foreign policy analysis context, inf luence attempts come above all in the form of foreign policy acts/tools. Analysts quite regularly evoke two types of foreign policy tools: diplomatic and economic instruments (Brighi/Hill 2008: 131–132; Webber/Smith 2002:
87–90). As such classif ications tend to remain abstract, operationalization attempts like the World Event Interaction Coding Scheme (WEIS) have led to catalogues of foreign policy acts “as an aid to productive analysis” of for-eign policy (Wilkenfeld et al. 1980: 117, 19). The WEIS catalogue identif ies 22 verbs such as “to promise”, “to grant” or “to reward” in order to pinpoint concretely what a foreign policy actor does when trying to exert inf luence.
These classif ications are integrated into a broader overview when it comes to specifying EU inf luence attempts in a subsequent section (see Table 2).
Based on its delimitation from the concept of inf luence attempt, inf luence is re-def ined in this study as the modif ication of one or several actors’ behaviour, preferences or beliefs by acts of another actor exerted for the purpose of reaching the latter actor’s aims.3 Four core components of the concept are identif ied, two of which overlap with the constitutive dimensions of inf luence attempts.
1. INTERACTION: Inf luence attempts require some form of direct or indirection relation between a potential inf luence-wielder and one or more inf luence targets.
2. PURPOSIVE BEHAVIOUR: The inf luence-wielder acts because it “wants to affect” the inf luence target.
3. TEMPORAL SEQUENCE: Actions by the inf luence-wielder precede any type of behavioural or mind change in the inf luenced (Braam 1975; Cox/Jacobson 1973).
4. GOAL ATTAINMENT: The behavioural or mind change in the inf luenced must go “in a direction consistent with (…) the wants, preferences or intentions of the inf luence-wielder” (Dahl/
Stinebrickner 2003: 17). In other words, the inf luence-wielder’s purposive behaviour is successful: its goal is attained. On this point, it has to be borne in mind that inf luence is a continuous concept. Partial goal attainment or shared inf luence-wielding with others do not rule out inf luence.
3 It has to be noted that inf luence can also be aimed at avoiding change. In this case, an inf luence-wielder would try – and ultimately succeed in – altering the behaviour, beliefs or preferences of those who desire change.
With this, the “positive pole” of inf luence is determined (Goertz 2006). Considering also its negative pole (when is what we observe no longer inf luence), a f ifth dimension comes into play:
5. ABSENCE OF AUTO-CAUSATION: Logically, observed be-havioural or mind changes qualify only as inf luence if they can be – at least in part – attributed to the activity of the inf luence-wielder, and not exclusively to some other reason that may be inherent4 to the inf luence target (Braam 1975; Huberts 1994).
All f ive components are necessary conditions. Together, they are suff icient to determine inf luence via conditional causal analysis.
While conditional causal analysis (Mackie 1974) tells us that certain conditions lead to the identif ied outcomes, it is unable to specify how and, above all, why precisely this happens (Mahoney 2003). Going a step further to – tentatively – explain why an actor has had inf luence amounts thus to accounting for an already established causal relationship. To “fully explain particular outcomes” (Mahoney 2003: 1), it has been suggested to resort to a different form of causal analysis by employing “causal mech-anisms”, i.e. “frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal pat-terns” in social reality (Elster 1998: 45). To do so, two causal mechanisms are integrated at the level of the constitutive dimensions of inf luence (and inf luence attempts) by specifying the f irst necessary condition (“interaction”). Since “inf luence is possible only when communication occurs” (Knocke 1990: 3), the relations between an inf luence-wielder and the inf luenced can take essentially two forms of communicative action: they can follow either a bargaining or an arguing logic of so-cial interaction (Risse 2004). Arguing as a form of communication can be def ined as “non-manipulative reason-giving” (Keohane 2001: 10).
It is based on speech acts that can be described with verbs like to claim, to ask, to inform and to justify (Holzinger 2004).5 Arguing typically aims at and involves a reasoned consensus among actors, who change their beliefs or preferences in the direction of what they perceive as the best ar-gument (Kleine/Risse 2005: 9).6 Bargaining as communicative action, by
4 Obviously, a change in an inf luenced actor can also be the result of a third actor’s inf luence. Inf luence of the analysed actor would in this case already be excluded through any of the f irst four conditions.
5 It has been remarked that arguing as a mode of communication can also be used stra-tegically for bargaining purposes. Yet, according to Risse (2002: 601), in a real nego-tiation process, this use of arguing will, once challenged by others, either quickly be unmasked as bargaining in disguise or it will transform into genuine arguing as quest for a reasoned consensus when a true exchange of arguments sets in.
6 This is a basic, empirically useful def inition of arguing. Far-reaching assumptions on the preconditions for arguing to set in between actors are made in Habermas’ original theory of communicative action (1981). His normative criteria for consensus-oriented
contrast, depicts negotiations between two or more parties that are charac-terized by strategic interaction and the exchange of promises, concessions and threats (Holzinger 2004). It is targeted at positions and behavioural changes and typically results in a compromise in which actors’ prefer-ences and beliefs remain unaltered (Saretzki 1996). To further distin-guish arguing from bargaining, Risse proposes to focus on the outcome of a negotiation process: a consensus based on arguing has been reached when the result is surprising, transcends the level of the lowest com-mon denominator, and actors indicate similar reasons for it (2004: 302).
Whenever these conditions do not hold, the result must be regarded as a compromise achieved via bargaining.7 Each of the two interaction modes corresponds to a specif ic set of foreign policy tools, as further elabo-rated on below specif ically for the EU case. Both inf luence and inf luence attempts can be argumentation- or bargaining-based.
As inf luence is a truly multi-dimensional concept, several additional clarif ications need to be made to fully operationalize it. F irst, while it may be true that inf luence attempts can be isolated, incidental actions, both the intentions behind these acts and the effects they produce (the ac-tual inf luence) need not be restricted to short-term behavioural changes.
Inf luence attempts can also be exerted with a long-term strategy and have sustainable effects (e.g. when another actor’s beliefs are permanently al-tered). Second, inf luence can affect agenda-setting or outcomes of po-litical processes. Third, one can distinguish between different objects of inf luence, which can be one/more actor(s) or structures, understood as the formal and informal frameworks of interaction for actors in a given context (Giddens 1984). Such structures can become the ultimate aims of inf luence attempts via the intermittent display of “the modif ication of one or several actors’ behaviour, preferences or beliefs”. The operation-alization of inf luence and inf luence attempts is summarized in Table 1, which serves as a typology for the study.
Another important clarif ication with regard to inf luence can be made by referring to the notion of “continuous concept” introduced above (Goertz 2006: 34). The degree of inf luence can be established on the
activity (“verständigungsorientiertes Handeln”) are extremely demanding, including the necessity for actors to accept each other as equals and to share a common lifeworld (“gemeinsame Lebenswelt”). In the context of this work, no such normative assump-tions are made. Rather, emphasis is placed on the application of inf luence acts that can be interpreted as argumentative action in concrete empirical contexts, and on the ex post identif ication of the conditions under which inf luence was exerted.
7 Both bargaining and arguing are ideal-types, which can overlap and mix in social reality (Risse 2002: 601; Ulbert et al. 2004). Both are necessary to study reality, especially in a context of regime negotiations about international legal rules, which can hardly be un-derstood by exclusively focussing on the analysis of strategic behaviour (Steffek 2005).
basis of an assessment that sets into relation (i) the signif icance of the inf luence-wielder’s input vis-à-vis the f inal outcome of a negotiation process and (ii) the importance of the output of this negotiation process.
As in the case of determining inf luence, establishing its degree requires interpretation in context. Several assumptions can nonetheless be made.
For one, an actor’s inf luence can be considered as highest when it at-tains its goals to the largest possible extent (extent of goal attainment).
Focusing on the outcome, this actor’s inf luence is highest if it attains its aims and the agreement has a high level of durability (e.g. through the creation of a durable structure) and/or of legal bindingness (e.g. an international treaty) (durability of the outcome). A tentative classif ica-tion of degrees of inf luence could thus be to refer to inf luence as very high (high extent of goal attainment, high degree of durability), high (certain degree of goal attainment, some degree of durability), low (low to medium goal attainment and durability) or inexistent (no goal attain-ment) (for a more complex formula: Arts/Verschuren 1999: 419–420).
Such classif ication represents a heuristic device to enable cross-case, cross-time comparisons.
Table 1: Toward a Typology of Inf luence Dimensions