Reassessing External Images of the EU: Evolving Narratives in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The past decade has challenged the EU and its international image. The Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the Ukraine crisis, the so-called irregular migration crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have all put the EU under severe strain. This article explores if and how the EU’s performance in such crises has impacted upon the external image of the EU. The analysis shows that external images have closely followed the EU’s actual performance, although filtering it through the powerful lenses of local and regional concerns and sensibilities. While some traditional images have proved to be resilient in the longer run (as in the case of the EU as an economic powerhouse or a frequently divided community), others have been severely weakened by the EU’s crisis responses (such as the EU as a bastion of human rights). Our findings contribute to the discussion on the public diplomacy and information strategy of the European External Action Service (EEAS) in shaping locally-resonating positive images of the EU worldwide. external images of the EU, multiple crises of the EU, EU public diplomacy

A Bibliometric Analysis of Refugee Health Publications in the Nursing Field between 1980 and 2023 by Visual Mapping Method

“…Millions of people worldwide are forced to migrate yearly due to violence, war, and natural disasters. Political events such as the US invasion of Iraq [1] and Afghanistan [2], the Arab Spring that started in 2010 [3], the civil war that emerged in Syria immediately afterward [4], the antidemocratic rule in Iran [5], and finally the Russian Ukraine crisis [6] were effective in the emergence of large population movements and large migration waves after World War II. These waves of migration affected Türkiye and Eastern European countries the most in terms of the regions where the mentioned political crises occurred [4,6].…”

Critical Expectation Gaps: Advancing Theorization of the Perceptual Approach in EU Foreign Policy Studies

“…Our novel contribution to the discussion is in grounding the concept of expectation gaps within a theoretical approach of 'Othering' to the study of EU external perceptions Holland 2014, 2019), where 'the Others' are considered active and reflective agents that respond to EU policies, notably when they perceive the existence of incongruences in EU behaviour. Our theorization of the expectation gaps adds a novel conceptualization to the growing field of the external perceptions studies of the EU (see for reviews Chaban and Elgström 2021b;Chaban and Lucarelli 2021;Speyer et al, 2020).…”