The Institutional Foundations Of European Union Foreign Aid Policy

Kim, Youngwan and Jensen, Christian (2015) The Institutional Foundations Of European Union Foreign Aid Policy. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

Introduction: The Ukrainian civil war and associate Russian intervention are linked to the European Union’s (EU) foreign relations with Ukraine. Whether the EU’s policy in Ukraine can be said to be a success or not, it is certainly having an impact on world affairs. Despite this increasing impact of EU foreign policy, most analyses of it view EU foreign policy as a tool of the larger member states. In this paper, we examine one aspect of EU foreign policy, the distribution of foreign aid. We argue that rather than being driven by the greater powers within the EU, EU foreign aid policy is driven by the unanimity voting of Council of Ministers. We further argue that the EU’s foreign policy decisions will therefore be constrained by the preferences of those member state governments with the most restrictive criteria for judging the appropriateness of a foreign aid recipient. Finally, we argue that this restrictive criterion is human rights. Applying a combination of factor analysis and regression data set of foreign aid receipts by over 150 countries between 1981 and 2001, we examine the factors associated with EU foreign aid disbursement. We find that far from being a tool of the larger member states, EU foreign aid policy is most similar to the foreign aid policies of the smaller Nordic members, Ireland and the Netherlands. Finally, we find measures of the human rights records of potential recipients significantly predict the amount of aid the EU disburses to those countries. The remainder of this paper is divided into several sections. First, we examine the current research on foreign aid with particular attention to the foreign policy of the EU. Second, we discuss the institutional politics of EU foreign aid decision making. We then explain our data collection and methodological approaches. Finally, we discuss the results of our factor analysis and regression models.

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