Beyond EU navel-gazing: Taking stock of EU-centrism in the analysis of EU foreign policy

Abstract

Whilst concerns about the EU-centric character of EU foreign policy analysis have become more frequent in recent years, a systematic toolbox for diagnosing and remedying this problem is still lacking. This article’s contribution is twofold. First, it proposes a new typology of three approaches to foreign policy analysis, offering conceptual body and nuance to the debate on EU-centrism. The typology can be used for scrutinising existing analyses, as well as for shaping new research projects. Second, this typology is applied in a meta-analysis of post-Lisbon EU foreign policy scholarship: a built-for-purpose dataset of 451 articles was analysed, covering all work on EU foreign policy published in seven key journals for the period 2010–2014, was analysed. It was found that academic work on EU foreign policy wass indeed rife with EU-centric research questions, and, moreover, that this is the case irrespective of either the policy area under study or the focus of the journal.

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