Contested EU Foreign Policy in an Era of Geopolitics

The doctoral network EUFOG will contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which the EU is reconsidering key tenets of its international role in the face of the geopolitical turn in international politics. The liberal international order, i.e. the collection of norms, institutions and power relationships that have defined the last decades of international political and economic relations, is undergoing major transformations.

Although the final destination of these changes is still to be seen, the situation is shaped by a return of competition between great powers in a multipolar world (US, China, EU and Russia), facilitated further by growing geopolitical ambitions of many regional powers. These developments should lead to a systematic overhaul of research about the international role of the EU.

Over the past decades, the EU's role in international politics was perceived through the prism of two assumptions. First, the external relations of the EU were understood as reflecting the kind of polity the EU was: an integration-through-law project, and a community of values. Support for

multilateralism and the promotion of certain international norms were seen as the unproblematic externalization of internal consensuses. Second, even when the EU entertained projects of reform for the international order, they sought to strengthen its

institutions and norms, in a moment when such strengthening was perceived as being broadly in line with the trajectory of international politics. This state of affairs has ceased to exist. EUFOG will train a generation of scholars to enable them to address the politics (the political conflicts and debates), policies (decisions and measures) and partners (relationships and perceptions) associated with the ways in which EU foreign policy responds to these new international realities in a broad range of issue areas, from security to trade to human rights.