What is the EU? The European Union’s foreign policy discourse

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to determine how the EU´s power projections are constructed in a depiction of its foreign policy actions in 2001 and 2011. Can the European Union be described as a normative or smart power? How is the EU´s foreign policy discourse constructed? This thesis employs a Discourse Historical Approach to answer these questions. The overall purpose of this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of how the EU promotes itself through its foreign policy and to be able to contribute to answering the question: What is the European Union? To deepen our understanding of the European Union and what kind of actor it is, or should be, in the world is a highly relevant and interesting topic that scholars have been debating for 50 years now. `The General report on the Activities of the European Union´, a yearly publication that is distributed in order for the public to know what the EU did in the past year, serves at material for this thesis. The conclusions drawn are that the EU promotes itself as a normative power, foremost towards regions in Africa, its neighbourhood and Latin America. The EU´s power discourse is constructed by creating in- and out-groups as well as using predication, positive or negative labels.