The 2011 Debacle Over Danish Border Control: a Mismatch of Domestic and European Games Malthe Munkøe
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The 2011 Debacle over Danish Border Control: A Mismatch of Domestic and European Games Malthe Munkøe DEPARTMENT OF EU INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND DIPLOMACY STUDIES EU Diplomacy Paper 01 / 2012 Department of EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies EU Diplomacy Papers 1/2012 The 2011 Debacle over Danish Border Control: A Mismatch of Domestic and European Games Malthe Munkøe © Malthe Munkøe 2012 Dijver 11 | BE-8000 Bruges, Belgium | Tel. +32 (0)50 477 251 | Fax +32 (0)50 477 250 | E-mail [email protected] | www.coleurope.eu/ird Malthe Munkøe About the Author Malthe Munkøe is Consultant at Dansk Erhverv (The Danish Chamber of Commerce), a Danish business confederation. He holds an MA in EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies (Charles Darwin Promotion 2010) from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, and a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has previously published in a number of Danish academic journals and edited book anthologies on the financial crisis and on public sector reforms. Editorial Team: Andrew Bower, Gino Brunswijck, Francesca Fenton, Grzegorz Grobicki, Sieglinde Gstöhl, Vincent Laporte, Jing Men, Raphaël Métais, Charles Thépaut, Claudia Zulaika Escauriaza Dijver 11 | BE-8000 Bruges, Belgium | Tel. +32 (0)50 477 251 | Fax +32 (0)50 477 250 | E-mail [email protected] | www.coleurope.eu/ird Views expressed in the EU Diplomacy Papers are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect positions of either the series editors or the College of Europe. 2 EU Diplomacy Paper 1/2012 Abstract In May 2011 the Danish minority government successfully obtained the support of the Danish People’s Party to carry out a comprehensive pension reform. In return, it was agreed that Denmark would reintroduce border controls. However, this appeared to be at odds with the Schengen Agreement and prompted a heated response from Berlin and Brussels. The Danish government had to backtrack and insist that the proposed initiatives would not violate the Schengen acquis. This paper examines how a purely domestic issue galvanized into a strong diplomatic pressure on Denmark, and what that tells us of modern diplomacy in an integrated Europe. It argues that by linking its pension reform with border controls, the Danish government introduced the international level into its national negotiations. This illustrates that the two levels cannot be kept entirely separate in the European Union and diplomacy increasingly becomes a part of daily policy-making. 3 Malthe Munkøe The debacle over Danish border controls: interplay between national and European politics In the spring of 2011 a most peculiar string of events unfolded that originated in the attempts by the Danish government to find parliamentary support to pass a pension reform, and culminated in heated diplomatic exchanges with its European partners who feared that Denmark was about to violate the Schengen Agreement which had abolished border controls. How did a rather obscure domestic issue become a matter of contention between the Danish government, the European Commission and other European countries? And what does this recent series of events tell us about how modern diplomacy is conducted in the context of an unfolding process of European integration? In order to understand why the Danish government became embroiled in this diplomatic controversy we must appreciate how the process of European integra- tion brings national politics and European-level negotiations closer together. Essentially, the Danish government tried to have it both ways by promising concessions to the nationalist Danish People's Party (DPP) in the form of a tightening of border controls in return for its support for a pension reform, while insisting vis-à-vis its European partners that it would abide strictly to the Schengen Agreement. The inconsistency of this position soon became evident when the other European countries began to fret over the prospects of Denmark ‘reintroducing border controls’ as the Danish People's Party proudly proclaimed in national news media. Traditionally, international relations are portrayed as a separate sphere of ‘high politics’ utterly distinct form national-level domestic politics. As the Danish example highlights, the advent of European cooperation has changed that dramatically. Hence, diplomacy must take into account the interplay between domestic and European politics. This is best done with recourse to the two-level game theoretical framework developed by Robert Putnam.1 This approach was subsequently applied to a variety of analytical approaches where international negotiations and European politics are nested in a broader context which must take into account political considerations at 1 R.D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games”, International Organization, vol. 42, no. 3, 1988, pp. 427-460. 4 EU Diplomacy Paper 1/2012 least at the domestic and international level.2 This paper thus applies the two-level games framework to the debacle over the reintroduction of border controls in Denmark in May 2011 and considers the broader implications for diplomacy and European politics. It argues that the Danish government, in order to carry through with its pension reform, linked it to the issue of border controls, thus introducing the international level into its ongoing domestic negotiations in order to overcome the deadlock. The Danish government attempted to present one version of the border control agreement to the national audience to appease the DPP and a softer version to its European partners. However, this failed as the heavy-handed interpretation of the new border regime expounded in particular by the DPP that it would ostensibly reintroduce border controls generated much apprehension in Europe. Faced with the prospect of losing much of its political clout in Brussels or losing a trial at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the government retracted from its position and sought a solution that would maintain the support of the DPP while putting fears to rest concerning the Schengen-compatibility of the agreement on border controls. Games with two levels The two-level game framework developed by Robert Putnam has become a standard theoretical apparatus for studying how international relations are affected by domestic politics.3 At its heart, the approach puts the need to move beyond the simple observation that domestic and international concerns often interrelate with each other. Putnam's two-level game approach is thus an attempt to develop a more rigorous understanding of how the inter-linkages between international relations and national politics work, rather than merely concluding out of anecdotal evidence that they exist. At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among those groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign 2 For example, P.B. Evans, HK. Jacobson and R.D. Putnam (eds.), Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993; A.R. Young, "What Game? By Which Rules? Adaptation and Flexibility in the EC's Foreign Economic Policy", in M. Knodt and S. Princen (eds.), Understanding the European Union's External Relations, London, Routledge, 2003, pp. 54-71. 3 Putnam, op.cit. 5 Malthe Munkøe developments. Neither of the two games can be ignored by central decision-makers, so long as their countries remain interdependent, yet sovereign.4 States are seldom unitary actors. When one representative conducts negotiations at the international level, he or she will usually be dependent on getting the eventual deal accepted at home. The U.S. President will need to get Congress to ratify an international treaty, for example, and his entire international position may be undermined if that fails, as President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to get Congress to accept American accession to the League of Nation famously demonstrated. As a result, a negotiator must conduct negotiations with internal stakeholders or at least bear the domestic situation in mind before and while negotiating at the international level. More often than not negotiators spend as much time building alliances and balancing concerns at the domestic level as they do in head-to-head negotiations with their counterparts at the international level. This logic can be applied to the EU, where countries negotiate with each other on matters of great interest to domestic interest groups and the populace at large. The interplays between national and international concerns are therefore obvious. Many sectors have become integrated, in particular in relation to the single market. Accordingly, a single country cannot amend, say, its business legislation dramatically on its own since the area has been made the subject of EU-level legislation. In this sense, as European integration progresses, more and more sectors become increasingly subjected to the logic of a game at two levels. That is to say, the inter- linkages between the two levels become more pronounced and the costs of ignoring either rise as the integration process unfolds. This dynamic is particularly strong at the European level, where European integration over the past couple of decades has reinforced the inter-linkages between domestic politics and international relations. Putnam explicitly mentions the neo- functionalist approach to European integration, as developed by Ernst Haas, to describe how integration creates self-reinforcing ‘spillovers’ as examples of international relations theories that acknowledge the interplay between international 4 Ibid., p. 434. 6 EU Diplomacy Paper 1/2012 and domestic factors.5 The underlying logic is that once a certain area has become integrated, it will create incentives to integrate in other areas in order to obtain the full benefits. In other words, domestic circumstances create a pressure on the international level. The recent euro crisis may be a case in point.