This article draws attention to storytelling in public diplomacy. Based on interviews with officials in the European External Action Service (EEAS) and a campaign on social media, it explores storytelling in EU public diplomacy. It treats storytelling as narrative strategies that tap into the power of dramaturgy and visual elements to mediate emotions and identity in international politics. This understanding of storytelling is discussed in relation to three interrelated bodies of literature of relevance to the digitalization of public diplomacy. The study traces how storytelling in the EEAS stems from the norm of engagement, intends for a process of legitimation through techniques of representation, and has the goal of recognition. The analysis illustrates the conceptualization of storytelling focusing on the communication of the European Union's Global Strategy launched in June 2016. The article finds the role of storytelling to be a result of the perceived new urgency of engaging domestic publics in EU foreign policy. In this context the role of stories to evoke emotions and the opportunities on social media to project these stories, are highly valued.
This article explores how and why Swedish-based civil society organizations (CSOs) in the welfare area engage with the European Union (EU). Europeanization is understood as a twosided process in which the EU influences national actors while national actors are engaged in usage of the EU. The data collection was conducted through a systematic study of the websites of organizations that participated in the Swedish Compact, and through subsequent e-mail interviews with representatives from 56 of those same organizations. The assumption was that organizations with a privileged position vis-à-vis the Swedish government would be affected by EU influences. The results show that these Swedish CSOs indeed signalled Europeanization in terms of attention to the EU, cooperation, 'projectification', professionalization, and transformation of organizational identities and interests. The EU engagement was analysed in relation to organizational origin and the historical development of the Swedish welfare state, and the conclusion is that the national sociopolitical context influences the scope and strategies of EU engagement.
This article examines how the mediatised context of foreign policy provides new opportunities for political leaders to both frame and project their own leadership role to new audiences. The past ten years have witnessed a sharp rise in political leaders' use of new social media to communicate on a range of foreign policy issues. We argue that this new media context of foreign policy, combined with a bolstered leadership mandate, has been central to the construction of a more visible public leadership role for the EU High Representative in the post-Lisbon era. Departing from recent scholarship on performative leadership and new media in International Relations theory, we develop an original theoretical framework drawing on Erving Goffman's dramaturgy of impression management. We employ the concept of "leaderisation" to analyse how mediatisation shapes the leadership process in terms of personification and drama to enable new forms of interaction with followers. We apply this framework in an illustrative case study focusing on the process of negotiating the EU Global Strategy. This diplomatic process provided the High Representative Mogherini with a stage on which she could frame herself in a central leadership position visà-vis European citizens to mobilise greater legitimacy for the EU as a global actor.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.