THE EU-ROPEAN POLICY TOWARDS ISRAEL'S WAR ON GAZA: ACTOR-CENTRED INSTITUTIONALIST EXPLANATION

There has not been a significant change on the EU’s stance on the main issues regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the start of the formulation of its single foreign policy position on this issue in the 1970s. However, Israel’s war on Gaza that started on October 7th, 2023 compelled some EU states to recognise the Palestinian state. The primary goal of this study is to explore EU’s policies towards Israel’s war on Gaza from the angle of actor-centred institutionalism. This approach, which was designed by Renate Mayntz and Fritz Scharpf, is an analytical tool employed to investigate political facts and processes. According to this approach, institutions are viewed as rules (laws, norms), regularities (behavioural routines, power relations, distributions of power and resources), social entities (formal corporate actors and organisations) and (formal or informal loose) networks. Non-written rules, legal regulations and regularities form real (formal or informal) social structures and create the framework for the relationships among the actors by the distribution of official competences, financial or power resources. Thus, these institutions determine their definitions of the actors’ situations, on which their choices of action are based. The primary argument of this article is that the current actor constellation in the EU prevents it from following a common stance towards the Gaza war. There are two opposing camps concerning EU’s policy towards Israel’s war on Gaza. Spain, Ireland, Slovenia are pro-Palestine whereas Germany, Austria and some eastern European states such as Hungary and the Czech Republic are supportive of Israel. Another contention of this article is that the disunity within the EU also stems from the EU’s institutional plurality and diversity. In other words, the divide is both within and between the EU institutions.