Constructing International Political Identity of the EU - From the 1973 Declaration to the EU Global Strategy

Studying European Union's (EU) identity at a moment when its integration process is experiencing one of the greatest crises in history is, certainly, a challenge. This article argues that the EU is an actor endowed with international political identity, understood as a set of elements that define its foreign policy and constitute the core values of the Union's political community. The main objective is to propose a model of analysis that allows both to identity and understand the EU's international identity evolvement, as well as how its construction process was promoted and developed. It is suggested that the EU international identity results from the dynamics between three main dimensions: normative (shared principles and values); national (member States inputs); and institutional (EU political system). This process develops in a context of tension and instability, caused by the interactions among the three dimensions, which is tamed by internal mechanisms designed to reaching consensus that allows the achievement of a common denominator, the basis of the EU international identity. Throughout last decades, this process went through cyclical reproduction, as each common denominator became the starting point to negotiate the following tensions, generated by permanent adjustments in the European project (internal level) and by changes in the regional and international system (external level). This model will be applied to the period between the Declaration on European Identity (1973) and the presentation of the EU Global Strategy (2016). To understand and analyse the EU international identity process, this article discusses the literature that considers the discourse as an expression of EU's international identity (Cederman; Risse; Neumann; Wodak, among others), as well the discourse analysis applied to foreign policy, adapting the multilevel model from Waever (2002). Three levels of the discursive structure were considered: EU and the International System; EU Foreign Policy and EU Foreign Institutional Narrative. This research has a double goal: to identify and interpret the systemic relations among the elements that concur for EU international identity production and reproduction; and understand how identity impacts in the general decision-making process in the EU's foreign policy and its official narrative.