Diplomats, Domestic Agency and the Implementation of Sanctions: The MFAs of France and Germany in the Age of Geoeconomic Diplomacy

Abstract

Summary Tasked with the implementation of complex geoeconomic instruments such as trade and investment regulations, targeted economic assistance and sanctions regimes, European ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs) are increasingly exposed to a field introduced as geoeconomic diplomacy. This article argues that traditional literature on states’ strategic use of economic power has underestimated how MFAs of liberal and tightly integrated market economies are challenged in their abilities to realise geoeconomic objectives. Mitigating such challenges requires diplomats to engage extensively with multiple domestic state and non-state actors relevant to the state-market nexus. Through a comparative case study of France and Germany, the article demonstrates how major European MFAs have recently streamlined their organisational approaches to the geoeconomic field in various ways, and analyses how French and German diplomats were bound to manage multifaceted, yet different, domestic agency relations in their quests to successfully implement the European Union’s sanctions regime against Russia in 2014-2016.