Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - International Politics - General and Theories, grade: 1.3, Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, language: English, abstract: In the last decades the processes of globalization gave rise to economic interdependencies, leading to the increasing importance of economic diplomacy. The European Union is the largest trading block in the world and therefore exerts considerable power in international trade affairs. This thesis will pursue a theory-testing approach to analyze whether the EU is a realist or liberal actor in economic diplomacy. Through three case studies we come to a complex conclusion, that highlights the realist strategic thinking embodied in EU actions and the liberal set of tools that is used to achieve those. As economic diplomacy is designed to shape the international economic order, the European Union has an important set of tools at its hand. But how is it used? Is the EU the liberal powerhouse of the world, striving to increase trade regardless of strategic motives, promoting democracy and the global rise of capitalism with a view on human rights and labour rights? Or is the EU in fact a realist actor, that makes use of economic diplomacy to increase its power and to strengthen its own national security?

The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of engaging in external trade relations outside of the World Trade Organization (WTO) with entire regions and economic powerhouses. Understanding why and how the EU engages in one of the most active fields of external relations is crucial. This book fills a gap in the literature by analysing motives on the modes – bilateralism, inter-regionalism, or multilateralism - of EU external trade relations towards regional organizations in Asia and Latin America outside of the WTO. In particular, it examines why the EU turned from interregional to bilateral external trade relations towards these world regions – a question that is, to date, under-researched. By developing and testing an original approach rooted in realist theorizing coined ‘commercial realism’, it examines systematically the explanatory power of commercial realism against liberal-institutionalist approaches dominant in the literature on EU external relations through five in-depth case studies. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in EU Politics/Studies, EU external relations, inter-regionalism and more broadly to International Relations and International Political Economy.

The European Union is a key player in international economic relations, but its exact role and how it goes about making decisions and negotiating is often poorly understood within and especially outside the EU. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the factors that determine the role of the EU in economic diplomacy.

This collection brings together leading scholars and practitioners to assess the processes, institutions and outcomes of the EU's collective diplomatic engagement in the fields of security, human rights, trade and finance and environmental politics. It analyzes successes and failures in the EU's search for global influence in the post-Lisbon era.

Since 1992, the European Union has put liberalisation at the core of its energy policy agenda. This aspiration was very much in line with an international political economy driven by the neo-liberal (Washington) consensus. The central challenge for the EU is that the energy world has changed, while the EU has not. The rise of Asian energy consumers (China and India), more assertive energy producers (Russia), and the threat of climate change have securitized the IPE of energy, and turned it more 'realist'. The main research question is therefore: 'What does a liberal actor do in a realist world?' The overall answer as far as the EU is concerned is that it approaches energy challenges as a problem of market failure: imperfect competition on the supply side; inadequate supply of public goods on the demand side and in terms of infrastructure; and large externalities that arise both from non-energy events and from large-scale consumption of fossil fuels. A Liberal Actor in a Realist World assesses the changing nature of the global political economy of energy and the European Union's response, and the external dimension of the regulatory state. The book concludes that the EU's soft power has a hard edge, which is derived primarily from its regulatory power. This works best when it targets companies rather than governments, and it is more effective in the 'Near Abroad' than at the global level. This makes the EU emerge an actor in its own right in the global political economy of energy - a 'Regulatory Power Europe'.

This text reviews a variety of approaches to the study of the European Union's foreign policy. Much analysis of EU foreign policy contains implicit theoretical assumptions about the nature of the EU and its member states, their inter-relationships, the international system in which they operate and the nature and direction of European integration. In many instances such assumptions, given that they are not discussed openly, curtail rather than facilitate debate. The purpose of this book is to open up this field of enquiry so that students, observers and analysts of EU foreign policy can review a broad range of tools and theoretical templates from which the development and the trajectory of the EU's foreign policy can be studied.

øSelected legal deficiencies relating to international energy governance are identified in this salient book. The currently fragmented and multi-layered international energy governance regime is exposed and reviewed. If governanceø were streamlined for