[Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler, The European Union as Global Actor,  (New York: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2006, ISBN: 0-415-28244-6)]

“The Union has translated its value-based identity into normative action, as promoter of human rights and sustainability across the international system. As a development and humanitarian actor the Union is distanced from the imperial legacy of the Member States and has developed a distinctive approach”

– Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler, The European Union as Global Actor

A. Introduction

Compared to the bulk of literature on European multi-level governance and the different internal policies of the European Community, there is rather littleresearch on the European Union’s external activities. This is likely to change. The post-Cold War world has pushed the EU to a more proactive international role. This development is reflected, inter alia, in several treaty amendments extending the Union’s external competences. The European Union as Global Actor by Charlotte Bretherton and John Vogler impressively shows that the EU’s foreign policy is already a highly complex subject, maybe more complex than a nation state’s external relations. But complexity alone would hardly justify intensive research. The obvious question is: Does EU foreign policy matter? Bretherton and Vogler attempt “to provide an assessment of the capacity and character of the European Union as a global actor”. From the outset, the authors make no secret of their opinion that the Union impinges significantly on several areas of global politics.

B. A social constructivist approach

In the first chapter, Bretherton and Vogler stress that their book is unique because of its social constructivist approach: “We found particularly useful a social constructivist approach that conceptualizes global politics in terms of the processes of social interaction in which actors engage. These formal and informal processes shape the evolution of actors’ identities and provide contexts within which action is constrained or enabled”. Despite this (well-grounded) preference for Constructivism, it is rather sad that the authors deal with other major approaches, such as (neo-) Realism, Pluralism, and neo-Marxism...