EU foreign policy in a new era: communication as response or strategy? The case of the East StratCom Task Force

Recent events in the Eastern neighborhood have caused a disturbance to the European Union’s (EU) attempts of a securing a ‘ring of friends’ in the Eastern neighborhood. Although the EU member states remain divided over common foreign policy and the idea of a collective response towards Russia’s activities in the common border countries, diplomatic efforts have been made to keep the door open for Eastern partnerships. These diplomatic advances have caused further confrontation. The continued support of the Ukrainian reform process has been met by systematic attempts of discrediting the EU’s policy towards the Eastern neighborhood making use of new digital opportunities such as social media. Following the European Council in March 2015, the East StratCom Task Force was therefore set up to address Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns. The main task at hand is to strategically communicate the EU, to strengthen the media environment in the Eastern neighborhood and to improve the EU’s capacity to manage disinformation activities by external actors. The EastCom Task force team, currently consisting of 10 communication experts, is thus charged with the mission of projecting a positive EU narrative to counter Russian aggression. Consequently, some has described the East StratCom Task Force as a return to propaganda warfare and a measure of organized collective counter propaganda. EU officials however maintain that its sole purpose is to proactively promote the EU, a communication strategy to bridge the information gap rather than respond to external threats. This paper explores these assumptions of communication as both response and strategy in a first attempt of conceptualizing the foreign policy practices of East StratCom Task Force. It does so building on ideas of mediatization and public diplomacy: discussing the premises that EU foreign policy could be gaining grounds through new media opportunities of the digital age. The empirical material consists of official documents, online ‘myth-busting’ activities of the task force and interviews with key actors. The paper’s main contribution is hence a first analysis of how the East StratCom Task Force envisions EU foreign policy in a new era.