International (non)recognition and territorial (un)differentiation practices in the EU’s engagement with the Western Sahara conflict

The paper investigates the EU’s engagement with the protracted decolonisation and territorial conflict of Western Sahara through the lenses of international practice theory. It conceptualises practices of international (non)recognition and practices of territorial (un)differentiation as a range of EU responses to conflicts involving contested statehood in the areas of EU foreign policy and external relations. These heterogeneous and in some cases ad hoc policies (outcomes) can be seen as budding structures which result from different patterns of social interaction between EU policymakers and non-EU state and non-state actors (processes). Upon this conceptual basis, the empirical part examines two particular features of the EU’s engagement with the Western Sahara conflict, i.e. the EU’s contractual relations with the two conflict parties and the overall lack of legal differentiation between Morocco and the Western Sahara territory under Moroccan control – a non-self-governing territory according to international law – in the EU’s external economic relations. The EU’s contractual relations with the two conflict parties are characterised by a deep asymmetry stemming from different practices of (non)recognition. While the EU maintains a remarkably dense fabric of bilateral contractual relations with Morocco, its most advanced southern Mediterranean partner along with Israel, neither the Polisario Front as a national liberation movement nor the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (RASD) proclaimed by the latter as a state in exile in 1976 are subject to any contractual relationship whatsoever with the EU. As far as practices of territorial (un)differentiation are concerned, all of the bilateral economic agreements signed between the EU and Morocco unfailingly omit any geographical demarcation of their applicability, thus tacitly including by default the Western Sahara territory. However, contradictions between the latter practice and international law have led the European Parliament (EP) to reject an EU-Morocco fisheries protocol in December 2011 and the Court of Justice of the EU to annul the EU-Morocco agricultural trade agreement in December 2015. The issue of labelling of products from Western Sahara traded under the latter agreement was also timidly put on the agenda in 2014-2015 at the EP and some EU member states’ courts.