CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Potocarova, Kamila |
|---|---|
| Title | The Grand Bargain: Forming the Role of the European Union |
| Summary | The international order is in transformation. The new global developments alongside economic, technological, and political dimensions generate security concerns that contribute to more fragmented, conflictual, politicized, and partially state-centered international relations. As these new structural developments lead to a more fragmented multilateralism that challenges the neoliberal order, of which the European Union (EU), in its self-understanding, is the avantgarde actor, I examine how the EU responds to this new international context. To answer this question, I conduct discursive and partially policy analysis evaluating the explanatory power of two sets of hypotheses – realist and constructivist – through which I evaluate the EU’s global strategy. The research shows that while the EU aims to strengthen its relative economic power as well as to build up militarily usable technologies, their strength is still moderated and arbitrated through the normative identity of the EU that deflects the external pressures. Additionally, I also show that the expectation that the EU will double down on norms, its normative approach may be challenged even as norms are intertwined with relative gains concerns to manage policy adjustments within the EU that from both normative and realist perspective look suboptimal. Overall, the research points to a new hybrid character of the EU with both constructivist and realist elements combining interests and values that import relative power and universal norms and through which the EU bargains its global role. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/potocarova_kamila.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University