The climate, energy, and external actions nexus - A critical discourse analysis of the EU’s external climate and energy strategy in the emerging geopolitics of renewables

Sammanfattning: The energy crisis in Europe has recently highlighted vulnerabilities that experts have recognised for a long time. The EU relies heavily on fossil fuel imports from Russia to supply its citizens with affordable energy. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, desperation to unbundle itself from Russian energy has rapidly stirred massive complexity and increased energy prices. Steps taken now should potentially have been taken by the EU a long time ago. The EU has been criticised for ignoring the importance of geopolitics and energy as its primary driver. The EU, undergoing an energy transition to mitigate climate change, now also faces the loss of its most stable energy supplies from Russia, further complicating the EU’s energy security. This master thesis theorises a foreign policy nexus in energy and climate change mitigation where policies potentially intersect in a nexus of climate, energy, and external actions. The nexus is theorised and later analysed in relation to the geopolitical discourse of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) by dissecting the European External Actions Service’s annual reports of the CFSP between 2009 and 2017 through Critical discourse analysis (CDA) to reveal the underlying discoursive characteristics and ideas of the EU’s external strategy concerning the climate and energy nexus. Through asking the question: ‘What characterises the EU’s geopolitical discourse over time when concerned with the nexus of climate change, energy, and external action of the ongoing European energy transition?’ The researcher concludes that there is a climate change, energy security and external actions nexus that is distinguishable in the geopolitical discourse of the CFSP. The nexus is not as intertwined in the early years of the EEAS, intersecting one another more seldom. Appearing more distinct in 2014, pressured by crisis and dramatic changes in the EU’s energy security, the three policy areas appear to intersect more often, forming a rather distinct nexus in the geopolitical discourse where the areas are linguistically and discoursively realised.