Perceptions Of The European Union S Identity In International Relations

This book examines the perception of European Union’s identity by the main actors in international relations. Analysing issues related to public discourse in third countries as demonstrated by, amongst others, their political elites, civil society, and think-tanks, the book highlights a ‘normative gap’ with regards to the European Union's self-definition/perception and its perception in the international environment. It also shows that the European Union’s perception of normative power in international relations is not shared consistently by the main principal actor yet is differentiated relative to geographical area and scope of activities undertaken by the EU. It demonstrates that the perception of the EU’s normative identity is a source of the crisis of the European Union as an effective and significant player in the international arena. This book will be of key interest to scholar and students of European Union politics, European politics/studies, European integration, identity politics, and international relations.

This book examines the perception of European Union's identity by the main actors in international relations and highlights a 'normative gap' with regards to the European Union's self-definition/perception and its perception in the international environment.

This book examines how the European Union (EU) is perceived beyond its borders in the US; the Middle East: Israel, Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Iran; Russia; China; India; Brazil and South Africa. The book also analyses the main perceptions of the EU in some key international institutions, including the World Bank; World Trade Organization, United Nations, African Union; and transnational actors, including non-Western media such as Al Jazeera. It seeks to provide a thorough analysis of the implications that these perceptions might have for the global role of the EU. By taking this approach and by providing both conceptual and empirical arguments, the volume provides an innovative perspective on the analysis of the EU as a global actor. It also strengthens a research agenda on the EU external image: an underdeveloped area of investigation in which the editors and the main contributors to this volume have played a pioneering role in the past few years. It will be of strong interest to academics and students of international politics, European studies and development studies.

A central problem for the European Union is said to be that of the "politics of identity". Within this, the concept of the EU’s international identity requires exploration in terms of how it is both constructed and represented globally. To address this issue, this book identifies measures and compares public awareness and perceptions of the EU within the Asia-Pacific region. It deals with the under-researched issue of the public perception of the EU outside the Union and the role of the media in shaping such perceptions. It builds on what has been described as the EU’s ‘communication deficit’, a phenomenon which has typically been explored as an internal EU dynamic but has yet to be applied to the EU’s external relations. The volume presents findings from a systematic research project designed to measure the EU’s external ‘communication deficit’ and to raise the level of its awareness in other regions through three perception levels: The study of EU images in news mass media production A survey of general public perceptions and attitudes on the EU A survey of the elite perceptions of the EU. Drawing on research from New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and Thailand, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, communication studies, European studies and Asian studies.

In the age of grand recession, nationalism seems to have returned to Europe. In every EU country, many citizens are unhappy with the perceived intrusion of 'Europe' in their way-of-life. Any idea of a genuine pan-European identity seems to be in retreat. This book provides an unprecedented insight into the multiple ways through which citizens of 16 countries connect their own national identity to European identity. The book's theoretical claim is that European identity, as well as national identity, should be empirically assessed taking into account its multi-dimensionality. The volume's contributors suggest that European identity was always unlikely to be a source of political integration and political legitimacy in the way national identities have been in the past and are today. Europeans' primary identity is national rather than supranational. Mutual trust between European peoples exists, but is somewhat fragile. Yet, European identity is intertwined with national identities in manifold ways. The 'imagined communities' at the national and European level show strong similarities - criteria for being a European are strongly associated with the criteria used to define who national belonging. These complex links also manifest themselves in citizen's feelings of interdependence between the nations in the European Union - which, the volume suggests, support the EU in the face of severe crises. The IntUne series is edited by Maurizio Cotta (University of Siena) and Pierangelo Isernia (University of Siena). The INTUNE Project - Integrated and United: A Quest for Citizenship in an Ever Closer Europe - is one of the most recent and ambitious research attempts to empirically study how citizenship is changing in Europe. The book series is organized around the two main axes of the project, to report how the issues of identity, representation and standards of good governance are constructed and reconstructed at the elite and citizen levels, and how mass-elite interactions affect the ability of elites to shape identity, representation and the scope of governance. A first set of four books examines how identity, scope of governance and representation have been changing over time respectively at elites, media and public level. The next two books present cross-level analysis of European and national identity on the one hand and problems of national and European representation and scope of governance on the other, in doing so comparing data at both the mass and elite level. A concluding volume summarizes the main results, framing them in a wider theoretical context.

The "EU-Network of European Studies Centres in Asia (NESCA): A Research Dialogue" was launched in April 2006 as a project funded by the 6th Framework Program of the European Commission and consists of a series of conferences and workshops plus related research and cooperation activities on EU-Asian relations. The project's focus includes: transferring and disseminating research on issues relevant for Asia to the Asian European Studies community, to Asian politics, and in particular to the Asian public; widening and deepening European interest and engagement in Asia; and promoting sustainable cooperation between universities and research institutions in the European Research Area as well as in Asia. In this study NESCAs third publication a team of international authors offers original and innovative studies based on unique empirical data on how Europe is communicated both within the EU and to the outside world. The table of contents include: --- An EU Self-Understanding of the Euro

The book explores the views of elites alongside those of the wider population in the European Union. The chapters place the new member states – and the potential candidate Serbia – on the map of Europe in this context for the first time. The volume's comparative method goes beyond the standard old member states versus new member states divide. It assesses regional differences within Central Europe and evaluates the problem of European and national identity formation, perception of external threats to the EU (including Russia), differences between economic and political elite views about the integration process and the connection between national performance and public opinion about Europe. Even though, in each country, positive views are dominant about the integration process, heterogeneous views prevail behind the image of a unifying Europe. The book’s major contribution is that it makes the new member states more visible and provides hard evidence while remaining theoretically driven. Furthermore, it covers the most important topics that emerge in studies concerning European integration. The book is intended for those interested in European integration in general but Central and Eastern European comparativists will find it particularly useful. This book was published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

This book examines European Union's foreign policy and its perceived under-performance. Contrary to many traditional analyses, this poor performance is not ascribed to a lack of political will, institutional under-development, poor leadership or lack of material resources. Instead, the argument here is that the Union's overall foreign policy (in) capacity can be understood as at least in part if not largely by virtue of profoundly different visions of what the Union represents in the world. Furthermore, that in the absence of a clear and visible democratic grounding of that policy, the Union is incapable of developing such an identity that can sustain it in its emerging global role. Proposing a radical analytical departure, the book puts forward a model based on the construction of the Union s very identity, most especially its contingency and fluidity, and the implications of this for the Union s relations with other international actors. Attention is therefore given to a better understanding of the Union as a discursive construction and the processes that underpin it. Moreover, those processes are rooted in their iterative performance by policy actors themselves that produce boundaries and result in a in a focus on the changing role of the Union in world affairs. The lack of certainty in the Union s identity is the starting point. The Union is not a self-constituting entity it is not therefore wholly the product of its own understanding. Rather, our understanding of the Union is driven in significant part by the views, perceptions and beliefs about the Union and its Member States held by its own policy actors and publics and those of international actors that thereby create a shared inter-subjective understanding of the Union. The goal of this work, therefore, is to identify and then to assess the scope and breadth of the contrasting visions that the European Union has of itself and to see how if at all such visions reinforce or undermine the Union's declared foreign-policy goals in specific cases. By identifying the perceptual gaps between the different readings of the EU by its own elites and publics, this book holds out the potential of thereby improving our understanding of EU foreign policy making and its execution at key policy stages, i.e. in policy design, in the engagement of policy actors and in the nature of institutional responses. This book will be of much interest to students of EU policy, foreign policy analysis, security studies and IR in general. "