ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the study of the EU's role as a newly emerging security player in the Indo-Pacific region requires a more nuanced analytical framework which transcends the dichotomy between soft power and hard power, between high politics and low politics. Whilst the concepts of hard and soft powers have sparked considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research in mainstream IR research, they have received relatively limited attention from the scholarship of EU studies and do not occupy a central position in the EU-as-a-power debate. Although there is limited research establishing a direct link between “soft and hard power” concepts and the EU-as-a-power debate, a closer reading of both scholarly debates reveals that the conceptual understanding of power resources and mechanisms in the soft/hard power literature is highly compatible with the one in EU-as-a-power research.
