The EU as a Security and Market Power
Full course description
In this course, you will examine the EU as an international actor. You will explore and compare the strengths and weaknesses of the EU’s two main tools of foreign policy i.e. the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Commercial Policy (CCP). Beyond studying their political and administrative set up, you will explore how these policies are brought to use in a number of case studies and topical issues such as - EU-US-China relations, trade negotiations and sanctions, trade and sustainable development, crisis-management, strategic autonomy; defence capabilities, democratic accountability, energy security, hybrid threats, etc.
The final two weeks of the course aim to synthesize and apply the insights obtained on the different dimensions of EU external action. This will be done by means of two debates, inspired by the Oxford-style format of debating.
At the end of the course, you will have to write a research paper on a concrete foreign policy challenges for the EU. The paper is not just applying the concepts and theories discussed in class but also about developing your own analytical argument. You will more particularly have to make a choice on a specific external policy domain and its available instruments and justify this choice in finding the optimal solution for the problem set you are dealing with.
Course objectives
At the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Understand the role of the EU as an external actor, including the institutional, political, economic and strategic rationales underlying EU’s CCP and CFSP
- Form a judgment on the strengths and limitations of the EU’s policies for external action;
- Autonomously generate new ideas and research questions of EU external relations, make substantive choices when analysing these questions, while setting priorities and a workplan within the timeframe of the course;
- Express ideas and research findings on the EU’s external action to specialist European and international academic audiences in written academic English through the medium of an academic paper;
- Engage in on-going scholarly and societal debates, such as the geopoliticisation of the Common Commercial Policy, the EU's aspired strategic autonomy in security and defence, the nexus between EU external and internal policies etc.
Recommended reading
- C. Hill, M. Smith, S. Vanhoonacker (eds) (2023). International Relations and the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press (4th ed.).
- S. Gstohl, and S. Schunz (eds) (2021). The external action of the European Union. Concepts, approaches, theories. London: Macmillan International.
- S. Keukeleire and T. Delreux (2022). The Foreign Policy of the European Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.