Finding the European Union's Grand Strategy Understanding the Commission's role in formulating grand strategy

Abstract

Complexity is a crucial barrier to our understanding of how actors behave in the international arena. Market power, normative power, regulatory power, global power, civilian power, are all concepts which have been utilised to describe the EU international actorness. However, the interaction between these concepts, and how the EU employs these comprehensively has been less debated. Complexity, in this case, has the upper hand, as it is naturally an overwhelming task to parse the pieces together of the EU's strategic behaviour, because of the unique nature of the EU and the numerous avenues it utilises to exert influence in the international arena. It is only natural that different academics argue that the EU behaves according to different sources of power, as after all, the EU power has many facets. If we concentrate on trade agreements, there would be a natural inclination to think of market power. 1 However, if the focus is on the EU's use of its international identity and its diplomatic efforts to defend liberal values, a rather normative power would be more visible. 2 However, focusing on only one does not provide us with the full picture. Thus, this thesis argues that to avoid the tunnel vision which may result from looking at only one aspect of the EU's strategic behaviour prism it could be more useful...