Towards a Value-Based Common European Economic Diplomacy: A Qualitative Document Analysis of Commission Strategies

Abstract: The landscape in global international economic relations has experienced major upheavals during the past decade. On the one hand, major economic powers abandon the principles of multilateralism and open trade, on the other, emerging players like China increasingly gain influence, firmly advancing their interests with extensive projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The EU, rightly seeing itself as a major economic power, is searching for a clear position in this new reality that allows affirming its strategic interests while safeguarding its core values. In the light of these developments, the thesis at hand investigates the current state of EED by mapping relevant actors and identifying conceptual frameworks to analyse and understand the EU approach. In a second step, this thesis analyses strategy documents produced by relevant Commission services addressing issues of EED concerning their coherence amongst each other and examines the role of European values in the formulation of these strategies. Methodically, this study conducts a document analysis based on elements of thematic qualitative text analysis and is aided by tools of quantitative content analysis. The mapping of the state of EED shows that, despite being a relatively new concept, this dimension of external EU policy has come a long way. The analysis of the strategies by Commission services shows that the strategies indeed prove to be overall coherent in their approach. However, significant differences in the way importance is assigned to EU values could be identified. While DG TRADE and DG DEVCO, assign high importance to values, DG GROW only does to a very limited degree. As this study only examined strategies but not actual policies, these findings should inspire further research into the translation of values in the implementation of EED.