ABSTRACT
Introduction The European Union (EU) regards itself as an important actor on the world ‘stage’. Yet an actor does not see the audience clearly, as the theatre is normally dark. This renders it difficult to gauge the reaction of the recipients of the ‘message’, the audience. The term ‘the fourth wall’ has been used to conceive of the idea of audience-as the stage is surrounded by its own three walls. Drawing on this idea, the fourth wall is the interaction with the audience-in direct speeches, for example, drawing on the term first used by Diderot. This technique has been associated with theatre, such as that of Shakespeare, and TV shows, such as House of Cards. This article, in examining how the EU seeks to have international impact, argues that there is a need to better understand the fourth wall in the EU’s selfprojection on the international stage, in bridging the distance between the EU and its interlocutors. The article suggests that the EU often struggles to ‘break the fourth wall’ in the global arena, taking the case of regionalism-promotion in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as its focus. It is remarkable that the EU has talked relatively little of its interlocutors in the
international arena. The EU requires a new ‘script’ and a fresh narrative in order to tackle global changes. Its current narrative needs to be recalibrated both for the EU’s citizenry
and for its engagement with the rest of the world. The world that it encounters is now far less familiar than in the past and is ‘less and less European’ (Laidi 2008, 1). The first EU script is for an EU audience. The second one is for the external audience.
