The European Commission as an international development actor: politicization from the inside?

For a long time, International Relations, Public Policy and Politics scholars have studied the diffusion and consolidation of international norms and the agency behind them as relatively uncontroversial and successful phenomena (Risse et al. 1999; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). The literature on European Union (EU) integration similarly assumed that the EU as a political authority and the norms related to its external relations were "the reflection of broadly shared internal values" (Costa 2019: 790). Nevertheless, international norms and agents are frequently contested and subjected to debates that question their legitimacy (Panke and Petersohn 2011; Wiener 2007) and that can lead to their politicization (Zürn et al. 2012). Along these lines, several studies have recently examined how populist Western (Chryssogelos 2020) and non-Western actors (Destradi et al. 2022) politicise the norms and the agency behind them by making them the object of political conflict, including the contestation of the international liberal order. Scholars of EU integration too became increasingly interested in studying politicization. Initially, they focused on how integration is politicized from the inside by the Member States (Hix 2006) as a Eurosceptic reaction against the perceived technocratic content of EU policies (Hutter and Kriesi 2019; Hoeglinger 2016; De Wilde and Zürn 2012) and as the consequence of a "constraining dissensus" about the EU itself (Hooghe and Marks,2008; 2004). Other scholars concluded that the EU’s external relations can also become the target of political conflicts. While most authors have studied the politicization of EU’s external relations within and among the Member States (Barbe et al. 2016; Hebel and Lenz 2015; Jorgensen 2013) or as a reaction coming from non-EU actors (Young 2016; Smith 2011), less attention has been devoted to the politics of EU’s external relations inside EU institutions (Peterson 1995), with a few exceptions related to the European Parliament (De Wilde et al. 2016; Stavridis and Irrera 2015). In this study, we propose to fill in this gap by exploring how international development cooperation policies can become politicized within a technocratic institution, such as the European Commission. Our focus is on the Global Gateway Initiative, launched by the Commission in 2021. The goal is to shed light on institutional dynamics within the Commission looking at how agents within this institution have conceived its international actorness. More specifically, we develop a reading based on complexity and looking at the European Commission's contributions to global governance efforts, aiming to understand if new feedback loops have been created. That is, if interaction effects between actors within its policy system, between these actors and third actors in the broader policy environment, and between actors and their institutional setting have led to related policy norms becoming more salient. Subsequently, we aim to understand if the EU institutions have become adaptive actors and through which institutional mechanisms. We also look at actor expansion as one of the mechanisms, and at how and if these adaptive efforts have led to unintended consequences such as polarisation.