Concerns on the EU-centric character of EU foreign policy analysis have become more frequent in recent years, yet a systematic toolbox for diagnosing and remedying this problem is still lacking. This article's contribution is twofold. First, it proposes a new typology of three approaches to foreign policy analysis, giving conceptual body and nuance to the debate on EU-centrism. The typology can be used for scrutinizing existing analyses, as well as for shaping new research projects. The second part of the article applies this typology in a meta-analysis of post-Lisbon EU foreign policy scholarship. To this end, it analyses a built-for-purpose dataset of 451 articles, which covers all work on EU foreign policy published in 2010-2014 in seven key journals. It finds that academic work on EU foreign policy is indeed rife with EU-centric research questions. Moreover, this is the case irrespective of the policy area under study and of the focus of the journal.
This article studies the co‐operation between parliamentary and executive diplomats in EU foreign policy. Building on transnational perspectives, the European Parliament is conceptualized as an actor capable of pursuing autonomous diplomatic behaviour through cross‐border agency over its elected representatives, its bureaucracy, as well as through European party federations. A novel framework is proposed, built around the hypothesis that parliamentary and executive actors co‐operate by exchanging institutional, information, legitimacy and access resources in order to reach their goals more effectively. To demonstrate the argument empirically, the article studies EU‐facilitated mediation talks in Macedonia (2015–17). Building on semi‐structured interviews with 27 key stakeholders, the analysis shows how during the different stages of the mediation, executive and parliamentary actors exchanged crucial diplomatic resources in order to effectively conclude and implement the so‐called Pržino‐agreements between the government and opposition parties.
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