Negotiating EU Foreign Policy: Evidence from the Individual Level of Analysis

Why do states use certain negotiation tactics more than others? By arguing that the personal characteristics of individual negotiators help to explain the choice of negotiation tactics, this article uses International Relations and foreign policy analysis approaches to study EU foreign policy making. In this respect, it takes issue with one of the most common challenges of the recently reinvigorated literature on individuals and International Relations – how, given all the bureaucracies they are embedded in, individuals are able to shape political decisions. The article argues that one particular group of actors – EU diplomatic negotiators – have de facto acquired ultimate policy-making responsibilities, most prominently in the selection of tactics. The image of the European negotiating state is thus re-conceptualized. Not only is the fiction of a hierarchical and vertically organized state rejected, evidence is presented of the opposite trend – what might be called the ‘partial individualization’ of the state. Next, by testing three individual characteristics (experience, social and epistemic motivations) against an original survey of 138 negotiators in EU foreign policy, the article shows that these characteristics matter in explaining variation in the use of tactics, although this does not apply to all the negotiating activities. The article also reveals that the explanatory power of individual-level characteristics is limited when the issues are of sufficient importance to potentially trigger the use of veto, or when high-profile issue-linkages are being made. The quantitative analysis is further backed up by 37 qualitative interviews.