Politicisation and Contestation in European Foreign Policy Cooperation

That European integration is increasingly politicised and contested is a well-established argument in the scholarship. Yet, for many years, foreign and security policies appeared to remain insulated from such developments, not least because of the intergovernmental nature of these policies. Only recently, there have been calls to take the impact of politicisation seriously in EU external relation policies (Costa, 2019). This paper is concerned with how politicisation and contestation manifest at the micro-level and, in particular, how they might shape every day European foreign policy cooperation. The focus of this article is on institutional arenas, i.e. Brussels-based committees where national diplomats meet to discuss EU foreign policy issues. Previous scholarship has argued that the Council’s in-camera settings help facilitate co-operative styles of negotiation because they enable diffuse reciprocity and are relatively insulated from the domestic arena. So, how has then the increasing politicisation affected consensus building? The paper focuses in particular on how politicisation resulting from the illiberal turn and coming from ‘challenger governments’ has driven normative contestation of substantive and procedural norms within EU foreign policy negotiations.