Beyond the Regulatory State: Rethinking the External Dimension of European Climate and Energy Governance

The regulatory state model has traditionally provided a useful analytical framework to conceptualise the nature of the EU, to study its policy making and to assess its impact on global political economy. Although it is widely accepted that the internal and external conditions of European integration have dramatically changed since the 1990s, when this approach was initially formulated, few scholars have sought to theorise the EU ‘beyond’ the regulatory state perspective. This becomes even more evident as world politics have seen the forceful return of geopolitics, also in sectors that have been dominated by market-oriented approaches, like climate and energy. This paper contributes to filling this gap in the literature. It offers a conceptual alternative to the regulatory state model, a framework that opens a new research agenda on European (economic) governance and the EU strategy ‘as power’ in global politics (Goldthau and Sitter 2015, 2018). The paper puts forward a conceptualization of external EU governance based on the “catalytic state” model (Prontera 2017, 2019). The latter is conceptualized as being situated between the direct interventionist approach of the positive state and the indirect one of the regulatory state. The paper then proposes an initial theorisation of the EU’s evolving role as a catalytic state and how this is manifested at the level of actors, instruments and policy frames. Building on this, it then develops the notion of Catalytic Power Europe to exemplify how the EU deploys its catalytic state capacities as resources for projecting power in international affairs. Crucially, the catalytic state – as well as its external extension as catalytic power – rests on more interventionist tools and mechanisms of connectivity, mobilization and (positive and negative) networking. Drawing on examples from climate and energy diplomacy, the paper then illustrates how these tools and mechanisms are deployed by the EU to achieve its external objectives in these policy fields. It demonstrates that these go beyond existing conceptualisations of the EU’s actorness in global politics as a by-product of its regulatory state identity and regulatory capacity, i.e. Regulatory and Market Power Europe (Bradford 2012; Damro 2012, 2015). By contrast, the paper demonstrates that the EU is set to emerge as a distinct player in a world of ‘geo-economics’.