From the treaty foundations of EU external action to the strategic rivalries of a multipolar world, this course examines how the European Union builds, projects, and defends its role as a global actor across institutions, partnerships, and contested geopolitical arenas.
Undergraduate Course (Bachelor’s Level)
This course introduces students to the frameworks, institutions, and policy instruments through which the European Union conducts its relations with the wider world.
Learning Outcomes
- Identify the legal foundations, institutional actors, and key policy instruments through which the European Union conducts its external relations.
- Describe how the EU engages with partner countries, regional neighbours, and international institutions across issue areas including security, trade, development, and enlargement.
- Assess the coherence, effectiveness, and normative underpinnings of EU external action in light of contemporary geopolitical challenges.
Assessment
- Class Participation (25%)
- Case Study Report (25%)
- Final Essay (50%)
Structure
- EU External Action: Concepts, Treaty Basis, and Scope
- The Institutional Architecture of EU Foreign Policy
- The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)
- The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)
- EU Trade Policy: Agreements, Actors, and Global Rules
- Development, Aid, and Humanitarian Action in EU External Policy
- Enlargement Policy: Conditionality, Transformation, and Fatigue
- The European Neighbourhood Policy: Partnership, Leverage, and Limits
- EU Diplomacy in Practice: The EEAS, Delegations, and Negotiation
- EU in International Institutions
- Coherence, Credibility, and Crisis: Challenges in EU External Action
- The EU as a Global Actor: Power, Norms, and Limits
Graduate Course (Master’s Level)
This course offers an advanced, critically oriented analysis of EU external relations at a moment of profound geopolitical transformation. Students move beyond institutional description to interrogate the theoretical, normative, and strategic dimensions of EU foreign policy, examining how the Union asserts autonomy, applies conditionality, and manages relationships with major and emerging powers.
Learning Outcomes
- Critically apply theoretical frameworks from international relations and foreign policy analysis to evaluate the strategic logic, normative ambitions, and structural contradictions that characterize EU external action across different policy domains and world regions.
- Synthesize comparative insights from EU bilateral relationships, including partnerships with China, the United States, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific, to construct original, evidence-based arguments about the consistency, coherence, and geopolitical positioning of EU foreign policy.
- Formulate informed, nuanced positions on the EU’s capacity for strategic autonomy and normative leadership, engaging critically with debates about power, legitimacy, and effectiveness in an increasingly fragmented and contested international order.
Assessment
- Case Study Report 1 (25%)
- Case Study Report 2 (25%)
- Final Essay (50%)
Structure
- Theorizing EU External Relations
- Normative Power Europe: Between Idealism, Self-Interest, and Geopolitical Pressure
- Strategic Autonomy: Doctrine, Debate, and the Limits of European Independence
- CFSP and CSDP: Coherence, Deadlock, and Reform
- Power Through Rules: EU Coercion, Conditionality, and Economic Leverage
- Enlargement Under Strain: Democratic Backsliding, Fatigue, and the Western Balkans Impasse
- EU–China: Strategic Partnership or Systemic Rivalry?
- EU–US Relations in the Age of Geopolitical Competition
- EU–ASEAN Relations
- EU–Japan Relations
- EU–Africa Relations
- EU–Latin America Relations