EU foreign policy and the fragmentation of the international order: a framework for analysis

Abstract

The liberal international order (LIO) is fragmenting—there is pushback against liberal universalism, spheres of influence are back, and the shortening of value chains is explicitly planned for. By itself an integration-through-law project born within the logic of the LIO, the EU has recorded such changes in its foreign policy. This chapter sketches a research agenda over the ways in which the fragmentation of the LIO has impacted (the politics of) EU foreign policy. How have intra-EU debates registered this process? What are the strategies deployed by the EU in the face of the changing and fragmenting landscape of global governance? We propose interrogating this plurality of responses by identifying three broad approaches to EU foreign policy (nationalism, Atlanticism and Europeanism), and then differentiate between two different reactions to a fragmenting liberal international order, depending on whether one prefers to embrace fragmentation, or rather rejects to act according to its logic.