From a Global Strategy to a Global Actor: European Union’s Actorness in Global Security through the Common Security and Defense Policy

With the EU Global Strategy (EUGS) in 2016, the EU sought to craft a common narrative that would unify together a wide range of actors – member states, EU institutions, think tanks, universities, etc. But beyond the creation of a common narrative, there was an intrinsic need for a meta-narrative or a strategic approach to global security, a unique combination between realistic assessment and idealistic aspiration. Although one should take great caution when pointing to the capacity of the EU to achieve the goal it sets in global security, in some ways the idealism in the tone of the strategy is about the power of possibility that inspires to take up challenges. This master thesis will attempt to answer the question of whether the EU maintains its global security actor status, from the perspective of adapting to the new security challenges post-EUGS. Therefore, the objective of this article is twofold. First, it introduces and applies Sjöstedt’s model of EU’s global actorness capacity to the specific field of security, transforming it into the theoretical framework of this paper. As such a model of analysis will take into account the five key elements of the analytical typology of Sjostedt. Rhinard and Sjostedt (2019) updated the four-decades-old model to encompass the new realities of the global governance architecture but were not yet successful to apply it to empirical evidence. This task will be realized in one of the chapters. A second task would be to integrate the Permanent Structured Cooperation, the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence and European Defence Fund into the context of EU security and defence, therefore raising a sub-question of whether they can be considered as a turning point in EU security and defence policy and security actorness.