Global Actorness: Experimentalist Governance in the EU External Aviation Policy (2002-2025)

Over the past few decades, the EU has been at the forefront of changes to the system governing international air transport and market liberalization. Following the successful deregulation of the intra-EU market in the 1990s, the EU began establishing the external dimension of common aviation policy addressed to its neighbors and key strategic partners. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is easy to forget that the power of the EU in the Chicago-bilateral system is still formally limited. Taking this as a starting point, this paper discusses the analysis of the governance mode embedded in the EU External Aviation Policy between 2002 and 2025. Drawing on thick qualitative descriptions combined with the process tracing method, it aims to identify the underlying mechanisms linking the hypothesized initial conditions to observed outcome. Experimentalist governance, understood as iterative, multi-level process based on provisional goal-setting, local adaptation, recursive cooperation, and mutual learning from comparing practices, provides an analytical lens for explaining how the Commission was able to advance EU interest in a domain despite the persistence of legal and political constraints. The research focuses on the five thematic components of EAP: economic regulation of air transport, aviation security, traffic and safety management, environmental protection and social policy. Together, these form the backbone of the EU strategy on international aviation. The analysis demonstrates that experimentalist modalities are systematically embedded across all five components of the EAP, enabling the Commission to bypass institutional inertia and strengthen the capacities required for global actorness. Research contributes to the scholarly debate on international aviation by analyzing the EU efforts to shape global skies. Second, it expands the body of work on experimentalist governance by applying the framework to a new domain and demonstrating the utility of this lens in explaining institutional innovation within legal and political constraints. Third, it contributes to EU foreign policy studies, showing how a sectoral strategy can serve as an instrument of actorness, enabling EU institutions to consolidate external authority in a highly technical and legally challenging context.