EU FOREIGN POLICY - ROLE CONCEPTIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Sammanfattning: Despite its achievements the exact status of the EU's international role remains highly contested in the academic debate. For some analysts, the EU can be legiti-mately considered as a global actor in both economic and security terms, but for others the notion of an EU foreign policy still seems distant. Hence, there are good reasons for this thesis to focus on the European Union and its role on the global arena. The central research problem that this thesis sets out to explore is the international role of the EU as an agent of foreign policy action during the first years of the 21st century. Following on K.J. Holsti's work on role theory in for-eign policy analysis this problem is analysed by examining how the EU look upon itself, its role, as an international actor. Primarily this thesis intend to answer two questions: Which foreign policy roles does the EU ascribe to itself? and How has the distribution of roles evolved since the beginning of the 21st century? The analysis, and the conclusions drawn from it, is based on the reading of offi-cial foreign and security policy speeches, and to a certain extent statements, deliv-ered by the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), Javier Solana. The analysis presented a role-set consisting of ten roles in total: Stabilizer, Promoter of Multilateralism, Partner, Regional Leader, De-fender/Promoter of Peace and Security, Defender/Promoter of ?EU? Values, De-veloper, Model, Global Leader, and Liberation Supporter. When looking at the different roles sorted by year one easily notices the strong evolution of EU's per-ceived role as a Stabilizer. Other obvious trends are the decreasing emphasis put on the role as Developer and Liberation Supporter, and the high emphasis on promotion of multilateralism and partnership. It is argued here that the changes in role conceptions and the emphasis put on each role could be explained by studying changes in capability. The launch of the ESDP in 2003 is considered to be crucial.