Introduction

The EU in a Globalized World is meant to foster critical reflection on Europe's place in a fast-changing global environment. Past studies in that field have often encountered the difficulty of the multitude of foreign relations the EU has with other powers in the world as well as with the great variety of policy areas concerned in such relations. Realists and neo-realists in particular focus on the “brutal arena where states look for opportunities to take advantage of each other and have little reason to trust each other”. Liberalists and neoliberalists seem naturally more open to study European integration, since they focus on the way in which peaceful dynamics can be initiated and sustained to the detriment of conflicts. Although globalization has blurred the clear-cut separation between low and high politics, it remains a theoretical framework which is still used directly or indirectly in the study of the EU and IR.