ABSTRACT
It is far from uncommon to encounter the concept of ‘role’ in the EU foreign-policy literature. However, it is most often used as a general way of describing the EU’s international behaviour or assessing its influence, and is rarely connected to explicit theoretical assumptions. Hence it is often treated as interchangeable with references to the EU’s international ‘actorness’, ‘identity’, ‘nature’, etc. The ambition of this volume is to bring role theory into the analysis of EU foreign policy. Roles are normatively regulated and refer to the expectations that are attached to a position or post. Consequently, using role analysis as a framework for studying the EU’s foreign policy should direct researchers towards examining questions such as how the EU’s foreign policy writes itself into an international society with a number of formal and informal norms and rules that create expectations with regard to its behaviour. This would certainly provide an alternative way of accounting for what the EU does in the international system to that of realist analyses, which tend to assume that actors are driven exclusively by utility considerations and to neglect that they might (also) be conditioned by normative expectations. However, one might question whether role theory is sufficient or satisfactory in terms of making sense of, and accounting for, many of the empirical claims made about the EU’s foreign policy.
