Between soft power, neo-Westphalianism and transnationalism: the European Union, (trans)national interests and the politics of strategy

Abstract

Can we speak of a joined-up European Union (EU) Grand Strategy in the world? Strategybased policy-making in the EU is a shared enterprise between the EU and its member state governments. The EU and its member states focus in the EUGS (2016) on the EU homeland as a priority and not the Neighbourhood or the global level of diplomacy as was the case previously in the ESS (2003). This is partly as a result of changing EU foreign policy priorities and partly as a result of the reassertion of national interests into the EU's transnational foreign policy. EU grand strategy has shifted focus from the global to the regional level reflecting the new pragmatic turn in EU foreign policy. The new strategy is more regional, more pragmatic, and less ambitious in furthering the EU as a global actor as a result.

The Death of Belonging? Interactions between Neo-Medievalism, Security and National Identity

“…Additionally, neo-medievalism has also been applied to the digital domain in which the shift from a modern to a postmodern political economy is as seismic as the historic move from the medieval to the modern era (Kobrin 1998). As a non-traditional polity, the European Union has also been investigated with regard to its fuzzy borders (Angelescu 2008) and its increased regional grand strategy rather than global approach (Winn 2019).…”