The European Union as a Global Actor

Rethinking European Union foreign policy

“…When defence policy was included in the provisions of the Treaty on European Union (1993) it became, at least in principle, a tous azimut foreign policy institution. Thus, while observers of developments during the 1970s and 1980s noted a somewhat slow beginning (Wallace 1983a;Nuttall 1992;Nørgaard Pedersen and Petersen 1993), observers of the 1990s have noted that European decision-makers during the 1990s significantly accelerated their involvement in common foreign policy-making (Hill 1996a;Piening 1997;Regelsberger, de Schoutheete de Tervarent and Wessels 1997;Flockhart 1998;Peterson and Sjursen 1998;Bretherton and Vogler 1999;Cameron 1999).…”

“…Another larger segment of the literature relates to thematic/regional case studies or those looking more broadly at the Union in the world (Allen and Pijpers 1984;Ifestos 1987;Buchan 1993;Nørgaard, Pedersen, and Petersen 1993;Holland 1995;Piening 1997;Smith 1998;Bretherton and Vogler, 1999). The critical value of this category of study is that it provides the empirical meat of substantive analysis.…”

“…Only infrequently are such accounts grounded in an explicit theoretical framework and even then such analyses are, more often than not, dominated by realist/rationalist accounts of state behaviour (Bretherton and Vogler 1999 is an important exception from a social constructivist perspective).…”

“…Or is there, rather, a battle over the content of European actorness in relation to every single policy issue which means that we are really closer to the realists' conception of EU foreign policy as the lowest common denominator of the national views or national cost/benefit considerations? (See for example Gordon 1997;Bretherton and Vogler 1999). The representation of EU actorness is a central issue to approach from a discourse perspective.…”

“…This approach has made a major contribution to our understanding of Europe's global role in both empirical and conceptual terms (Whitman 1997;Bretherton and Vogler 1999).…”