Course Schedule

Course Schedule

Start > Leuphana Bachelor (B.A./B.Eng./B.Sc./LL.B.) -> Major Politikwissenschaft (ab WS 2016/2017) -> Vertiefung: Internationale Beziehungen: Kooperation und Konflikt

Lehrveranstaltungen

Die Europäische Union in Internationalen Beziehungen: Außenbeziehungen und Akteursqualität (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Vera van Hüllen

Inhalt: Today, we easily accept the European Union (EU) an actor in international relations in its own right: It is actively involved in global climate politics, represents its member states at the World Trade Organization, has delegations in more than 100 countries worldwide, engages in development cooperation, and leads negotiations with the United States of America on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). However, the EU is itself a product of regional cooperation and integration, raising questions of what kind of actor it actually is and how much influence it has. It poses a challenge to International Relations (IR) as a traditionally state-centred discipline and classic IR Theories and Foreign Policy Analysis approaches only take us so far in understanding the EU’s external relations. Over the past decades, a rich scholarship dedicated to the EU as an international actor has emerged. In order to familiarize ourselves empirically with the EU as an international actors, we start the course by looking at the legal and institutional foundations of the EU’s external relations, including relevant actors and their competencies in decision-making procedures in different policies. We then turn to review the main conceptual debates on the EU as an international actor, e.g. in terms of its ‘actorness’ or ‘power’. On this basis, we investigate in more detail selected ‘foreign’ policies, e.g. the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, its ‘regional’ accession and neighbourhood policies, and specific issues such as trade and environmental protection. On the one hand, we draw on various analytical approaches that seek to either explain the EU’s actions or measure their effect. On the other hand, we link these insights to current developments, including e.g. specific missions under the Common Security and Defence Policy or the TTIP negotiations. Through working with primary sources (e.g. EU treaties and documents) and academic writings, the seminar offers the opportunity to train independent research in this field of IR and political science that brings together conceptual and theoretical approaches with specific empirical examples. Assignments are intended to facilitate the active participation of students in class and to train research capacities, in particular finding and working with relevant literature and empirical data. Linking theoretical, empirical, and practical issues of conducting research, we discuss ‘work in progress’ on writing a seminar thesis in class.