Browsing by master's degree program "Master's Programme in European and Nordic Studies"

Swiss-EU relations have been studied previously through the angle of External Governance theories and the concept of Privileged Partnerships (Gstöhl & Phinnemore, 2019; Lavenex & Schimmelfennig, 2009). To nourish the research of the relations between Switzerland and the EU, this thesis brings Diplomatic Practice Theory to the study of this special partnership (Pouliot, 2008; Pouliot & Cornut, 2015; Adler-Nissen, 2015; Neumann, 2002; Constantinou et al., 2021; Kuus, 2015/2023). The research focuses on institutions and the actors within these institutions, the diplomats and those practicing diplomacy. Moreover, it also explores the interplay of formal and informal institutionalisation, following the theory of new institutionalism (March & Olsen, 1984; Mackay, Kenny & Chapell, 2010). The objectives and aims of this thesis are two-fold. Firstly, it aims to inquire how diplomats and experts from Switzerland perceive their negotiations work in terms of institutional development of Swiss-EU relations. Secondly, it aims to better understand the interplay of formal and informal diplomatic practices. The method used for this research was to proceed with conducting and analysing, twelve (12) qualitative research interviews with diplomats and experts working mostly for the Swiss FDFA (Federal Department of Foreign Affairs) and one diplomat from the EU (European Union). The interview data was analysed through qualitative content analysis, which was chosen to best bridge new institutionalism theory with diplomatic practice theory, inductively inquiring into the experiences and interactions of Swiss diplomats and experts working in Swiss-EU relations. The main findings of this research are, firstly, that diplomats are limited in their agency and possibility to act, because of the rigid structures in place in diplomatic relations. Secondly, due to this rigidity and the limited formal access that Switzerland has in the EU decision-making as a non-member, this setting encourages for the flourishing of informal diplomatic practices. A prominent actor in this informal and formal interplay is the Swiss Mission to the EU in Brussels, which work in large parts informally. Finally, my research showed that the Swiss political system and its internal institutions form a political block opposing the advancement of diplomatic work and negotiations on formal institutional agreement with the EU. In terms of significance, the thesis brings important insights into the practice of Swiss diplomacy in the negotiations and agreements set between Switzerland and the European Union. It addresses the academic gap in political science of the widely studied research on the peculiar Swiss-EU relation, more specifically here inquiring the negotiations (2014-2024), from a diplomatic studies angle. Moreover, it underlines the possibility of examining these relations using qualitative research methods and encourages additional research on the topic. More specifically, pointing towards further research on discriminatory practices and structures of diplomacy, as well as methodological developments of qualitative research in domains ruled by a high level of secrecy.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse The European Parliament (EP) as an actor of parliamentary diplomacy during its ninth parliamentary term, in the context of its relations with China. The relations between the EU and China have felt a major shift from the late 2010s onwards, and the EP has been increasingly vocal about Chinese human rights matters through its various resolutions and declarations. This thesis pursues to analyse the public outputs of the European Parliament through two research questions: How does the European Parliament operate as an actor of parliamentary diplomacy? and how is the European Parliament’s China policy characterized in its resolutions? while also comparing the EP’s public outputs to that of the EEAS’ through the question of How do the public outputs of the European Parliament compare to that of the EEAS’? This thesis relies heavily on the definition of parliamentary diplomacy and sees the European Parliament as an increasingly important actor in the multilayered and evolving international field. This thesis consists of focusing on the overview of foreign political conduct in the EU, the definition of parliamentary diplomacy, focusing on the European Parliament as an actor of parliamentary diplomacy along a case study. The case study of this thesis is an analysis of the EP’s resolutions, other publications & delegation work, and EEAS publications, divided into three subchapters. The methods used consist of coding along with qualitative and quantitative content analysis. The findings are, that the EP pursues to be a particularly vocal foreign political actor when it comes to China. The publications of China are increasingly negative by their nature, and in a way, it seems that the EP has abandoned the central idea of parliamentary diplomacy of conducting mutual relations, in favour of protecting its normative ideals. As part of its public outputs on China, the EP has also put much emphasis on the need for the EEAS to act in a particular way to tackle some of the China-related issues. The conclusion is, that the EEAS’ China policy does not seem to differ much from that of the EP, the clear exception seemingly being the case of Taiwan relations.

In my thesis, I study the evolving role of the European Union in facilitating the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue. Since 2011, the EU has acted as a facilitator in the dialogue that aims to normalize the relations between Kosovo and Serbia. I focus especially on the development of the EU’s negotiating approach in the dialogue. In my thesis, I present three research questions: 1) What kind of a negotiating approach does the EU adopt in mediating the dialogue? 2) How does the EU incentivize Kosovo’s and Serbia’s participation in the dialogue? 3) How actively does the EU engage in the facilitation of dialogue? The theoretical framework of my thesis is twofold. Regarding the EU’s negotiating approach and engagement in the dialogue, I follow the categorization presented in Zartman and Touval’s (1985) mediation theory, where mediators working in conflict resolution are divided into communicators, formulators, and manipulators. Concerning the incentives offered by the EU, I rely on Schimmelfennig ja Sedelmeier’s (2004) classification within Europeanization theory, where Europeanization is presented as following from external incentives or social learning. As my research data, I use the European Commission’s yearly reports on Kosovo and Serbia, as well as the EU’s General Affairs Council conclusions on the Enlargement and Stabilisation and Association Process, which describe the dialogue’s progression and the EU’s positions on the dialogue. I analyze the data through the use of Qualitative Content Analysis by assigning coding categories to the documents, which enable me to examine the EU’s mood in various phases of the dialogue, the development of the input the EU exerts on the dialogue, and the use of incentives the EU offers Kosovo and Serbia. As the result of my thesis, I show that the dialogue can be divided into a progress phase (2011-2016) and a stagnation phase (2017-2022). I find that in the progress phase, the EU acts as a neutral arbiter, but as the dialogue progresses into the stagnation phase, the EU attempts to create progress by increasing its engagement in the dialogue and by strengthening the incentives it uses, introducing sticks in addition to carrots. This transforms the EU’s mediator role in the dialogue from an arbiter to a mediation participant protecting its own interests.

Finland has the highest per capita coffee consumption in the world. As one of the national drinks, drinking coffee is considered an essential cultural habit in Finland. Among them, coffee breaks at workspaces are a well-established and important cultural practice. This thesis tries to reveal what is represented to be Finnish about coffee breaks in Finnish working life. First, it analyses the background of the spread of coffee culture among Finnish people. Secondly, it assesses their experiences and opinions of the coffee break in recent years by using Oldenburg’s idea of “the third place” and previous studies about the coffee break. The survey was conducted on 18 Finnish people in the spring of 2021 and autumn of 2022. Moreover, it asked about changes and experiences caused by the corona pandemic. The Finnish coffee break substantially affects health maintenance, work efficiency, and social relationship/community formation. Remarkably, the role of social relationship/community formation is significant because the coffee break has provided cosy spaces for participants and opportunities to socialise since coffee was introduced to Finland. Recently, working life has become more individualised in Finland, as working hours and locations have become more flexible, and remote working has become more common after the corona pandemic. However, the coffee break has overcome such social changes and plays a role like a bond to keep people well connected, and many of them demand such opportunities.

Data privacy came to the forefront of public consciousness in March 2018, with the revelation that the data of upwards of 87 million accounts was misused due to a lack of privacy protections. Furthermore, the release of confidential court documents detailing years of anticompetitive conduct by Facebook, largely helped by the amount of data it has access to, through ways that many are beginning to characterise as immoral. The intersection of data privacy and competition law is a relatively new issue, but one that will have a significant impact in the coming years. Investigations into Facebook’s conduct by the United States and the European Union will determine if the social media giant, and by extension, any other companies that collect large amounts of data, will adjust or maintain its data-gathering practices.

The goal of this thesis is to better understand the role and the impact of the DiscoverEU initiative. It allows 18 year-old EU citizens to travel and explore Europe for up to a month by giving them a free Interrail pass. The Interrail programme however, was not created by the EU but is being used as a tool by the latter to promote European solidarity, their vision of a European identity and to further a sense of belonging. To conduct this study, I used Instagram to gather the participants’ posts and captions. All the data I gathered was public and the participants remained anonymous throughout my thesis. I proceeded with qualitative content analysis to analyse my data in order to observe what kind of narrative was being created online by the participants. European identity, the significance of travel and the decision to target the younger generations were topics of particular interest throughout this thesis. DiscoverEU aims at providing a shared experience these young people can relate to and bond over so that the EU becomes something concrete in their mind, something they can identify with and support later on in their life as well. This thesis finds that the EU is using DiscoverEU as a tool to promote European identity in numerous ways. The participants are sharing mostly positive experiences but only a few European statements about European identity. However, criticism towards the better off was also raised.

This master's thesis compares two quite different areas of Nordic cooperation, the passport union and defence cooperation. The research question seeks to find answers to whether the failures of the passport union have been connected to the advantages in defence policy and if they have not, which factor have promoted the shift of attention form passport union to defence cooperation. I seek to demonstrate how the atmosphere in cooperation has changes and the time of growing cooperation and supranationalism is turning to a traditional realist, intergovernmental cooperation. The first form of cooperation, the passport union, at the time of its founding in the 1950s was distinctively deep form of cooperation, especially considering being a traditionally sensitive political area.. The importance of defence cooperation, on the other hand, has increased especially in the 2010s and thereafter due to the changes in the European security environment. The most important events are the Russian conquest of the Crimean peninsula and later the war in Ukraine, as well as Finland's and Sweden's NATO application in 2022. Both areas, defence, and the passport union, include a lot of other international cooperation, the most important of which is the Schengen area in connection to the passport union and NATO in defence cooperation. By comparing these two areas, we see the many forms of Nordic cooperation and changes in the most important themes over the decades. With the definition of the borders, the quality of the passport union becomes evident. Borders are diverse, can create inequality and equality, unite and separate people, and act as the physical borders of the state, representing states’ power and rights. With the diversity of borders, their opening has been a significant step in Nordic cooperation. Even though the passport union has faced challenges, it is still in operation and plays a significant role as a builder and facilitator of Nordic cooperation. Defence cooperation, on the other hand, has largely developed under international organizations. The most important of these is NATO, whose founding members Denmark, Norway and Iceland were, and to which Finland and Sweden submitted their application to join in 2022. Cooperation under the European Union as well as commitment to UN and NATO exercises and peacekeeping have also developed Nordic cooperation in defence forces. NORDEFCO, founded in 2009, is important achievement as a facilitator of Nordic cooperation outside other institutions. By using the reports and texts of the Foreign Policy Institute and its Nordic counterparts, we get a picture of the effects of crises to these chosen policy areas. These crises are most prominently the 2015 refugee crisis, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's attack on Ukraine. The historical analysis is based on academic literature as well as political statements, opinion polls and news articles. When comparing these two areas of cooperation, it is clear that global events have affected the level of cooperation, and cooperation often sparks as a reaction to external events. Because of this, defence cooperation has been more significant and received more attention in the recent years. The passport union is still a significant part of cooperation, but it seems that its peak has already passed, and other things are attracting more attention. At the same time, international cooperation around the world is experiencing similar changes. The conclusion is that whereas it is true that the passport union has struggled while the defence has bloomed, the changing focus has been due to global events. However, while the hypothesis was that similar events were failures for one and successes for the other, the most important events shaping cooperation have been different.

Developed economies face increasing pressures of to produce innovations that improve their competitiveness and resilience in a globalized economy. The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development of the European Commission as funding instruments for innovation have therefore gained significance in the increasing of its geopolitical power through competitiveness and resilience. While the Framework Programmes as a policy have been researched widely, the roles of its funded projects, that is consortia, as actors within the larger political context of research and development have been researched little. This research aims to contribute to the understanding on the ways in which researchers, commercial entities and third sector actors as part of research consortia influence the development of Framework Programmes from the bottom-up perspective. Through a political sociology approach, the role of consortia formation, social networks and role characteristics within consortia are used as concepts to their extent of explaining the ways in which non-state actors use Europeanization processes such as Framework Programmes to advance their interests and visions. The data was collected through in-depth semistructured interviews of ten Horizon 2020 consortium participants and two R&D experts and a reflexive thematic analysis method was applied. Consortium initiators were found to have a high relevance in their ability to interpret the call for proposal and thus determine the outputs that contribute to the overall impact of the Framework Programme, presenting a circularity in the Europeanization of R&D. By choosing to exercise their gate-keeping or agenda-setting power, the consortium core participants steer their interpretation of the call for proposal towards their desired direction. The social networks were mainly found to function as pools of contacts and as insurance against the uncertainties that come with the acting in an international setting but could also provide insider knowledge that advanced their social position and competencies of the consortium core, strengthening the ability to influence the Europeanization from bottom-up. The results indicate that the consortium formation, social networks and role characteristics can explain some of the impact that actors exert on the ouput of the Framework Programmes from the bottom-up, but more research needs to be done to measure their impact

This research aims to reveal factors that impact the formation of trust in governments during the COVID-19 pandemic from a comparative cross-EU perspective. The formation of trust in pandemic times is ambiguous because national executives are supposed to combat the virus and can be both rewarded and punished for their actions as well as for the economic consequences of the lockdowns. Theoretically, the thesis fills the gap between the economic voting bulk of literature and research on trust formation in crisis times. The study is based on the “Living, working and COVID-19 dataset” survey conducted by Eurofound agency in spring and summer 2020. The results of the multilevel regression analysis contribute to the field with the significant impact of the clarity of governmental responsibility and losing a job interaction on trust. The applied method allows combining country-level and individual-level data, revealing a higher variance among respondents than EU member states. The interaction indicates that most citizens appreciate cohesive governments in crisis times, which contradicts economic voting literature’s argument that trust is lower in less polarized systems where people have a clearer understanding of assigning blame for policies. However, the respondents who lost the job permanently when the pandemic escalated blame united governments establishing a better link between personal welfare and governmental action. The discrepancy between unemployed and employed is more minor in more polarized and less cohesive systems, which blur responsibility. In general, such factors as losing a job during the pandemic, either permanently or temporarily, feeling job insecurity, and expecting personal finances to worsen - negatively influence the trust in governments. These findings illustrate the significance of political factors as government composition and economic indicators as unemployment and subjective feelings of economic well-being in trust formation. Compared to the theoretical assumptions in regular times, the trust variations during the concrete situation of the pandemic’s outbreak are different since people tend to value more united governments able to respond to the crisis fast.

Where is best? Much like the pay-for-access services, profiteering, and mystery that in-part defines the nation brand ranks that form the subject of this work; cross my palm with enough money and it might just be you when the results of this work’s index are revealed! Provocation aside; the concepts of nation branding and nation brands have quickly entered the spotlight of the world’s stage since Anholt first coined the term in 1996. Quickly, it has become big business. From Cool Britainia to ESTonia, nations have been quick in ‘corporatising’ their image to gain attraction and favour around the world. This work is not interested in the brands created by countries per say, rather it is interested in a country’s brand strength, that is how effective countries are in achieving the goals they set out to accomplish through their branding efforts. This work is not the first to be interested in such a thing, for within a decade of Anholt coining the term, he had developed a rank to measure and compare the strength of nation’s brands himself. Jump forward to 2020 and the world has multiple such organisations - often consultancy firms - seeking to do the same through the development of their own ranks. This work seeks to cast a critical eye over these ranks, developing an index of European country brand strength itself. Specifically, this work does three things. Firstly, it provides an understanding of ‘nation brand’ from a country level perspective, generating its findings based on literature (and lack of literature) from thirty-five countries. Secondly, it critically assesses the success and failures of nine prominent nation brand ranks, and in doing so draws from outside literature on University ranking and ranking in general. Thirdly, the crux of the work. Based on the findings gleaned from the previous aim’s outcomes, it develops an original index of country brand strength that is less analytically flawed than its comparators. Through the building its own index of country brand strength, a more holistic understanding of the challenges of indexing and ranking is developed, whist also evidencing that at least some of the shortcomings of its comparators can be overcome. This undertaking is done following OECD guidance, and inspired by the 2010 work of Marc Fetscherin. To compliment its aims, the work provides a detailed discussion on key interlinked and underlying concepts including soft power, geoeconomics, and globalisation. The index is not without fault, failing one test of soundness, but it does yield that Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Ireland and Estonia share the strongest country brands within the EU. The ranks it casts a critical eye over are not without fault either, with the biggest problems reviled to be those of black boxing, subjectivity in surveying, and enablement of misinterpretation through presenting only rank positions of countries, and not index scores.