Can Emotional Collaborations with External Actors Help Achieve EGD Targets? The Nexus of Climate Change Policies and Emotions in the EU’s Normative Superiority Over External Actors

Recent developments in the European Union’s (EU) climate change policies, such as the initiation of the European Green Deal (EGD) by the European Commission in 2019, have opened new avenues for its relationship with non-EU countries to mitigate environmental concerns, such as carbon emissions and food insecurity. Although the EU generally focuses on the EGD’s implementation within member countries, it is widely acknowledged that collaboration with external actors, particularly developing countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey, is crucial to achieving specified targets. In this context, external actors, with their utilization of new energy technologies, growing populations, and extensive agricultural and food sectors, play an essential role. This paper seeks to uncover the emotional components within the EU’s climate change policies as they pertain to collaborations with external actors. Using a dataset from eu parliamentary debates on climate change referencing external (non-eu) countries, this paper examines the framing of candidate countries within the EU’s climate change policies and explores the emotional dynamics mediated by the EU’s normative superiority. The paper combines computational social sciences methods such as zero shot modelling and emotion analysis to examine how the EU debates use shared symbols, meanings, and values to collaborate with external actors in achieving the targets set out in the EGD. It also examines the role emotions play in this collaboration process, particularly in establishing the EU’s normative superiority in climate change policies over candidate countries to gain consensus.