The EU as an Actor Beyond Its Borders: Concept, Capacity and Challenges

Abstract

This panel discusses international actorness of the European Union (EU) and its relations with third parties, with a focus on candidate states in enlargement process. Being an international organization with supranational and intergovernmental features, EU actorness matters in its relations with third parties. It appears in international relations sometimes as a powerful actor and sometimes as a weak one, and with a varied actor type always, e.g., as a normative power, as a regulatory state or as a geopolitical actor. Based upon external threats, or the recent geopolitical and geoeconomic crises, namely, the Russian-Ukrainian war and competition over global supply chains, and domestic conflicts in and inter-state tensions between candidate states, the panel is rather around geopolitical actorness of the EU, its definition, capacity, obstacles faced by it, and its impact on EU enlargement. Accordingly, the empirical analyses included in this panel ask and discuss the following points: how external threats have transformed a normative power EU into a geopolitical actor; how strategic autonomy matters in this actorness; what challenges this autonomy has faced; how the EU as an actor in external relations can be looked from another perspective, e.g., the EU as a relational, or dialogue-based actor, as an alternative to this strategic autonomy-based geopolitical actorness, which has mainly negative influence on candidate states’ framing of the EU; how the EU, as a security-oriented actor, behaves in response to domestic conflicts in candidate states, e.g., in Moldova, against the secessionist movements in the de facto state Transnistria; and finally, why the EU, a geopolitical actor carrying concerns about stability and security in candidate states, has failed in ending inter-state conflicts between its candidate states, e.g., between Kosova and Serbia, where the Union has been acting as a facilitating actor – through setting a ‘dialogue’ between Belgrade and Pristina, whose implementation agreements, e.g. Ohrid (2023), have become a pre-condition for those countries towards their EU accession.

Title	Details
Revisiting Transnistria in the Context of EU Enlargement: Evidence from 2022–2024	View Paper Details
Crisis-Induced EU Actorness in the South Caucasus: From External Governance to Mediation, Energy Statecraft, and Monitoring (Pre-2020–2025)	View Paper Details
the Paradox of Eu Strategic Autonomy: Centralised Ambitions and Decentralised Diplomatic Action	View Paper Details
Beyond Strategic Autonomy: Relational Power, Cultural Politics, and Europe’s Eastern Entanglements	View Paper Details
The EU’s Performative Power in the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue	View Paper Details