International recognition of European Union ‘actorness’: Language-based evidence from United Nations General Assembly speeches 1970-2020

Is the EU seen as a relevant actor in international politics? Diverse accounts diagnose an emerging international ‘actorness’ of the Union, which is said to wield ‘economic’ or even ‘normative’ power. These accounts presume that states in the international system actually recognize EU actorness with the growing foreign policy capabilities of the Union over time. Yet, does this hold true? In which contexts does this happen? And, more importantly, which third states have an incentive to recognize EU actorness? This paper maps the recognition of EU actorness on the international stage by applying modern natural language processing algorithms to the 8,481 speeches held in the annual United Nations General Assembly 1970-2020. To show when and by whom EU actorness is recognized, I use semantic role labelling algorithms to identify all sentences in which the EU is presented to have agency and word embedding models to study in which contexts this occurs. The results show that the recognition of international EU actorness has indeed increased over time while this concentrates on economic contexts and is primarily driven by EU member states themselves. Regarding external recognition, distance and trade dependence matter while great powers and illiberal regimes systematically downplay the EU’s international actorness. Recognizing the EU as an international actor is thus hardly a global phenomenon and rather reproduces the fault lines of the contemporary international system.