Hostage-Taking in EU Foreign and Security Politics

This chapter explores the strategy of hostage-taking in EU foreign politics. Hostage-taking involves a situation where the government of a third country, or an EU member state (i.e. the hostage-taker), leverages its relative power in intergovernmental decision-making (i.e. the hostage) to extract concessions (i.e. objective) from other member states and EU institutions (i.e. targets) in another, not functionally related, policy area. As such, hostage-taking combines the relative bargaining power held by a hostage-taker in multilateral settings like the EU or other international organizations, with a strategy of tactical issue linkage. The chapter distinguishes internal vs. external and hard vs. soft modes of hostage-taking. Empirically, we discuss external hostage-taking in EU-NATO relations and internal hostage-taking in the EU with respect to the role of Hungary's populist radical right (PRR) government in EU foreign policymaking. Overall, we argue that cases of hard hostage-taking are more likely in situations of external hostage-taking, as here actors face less severe institutional constraints than in the dense institutional setting of the EU.