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Abstract :
[en] This paper explores how members of the European Parliament from a founding small state – Belgium – leveraged the interaction between the European Parliament (EP) and European Political Cooperation (EPC) to catalyze an action in the field of international human rights compliance, from the Helsinki Conference to the birth of the Common Foreign and Security Policy.
Although the EP is a supranational body whose members do not represent their countries but the European society as a whole, scholarship has demonstrated that national interests often found their way to this forum . Belgium is generally regarded as a small country with limited agency in international relations. However, members of its civil society have strong moral expectations which have at time led to relative frustration. In this context, Belgian MEPs have favored the EP over their national Chambers in conveying their fellow citizens’ grievances. As for the Belgian government, it was eager to embed its foreign policy in a broader European framework, especially in the context of the Cold War . In turn, both the EPC and the EP drew content for their nascent international human rights action from these initiatives. Indeed, Europe’s commitment to promoting global human rights was originally not self-evident and has resulted from a historically constructed process .
To focus the analysis, this paper will address a particularly sensitive issue within the Belgian society: the protection of minority rights. This focus is particularly relevant in the context of the Northern Middle East – a region characterized by a historically poor record on minority rights, comprising Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. A light comparative dimension with Denmark, Luxembourg and the Netherlands will highlight whether Belgium’s strategy was idiosyncratic or emblematic of small state behavior.
Along with other documents, underutilized telegrams from the CorEu communication system will be analyzed, alongside interviews with former MEPs and private papers. Given that the archives of the EPC, which are stored by the Council, are only partially accessible for the period under consideration, complementary material will be drawn from the CorEu copies kept by the Archives Department of the Belgian Federal Public Service of Foreign Affairs. These materials will allow to map different initiatives taken by the Belgian MEPs and to reconstruct their networks within the European institutions, the Departments of Foreign Affairs of other European partners and civil society all at once.
Overall, this paper shall show that the dual supranational/intergovernmental architecture of the EP-EPC nexus furnished small states with tactical venues to exercise outsized influence, and that Belgian entrepreneurship contributed materially to the institutionalization of EU human rights diplomacy.
