External Relations of the European Union Course

Course Overview

The European Union is one of the most ambitious projects in collective foreign policy in the history of international relations. Twenty-seven states with distinct historical experiences, strategic cultures, military traditions, and external interests have constructed a shared institutional architecture for engaging with the world: a High Representative who speaks in the Union’s name, an External Action Service that maintains over one hundred and forty delegations across the globe, a Common Foreign and Security Policy that coordinates diplomatic positions, a Common Security and Defence Policy that deploys civilian and military missions, a trade policy of genuine global reach, and a development cooperation framework that makes the European Union the world’s largest provider of official development assistance. The ambition is extraordinary. The results are, by any honest reckoning, considerably more mixed.

This course examines EU external relations as an analytical and strategic issue rather than an institutional description exercise. It asks what kind of actor the European Union is in world politics, whether its self-image as a normative power is analytically defensible or ideologically convenient, how far the doctrine of strategic autonomy reflects genuine strategic thinking or a reaction to American unpredictability, and whether the EU’s instruments of external action are adequate to the geopolitical environment it now faces. The curriculum moves from foundational questions of theory and institutional architecture through the major instruments of EU external action, the contested terrain of enlargement and neighbourhood policy, and the bilateral relationships that define the EU’s position in a multipolar world. It concludes with the question every serious student of EU foreign policy must eventually confront: whether the European Union’s ambitions and its structural capacities are compatible, and if not, what would need to change.

Teaching is organised around major analytical questions rather than conventional thematic surveys. Each week, students investigate a central problem through primary sources, policy documents, theoretical frameworks, and comparative case studies, building towards independent analytical and policy-oriented work. Teaching combines seminar discussion, applied policy exercises, comparative analysis, and a structured simulation. Students are expected to engage seriously with international relations theory, European Union studies, and foreign policy analysis as analytical tools.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain and critically evaluate major theoretical frameworks for understanding EU external relations, including liberal intergovernmentalism, supranationalism, constructivism, normative power theory, and realist perspectives on European strategic capacity.
• Analyse the institutional architecture of EU foreign policy, including the roles, competences, and limitations of the major actors: the High Representative, the EEAS, the European Commission, the Council, and member state governments.
• Assess the principal instruments of EU external action, including the CFSP and CSDP, trade and sanctions policy, enlargement conditionality, neighbourhood policy, and development cooperation.
• Evaluate the EU’s bilateral relationships with major and emerging powers, including the United States, China, Russia, and the regional groupings of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
• Interpret policy documents, legal texts, strategic frameworks, and institutional analyses with critical precision.
• Construct independent, evidence-based arguments about the coherence, effectiveness, and normative foundations of EU external action.
• Develop strategic assessments and policy recommendations under conditions of geopolitical pressure and institutional constraint.

Assessment

1. Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
2. Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
3. Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
4. Final Research Essay — 35%

Seminar Participation and Analytical Engagement — 15%
Students are assessed on the quality, consistency, and analytical depth of their contributions to seminar discussions throughout the semester.

Strong performance demonstrates:

• sustained engagement with weekly readings
• ability to apply theoretical and conceptual frameworks
• critical discussion of empirical cases and policy developments
• constructive engagement with the arguments of others

Students are encouraged to incorporate comparative perspectives, primary sources, and contemporary international developments into seminar discussions.

Analytical Development Portfolio — 35%
This is a two-stage analytical assignment submitted in connected parts across the semester. Part II builds explicitly on Part I, and students may revise aspects of their earlier analysis in light of feedback received before incorporating it into the second submission.

Part I: Actor and Case Positioning Analysis (Week 5) — 1,000 words — 15%
Students select a bilateral relationship, external policy domain, or institutional arrangement involving the EU from a list provided by the lecturer and produce a focused analytical paper. The paper should:

• identify the key actors, institutional context, and political interests shaping the external relations case
• examine the degree to which the EU acts coherently and effectively as an international actor in the selected domain
• apply at least one theoretical framework from the course to explain the dynamics of the case
• assess the principal challenges the EU faces in pursuing its stated objectives

Part II: Policy Evaluation Brief (Week 8) — 1,500 words — 20%
Building on the Part I analysis, students prepare a policy evaluation brief addressed to a specified EU institutional audience, which may be the European Commission, the Council, the European External Action Service, or a member state government. The brief should:

• assess the performance of EU external policy in the domain or relationship identified in Part I
• evaluate the institutional, political, and strategic factors that have shaped that performance
• identify the most significant obstacles to more coherent or effective EU external action
• recommend specific reforms or priorities for the specified audience

Students may revise aspects of their Part I analysis in light of feedback before developing the brief.

Applied Exercise and Reflection — 15%
Students participate in an EU foreign policy simulation held across Weeks 10 and 11. Each student represents an assigned member state, EU institution, or external partner in a structured scenario involving a contested dimension of EU external relations. Assessment has three components:

• Position paper (500 words), submitted before the simulation — 5%
• Simulation participation and negotiation conduct — 5%
• Reflective commentary (750 words), submitted after the simulation — 5%

The reflective commentary should evaluate the student’s own strategic positioning and decision-making during the exercise, the negotiation dynamics and institutional constraints that emerged, and the relationship between the theoretical frameworks studied in the course and the experience of EU external relations as simulated. Role assignments and detailed instructions are distributed at the end of Week 7.

Final Research Essay — 35%
A research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words addressing a substantive question in the external relations of the European Union. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course, provided they engage with relevant theoretical and empirical debates, draw on EU primary sources and academic scholarship, and advance an original analytical claim. A one-page essay proposal with a preliminary bibliography is submitted at the end of Week 7 for formative feedback. The final essay is due in Week 13.

Submission, Formatting Requirements and Academic Integrity

• All written work must be submitted as a PDF file, regardless of the word processor used.
• Use font at 12 points Times New Roman or Arial. Pages must be numbered. Include your name, student number, course name, assignment title, and word count on the first page; a separate cover page is not required.
• The word count stated in the assignment brief is a guide to scope and depth, not a rigid threshold. Work within 10 per cent of the stated count in either direction. The word count covers the main body of the text, including in-text citations, but excludes the reference list, any tables or figures, and any appendices.
• All written work must follow APA 7th edition throughout. In-text citations use the author-date format: (Yergin, 2020) or Yergin (2020) argues that… For direct quotations, include the page number: (Yergin, 2020, p. 47). The reference list appears at the end of the document, ordered alphabetically by surname. Do not use footnotes for references; footnotes may be used sparingly for substantive clarifications that would otherwise interrupt the argument.
• Formal policies on academic integrity and the use of AI tools vary by institution and will be communicated where applicable. The question beneath those policies does not change: is the goal to understand, or simply to appear to have understood? A qualification obtained without the knowledge it is meant to represent is a transaction, not an education, and it shortchanges the holder as much as anyone else. I invest genuine effort in connecting students to scholarship, practitioners, and professional networks that extend well beyond any syllabus. Whether that investment meets a reciprocal commitment is, in the end, a question of character rather than compliance.

Literature

• Bremberg, N., Danielson, A., Hedling, E., & Michalski, A. (2022). The everyday making of EU foreign and security policy: Practices, socialization and the management of dissent. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Kaddous, C., & Hoffmeister, F. (Eds.). (2025). EU diplomacy in multilateral fora. Hart Publishing.
• Keukeleire, S., & Delreux, T. (2022). The foreign policy of the European Union (3rd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.
• Wessel, R. A., & Larik, J. (Eds.). (2026). EU external relations law: Text, cases and materials (3rd ed.). Hart Publishing.

Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:

• Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks and empirical analysis.
• Primary and policy documents — including the Treaty on European Union, the EU Global Strategy of 2016, CFSP decisions, European Council conclusions, and documents produced by the EEAS and the European Commission — constitute the material through which EU external relations are formally constructed and publicly justified.
• Strategic assessments and comparative analyses, produced by bodies such as the European Union Institute for Security Studies, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and national foreign policy research institutes, provide the applied context within which institutional choices are made and contested.

Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.

Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.

Structure

Week 1 — What kind of actor is the European Union in world politics?

Before asking what the European Union does in world politics, it is necessary to ask what kind of thing the European Union is. It is not a state, but it behaves in some respects like one. It is not a traditional international organisation, but it operates through institutions with autonomous legal personality and significant delegated authority. It has a foreign policy, but that policy emerges from a process of permanent negotiation between twenty-seven member states with different strategic priorities, different histories of great power involvement, and different conceptions of what European foreign policy should be trying to achieve. The theoretical frameworks developed to make sense of the European Union as an international actor — liberal intergovernmentalism, supranationalism, constructivism, normative power theory, and a range of foreign policy analysis approaches — each illuminate different aspects of that complexity while leaving others in shadow. This week introduces the foundational conceptual and theoretical tools that students will apply and evaluate throughout the course.

Key Themes

• The European Union as an international actor: what is distinctive, what is comparable, and what is analytically contested
• Treaty foundations of EU external action: the Lisbon Treaty architecture and its political context
• Theoretical frameworks: liberal intergovernmentalism, supranationalism, constructivism, and normative power theory
• The scope of EU external action: what falls within it, what remains with member states, and why the boundary matters

Case Studies

• The Lisbon Treaty and the creation of the High Representative and the EEAS: political bargain and institutional consequence
• EU external action in practice: a comparative snapshot of instruments and outcomes across issue areas

Seminar Exercise

• Theoretical mapping: students are assigned one theoretical framework each and tasked with applying it to a specific EU foreign policy episode, then presenting their analysis to the seminar for collective evaluation of which framework best accounts for the behaviour observed and where each approach encounters its limits.

Analytical Focus

• Building analytical vocabulary for the course; evaluating theoretical frameworks against empirical cases; situating EU external relations within the broader study of international relations and foreign policy analysis

Week 2 — Who makes EU foreign policy? The institutional architecture and its politics

The institutional architecture of EU foreign policy is both more elaborate and more contested than most introductory accounts suggest. The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, double-hatted as Vice President of the European Commission, sits at the formal apex of EU external action but operates between the Council, which guards member state prerogatives in foreign policy, and the Commission, which controls trade, development, and external economic instruments. The European External Action Service, established by the Lisbon Treaty, maintains delegations across the globe and provides the diplomatic infrastructure of EU external action, but its relationship with the Commission services responsible for much of the substantive content of EU external policy remains institutionally complex and politically charged. Member state foreign ministries, meanwhile, retain primary authority over bilateral diplomacy, intelligence, and decisions about the use of force. Understanding who controls what — and where the institutional seams between actors create opportunities for incoherence — is an analytical prerequisite for evaluating everything the course examines thereafter.

Key Themes

• The High Representative and Vice President: role, authority, and political constraints
• The European External Action Service: structure, delegations, and limits
• The European Commission’s external role: trade, development, neighbourhood, and enlargement
• The Council and member state governments: the veto, unanimity, and the politics of the lowest common denominator
• The European Parliament’s role in EU external relations

Case Studies

• The EEAS in practice: a comparative analysis of EU delegation activities in Washington, Beijing, and Nairobi
• Decision-making paralysis in EU foreign policy: historical cases of member state veto and their consequences

Seminar Exercise

• Institutional mapping exercise: students map the full set of actors involved in a specified EU foreign policy decision, tracing the institutional pathways through which the policy was developed, contested, and ultimately adopted or blocked, then assess where the process created coherence and where it produced fragmentation.

Analytical Focus

• Institutional analysis as a method for understanding foreign policy output; evaluating how institutional design shapes policy capacity; connecting internal governance structures to external credibility and effectiveness

Week 3 — The CFSP and CSDP: instruments, achievements, and structural limits

The Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy are the EU’s most explicitly political instruments of external action, and they are also the most institutionally constrained. The CFSP operates by unanimity, meaning that any one member state can prevent a common position from emerging; the CSDP operates without a standing military headquarters, without a permanent rapid reaction force, and without a defence budget of its own. Yet neither instrument is as impotent as its critics suggest. The CFSP has produced coordinated sanctions, common positions, and diplomatic initiatives that would not have occurred in its absence. The CSDP has deployed over thirty civilian and military missions, from training security forces in Mali and the Central African Republic to maritime operations in the Indian Ocean and the Aegean. The question is whether the gap between the EU’s stated foreign and security policy ambitions and the institutional and political tools available to pursue them is a temporary developmental problem or a structural feature of an organisation built by states determined to retain ultimate control over the use of force. This week examines both instruments analytically, situating their achievements and failures within a coherent theoretical account.

Key Themes

• The CFSP: legal basis, decision-making rules, instruments, and the unanimity constraint
• The CSDP: missions, capabilities, institutional development, and the relationship with NATO
• Qualified majority voting in foreign policy: the debate and the political resistance
• EU sanctions as a CFSP instrument: design, adoption, and effectiveness
• Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the European Defence Fund: ambition and delivery

Case Studies

• EU sanctions on Russia after 2014 and 2022: the CFSP decision-making process, member state tensions, and policy outcomes
• CSDP missions in the Sahel: EUTM Mali and its limitations in a deteriorating security environment

Seminar Exercise

• CFSP decision-making simulation: students represent assigned member states in a Council working group tasked with reaching a common position on a specified foreign policy crisis, navigating the unanimity requirement and the competing national interests that shape EU foreign policy outputs.

Analytical Focus

• Evaluating the CFSP and CSDP as foreign policy instruments; connecting institutional design to policy outcomes; assessing whether the structural limits of EU security and defence policy are remediable or inherent

Week 4 — Is the European Union a normative power or a strategic actor?

The concept of normative power Europe, introduced by Ian Manners in 2002, proposed that the European Union exercises international influence primarily through the diffusion of norms rather than through military or economic coercion. It was a theoretically elegant and politically convenient formulation: it explained what made the EU distinctive, justified its self-presentation as a benign civilising force, and sidestepped the uncomfortable questions about hard power that the EU’s limited military capacity raised. Two decades and several geopolitical crises later, the concept is under sustained theoretical and empirical pressure. The 2022 decision to supply weapons to Ukraine, the development of a defence industrial base, the explicit embrace of strategic autonomy as an organising doctrine, and the acknowledgement that the EU operates in an environment of great power competition all suggest that the normative power framing, whatever its intellectual merits, is insufficient as an account of the EU’s actual foreign policy behaviour. This week examines the normative power debate alongside the strategic autonomy doctrine, asking whether the two framings are contradictory or complementary, and what a theoretically honest account of the EU as a global actor looks like.

Key Themes

• Normative power Europe: the original argument, its theoretical foundations, and its critics
• Strategic autonomy: origins, doctrine, and the debate about what it means in practice
• The tension between values-based foreign policy and strategic interest
• The EU’s 2016 Global Strategy: a departure from normative power thinking?
• Geopolitical pressure and the evolution of EU strategic thinking since 2022

Case Studies

• EU weapons supply to Ukraine: normative power or strategic actor?
• The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: values, interests, and regulatory power combined
• Strategic autonomy in practice: the EU’s response to American policy shifts under successive administrations

Seminar Exercise

• Theoretical debate: students are divided into two groups, one tasked with defending the normative power Europe framework as still analytically useful and one tasked with arguing for a realist or strategic actor account, drawing on specific empirical cases to support their positions before reaching a collective assessment of which framework has greater explanatory power.

Analytical Focus

• Applying and critically evaluating normative power theory; situating strategic autonomy within theoretical debates about EU foreign policy; assessing the empirical record against competing theoretical expectations

Week 5 — Power through rules: trade, conditionality, and economic leverage

The European Union exercises more consistent and more consequential international influence through its trade and economic instruments than through any other dimension of its external action. The EU is the world’s largest trading bloc, and access to its single market constitutes an incentive of extraordinary political salience. Trade agreements are negotiated on behalf of all member states by the European Commission, giving the EU a coherence in commercial diplomacy that is absent from much of its political foreign policy. Conditionality — the attachment of political and governance requirements to trade agreements, development assistance, market access, and enlargement prospects — is the mechanism through which economic leverage is converted into political influence. The question is how far this leverage actually works in practice: whether partner states comply with conditionality requirements genuinely or performatively, whether the EU’s willingness to enforce its conditions survives the competing pressures of commercial interest and strategic pragmatism, and whether regulatory power through mechanisms such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is a new form of economic coercion dressed in environmental language. This week examines the EU’s economic instruments of external action with analytical precision.

Key Themes

• EU trade policy: competence, actors, instruments, and the politics of trade agreements
• Conditionality: theory, design, and the gap between intention and implementation
• The Brussels Effect and regulatory power: how EU standards shape global markets
• Sanctions and economic coercion as instruments of EU foreign policy
• The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism as trade and climate foreign policy

Case Studies

• The EU-Mercosur trade agreement: decade-long negotiations, conditionality debates, and unresolved ratification
• EU conditionality in practice: the Generalised Scheme of Preferences and its enforcement record
• EU sanctions regimes: Russia, Belarus, Iran, and the political economy of their adoption and implementation

Seminar Exercise

• Conditionality evaluation: students assess the effectiveness of EU conditionality in a specified bilateral trade or development relationship, examining the compliance record, the enforcement mechanisms available, the competing interests that shape EU willingness to act, and the conditions under which conditionality produces genuine political change rather than cosmetic adaptation.

Analytical Focus

• Economic instruments of foreign policy; evaluating the conditions under which conditionality and trade leverage succeed; connecting the EU’s regulatory and commercial power to its broader geopolitical positioning

Week 6 — Development, humanitarian action, and the EU in international institutions

The European Union and its member states collectively constitute the world’s largest provider of official development assistance, and the European Commission’s humanitarian aid office responds to crises across the globe. These instruments are sometimes treated as the soft, non-strategic dimension of EU external action: they express values rather than pursue interests, and their foreign policy significance is limited to reputational benefit and the diffusion of norms. That framing is analytically inadequate. Development assistance is a foreign policy instrument that shapes partner country behaviour, builds long-term dependency relationships, and competes directly with Chinese, American, and Gulf state alternatives. The EU’s presence in international institutions — the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, the G7 and G20, and the broader multilateral system — is a dimension of its global influence that is often underappreciated relative to its bilateral relationships. This week examines the development and multilateral dimensions of EU external action, asking how far they constitute genuine strategic instruments and where they remain disconnected from EU foreign policy coherence.

Key Themes

• EU development cooperation: instruments, institutions, and the Global Europe framework
• Humanitarian aid as an external policy tool: the ECHO mandate and its political limits
• The EU in international institutions: the UN system, the WTO, and multilateral governance
• Global Gateway and the competition with Chinese infrastructure investment
• The coherence problem: connecting development and humanitarian action to EU strategic objectives

Case Studies

• Global Gateway in Africa: financial commitments, implementation gaps, and competition with the Belt and Road Initiative
• EU humanitarian aid in crisis contexts: Ukraine, Gaza, and the politics of aid allocation
• The EU at the UN General Assembly: voting coordination, statement coherence, and the limits of collective representation

Seminar Exercise

• Strategic aid analysis: students evaluate a specified EU development or humanitarian engagement, assessing the explicit policy objectives, the strategic interests at stake, the degree of coherence with broader EU external relations, and the comparison with alternative providers of comparable assistance.

Analytical Focus

• Development cooperation as a foreign policy instrument; evaluating the EU’s multilateral presence; connecting the aid and humanitarian dimensions of EU external action to the coherence of EU foreign policy as a whole

Week 7 — Enlargement and the neighbourhood: transformation, leverage, and fatigue

EU enlargement is the most powerful transformative foreign policy instrument in the Union’s history. The accession of twelve Central and Eastern European and Mediterranean states between 2004 and 2013 was the largest single act of geopolitical stabilisation in post-Cold War Europe, achieved not through military alliance or security guarantee but through the prospect of membership and the conditionality apparatus that prospect enabled. Yet enlargement policy is now under severe strain. The Western Balkans accession process has stalled for over a decade, producing what analysts have called enlargement fatigue on the EU side and reform fatigue on the candidate country side. Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia received candidate status in the aftermath of the 2022 invasion, transforming enlargement from a technical process into a geopolitical signal with enormous political weight but uncertain delivery. The European Neighbourhood Policy, designed for states that would not or could not join, has produced mixed results across very different regional contexts. This week examines enlargement and neighbourhood policy as complementary but analytically distinct instruments of EU external action, asking what determines their effectiveness and where their limits lie.

Key Themes

• The accession process: conditionality, chapters, monitoring, and the political economy of compliance
• Democratic backsliding and the limits of post-accession enforcement
• The Western Balkans impasse: structural causes, political dynamics, and the credibility deficit
• Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia as candidate states: geopolitical enlargement and its institutional implications
• The European Neighbourhood Policy: design, differentiation, and mixed results across the eastern and southern dimensions

Case Studies

• The Western Balkans accession process: Serbia, Kosovo, and the accumulation of obstacles to progress
• Ukrainian candidate status after 2022: the political logic, the institutional demands, and the absorption capacity question
• The Eastern Partnership: achievements, failures, and the divergence between Belarus, Armenia, and Moldova

Seminar Exercise

• Enlargement strategy workshop: students develop a strategic assessment for a specified candidate or potential candidate country, evaluating the current state of accession negotiations or neighbourhood engagement, identifying the principal obstacles, and recommending a sequenced EU approach that balances conditionality enforcement with geopolitical incentive.

Analytical Focus

• Conditionality as a transformative foreign policy instrument; evaluating the conditions under which enlargement produces genuine political transformation; assessing the future of EU enlargement policy in a geopolitical environment that has fundamentally changed its strategic significance

Week 8 — EU-China and EU-US: navigating great power competition

The triangular relationship between the European Union, the United States, and China constitutes the defining structural challenge of EU external relations in the contemporary period. The EU-US relationship is the bedrock of European security and the foundation of the rules-based international order the EU claims to support, yet it has been subjected to unprecedented strain by divergent approaches to trade, climate, technology regulation, and the terms of burden-sharing in European defence. The EU-China relationship presents a different set of contradictions: China is simultaneously the EU’s largest source of imports, a partner in multilateral climate and trade governance, and a systemic rival whose practices in technology theft, market manipulation, human rights, and support for Russia challenge the foundations of the liberal international order the EU seeks to uphold. The EU’s attempt to manage China as a partner, competitor, and systemic rival simultaneously through a tripartite framing has been subjected to mounting pressure from events that resist such neat categorisation. This week examines both relationships analytically, asking how the EU manages the structural tensions they generate and whether a coherent strategy is achievable.

Key Themes

• The EU-US relationship: transatlantic institutions, divergences, and the burden of strategic dependency
• The EU-China relationship: the partner-competitor-systemic rival framework and its limits
• Technology, data governance, and the contest over digital standards between the EU, the US, and China
• De-risking and decoupling: EU industrial and trade strategy in the context of US-China competition
• European strategic autonomy and the transatlantic relationship: compatible or contradictory?

Case Studies

• The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with China: negotiation, political suspension, and what it revealed about EU China policy
• EU-US tensions over the Inflation Reduction Act and its implications for European industrial competitiveness
• EU de-risking strategy: export controls, inward investment screening, and the politics of supply chain diversification

Seminar Exercise

• Great power navigation exercise: students develop an EU foreign policy strategy for managing a specified point of tension in either the EU-US or EU-China relationship, articulating the strategic interests at stake, the institutional and member state constraints, the available instruments, and the risks of different courses of action.

Analytical Focus

• Bilateral relationship analysis at the great power level; applying strategic autonomy frameworks to transatlantic and EU-China dynamics; evaluating the coherence of EU strategy under conditions of structural great power competition

Week 9 — EU relations with Asia, Africa, and Latin America

Beyond the great power triangle, the European Union conducts a complex network of regional relationships that collectively shape its global positioning and its credibility as an actor committed to multilateral order and rules-based engagement. EU-ASEAN relations have deepened through the framework of a strategic partnership but remain institutionally underdeveloped relative to the strategic importance of Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific competition. The EU-Africa relationship is undergoing contested reinvention: the Global Gateway is designed to compete with Chinese infrastructure investment on different political and governance terms, but European credibility with African partners has been complicated by historical legacies, migration policy, and the perception that European conditionality is applied selectively. EU-Latin America relations, centred on the Mercosur agreement and the bi-regional partnership with CELAC, have stalled over conditionality disputes about the Amazon and agricultural standards. This week examines these regional relationships comparatively, asking what determines the depth and effectiveness of EU external engagement across regions where European strategic interest and institutional investment have historically been secondary to the great power focus.

Key Themes

• EU-ASEAN: strategic partnership, institutional frameworks, and the Indo-Pacific dimension
• EU-Japan: the Strategic Partnership Agreement, shared values, and economic convergence
• EU-Africa: the AU-EU summit framework, Global Gateway, conditionality, and historical tensions
• EU-Latin America: the Mercosur negotiations, CELAC, and the politics of conditionality and sovereignty
• The EU as a multilateral actor across regions: consistency, selectivity, and credibility

Case Studies

• The EU Indo-Pacific Strategy and its practical implications for ASEAN and Japanese engagement
• EU-Africa relations at the 2022 AU-EU Summit: ambition, disappointment, and the competition with China
• The EU-Mercosur agreement: decade-long negotiations, environmental conditionality, and Brazilian political resistance

Seminar Exercise

• Regional partnership assessment: students evaluate the EU’s engagement with a specified region or regional organisation, assessing the institutional frameworks, the instruments deployed, the degree of strategic coherence, the principal obstacles to deeper engagement, and the competition from other external actors for influence in that region.

Analytical Focus

• Comparative regional analysis of EU external relations; evaluating the consistency of EU engagement principles across different regional contexts; connecting global multilateral ambitions to the practical record of bilateral and regional partnerships

Week 10 — Coherence, credibility, and crisis: the structural challenges of EU external action

The most persistent criticism of EU foreign policy is not that it lacks ambition but that it lacks coherence. The gap between the EU’s stated commitment to human rights and its migration deals with authoritarian border states; the gap between its climate leadership and its energy dependence on authoritarian suppliers; the gap between its strategic autonomy doctrine and its continued security dependence on the United States; the gap between its conditionality apparatus and its selective willingness to enforce it — these are not accidents of circumstance but structural features of a foreign policy made by twenty-seven governments with competing interests, operating through institutions designed to produce consensus rather than strategic clarity. Crisis has sometimes overcome these structural tendencies, producing rapid and consequential foreign policy action that the normal EU process could not have generated. The 2022 response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the most significant example. But crisis-driven action creates its own problems: it is reactive rather than strategic, it exhausts political capital that then becomes unavailable for sustained policy, and it generates commitments whose long-term management requires precisely the coherence that crisis bypassed. This week examines the coherence problem in EU external relations as a structural analytical question, not a solvable administrative one.

Key Themes

• Horizontal coherence: the challenge of coordinating CFSP, trade, development, and neighbourhood instruments
• Vertical coherence: the gap between EU-level foreign policy and member state bilateral diplomacy
• Values and interests in EU external action: when do they align and when do they conflict?
• Crisis as a driver of EU foreign policy: speed, commitment, and the sustainability problem
• The credibility of EU conditionality and the politics of selective enforcement

Case Studies

• The EU response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: decision-making speed, instrument deployment, and coherence under pressure
• EU migration agreements with Turkey, Libya, and Tunisia: strategic pragmatism or values compromise?
• The EU’s response to the coup in Myanmar: CFSP, trade instruments, and the limits of coordinated pressure

Seminar Exercise

• EU foreign policy crisis negotiation (Part One): students represent assigned member states, EU institutions, and external partners in a structured multilateral negotiation over a specified EU foreign policy crisis, advancing position papers that reflect genuine institutional and national interests and engaging with the coherence constraints that EU external action imposes on all participants.

Analytical Focus

• Coherence as an analytical concept in foreign policy; evaluating the structural sources of EU foreign policy incoherence; distinguishing remediable coordination failures from inherent features of a collective foreign policy made by sovereign states

Week 11 — The EU as a global actor: power, norms, and strategic limits

The European Union’s claim to be a global actor rests on an unusual combination of assets: the world’s largest single market, the world’s largest development assistance programme, a sophisticated multilateral diplomatic presence, a normative framework that has genuine international salience, and an institutional architecture that, at its best, converts the combined weight of twenty-seven economies into coherent external action. It also rests on a set of persistent structural weaknesses: limited military capacity, a security guarantee provided by an ally whose commitment is increasingly conditioned on European burden-sharing, a decision-making system that makes rapid strategic adaptation institutionally difficult, and a political economy that makes the EU’s trade and regulatory instruments its most credible tools while leaving its security and geopolitical instruments perpetually underdeveloped. The question of what kind of global actor the EU can realistically become — as opposed to what kind it would like to be — is the question the course has been building towards. This week synthesises the analytical frameworks and empirical evidence developed across the course to construct a rigorous answer.

Key Themes

• Taking stock: the EU’s assets and structural weaknesses as a global actor
• Hard power, soft power, and regulatory power: which instruments work, for what purposes, and under what conditions
• The European Union in a multipolar world: positioning, partnerships, and the management of strategic dependency
• Reform debates: what would need to change for the EU to become a more effective global actor?
• The future of the EU global strategy: strategic coherence as a moving target

Case Studies

• The EU’s global standing in comparative perspective: influence relative to the United States, China, and other major actors across issue areas
• Defence integration and the European Defence Union: how far has the EU moved and what remains structurally blocked?
• The EU’s performance in multilateral institutions: voting coherence, agenda-setting, and norm diffusion

Seminar Exercise

• EU foreign policy crisis negotiation (Part Two) and reflective presentation: students continue the simulation from Week 10, reaching or failing to reach negotiated outcomes, then deliver individual five-minute reflective presentations on their strategic experience and what it revealed about the structural conditions that enable or constrain effective EU external action.

Analytical Focus

• Synthesising the course’s theoretical and empirical frameworks; evaluating EU power across its multiple dimensions; connecting the analysis of specific instruments and relationships to a coherent account of what the EU can and cannot achieve as a global actor

Week 12 — What will EU external relations look like in 2050?

Strategic forecasting is a discipline of structured uncertainty. It cannot predict the future, but it can identify the forces most likely to shape it, map the scenarios in which different combinations of those forces produce divergent outcomes, and clarify the policy choices that make some futures more or less probable. For EU external relations, the horizon of 2050 is genuinely open. A more integrated European defence and foreign policy capacity, driven by continued geopolitical pressure and institutional reform, could produce a European Union with the strategic weight its economic size should generate. A Union fractured by member state divergence, the strains of successive enlargements, and the political appeal of national strategic autonomy over collective European action could produce something considerably less. Technological change — in artificial intelligence, in cyber competition, in the economics of the green transition — is reshaping the strategic environment faster than EU institutions were designed to adapt. This week uses EU external relations as the lens through which to examine the challenge of reasoning about long-term geopolitical and institutional futures, drawing on the analytical frameworks developed across the course.

Key Themes

• European defence integration: scenarios for the European Defence Union and NATO’s future
• Enlargement and the EU’s borders in 2050: a Union of thirty-five or more members and its foreign policy implications
• Artificial intelligence, cyber competition, and the technological dimension of EU external relations
• Multipolarity, fragmentation, and the EU’s role in a post-Western international order
• Scenario analysis: what would a strategically effective EU look like, and what would need to have changed to produce it?

Case Studies

• Scenarios for EU-US relations under different American political and strategic trajectories
• The foreign policy implications of EU enlargement to include Ukraine, Moldova, and the Western Balkans
• Artificial intelligence governance as a dimension of EU external relations: norm-setting, strategic competition, and partnership

Seminar Exercise

• Strategic futures workshop: students work in teams to construct and present two contrasting scenarios for EU external relations in 2050, specifying the key variables, driving forces, and strategic implications of each, then subject each other’s scenarios to critical scrutiny in open seminar discussion, drawing explicitly on the theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence developed across the course.

Analytical Focus

• Strategic forecasting methodology; scenario construction; synthesising the theoretical, institutional, and policy-oriented frameworks developed across the course and applying them to questions whose resolution depends on choices not yet made by actors not yet in office

*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.

Updated – May 2026