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Palgrave Macmillan
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The European Union's Strategic Partnerships

Global Diplomacy in a Contested World

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  • © 2021

Overview

  • Offers a multidimensional analysis of the EU’s SPs.
  • Includes a set of case studies and comparative perspectives to interpret the complexity and multi-facetedness of the phenomena.
  • Advances both conceptualization and analysis of the implementation of the established EU's SPs.

Part of the book series: The European Union in International Affairs (EUIA)

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Table of contents (14 chapters)

  1. Strategic Partnerships in the European Union’s Diplomatic Practice: Evolution and Analysis

  2. The Transatlantic Partners: The United States and Canada

  3. Reaching Out for Strategic Partnerships Beyond the BRICS

Keywords

About this book

This book provides a critical and updated analysis of the nature of the EU’s strategic partnership diplomacy, and of the partnerships themselves, in times of power shift and contestation. It links with key aspects of the EU’s Global Strategy; it brings together a strong list of experts who work within a clear framework for analysis; and it deals not only with the substance of the policy but also with the ways in which the policy as a whole has emerged, is conducted and might develop in the future. In offering an inclusive set of case studies and diverse perspectives, this book aims to advance both conceptualization and analysis of the implementation of the established EU partnerships. The book highlights the notion of strategic partnership as a foreign policy instrument to support EU external action in a context of multilevel change and crisis; its policy dimension as a gradually separated, but not separable policy within the Union’s external action; the institutional component given the emergence of SPs as a sort of self-preserving institutional platform allowing for denser and deeper cooperation in various policy areas; and the implications for the EU’s self-conception as an international actor with a global identity and role.


Reviews

This timely collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the EU’s international relations during the last quarter century. Strategic Partnerships (SPs) have increasingly become the neglected child of the EU foreign policy family - from both an academic and practitioner perspective. This volume is thus of historic and contemporary relevance; it reminds us that SPs were once the EU’s preferred architecture for the international system and demonstrates through its comparative analytical structure the variations between them. (Martin Holland, Professor and Jean Monnet Chair ad personam, University of Canterbury, New Zealand)

At a time when the EU is struggling to position itself in a rapidly changing world, this comprehensive study of Strategic Partnerships is a very welcome contribution to our understanding of EU global diplomacy. By systematically studying the key strategic partnerships of the Union and situating them in the broader post-cold war context, this volume not only improves our understanding of this EU foreign policy instrument but also sheds light on EU external action more broadly. (Sophie Vanhoonacker, Professor of Administrative Governance, Maastricht University, the Netherlands)

With its focus on Strategic Partnerships this book provides analysts studying Europe’s global role with overdue attention to an under-examined aspect of the European Union’s diplomacy. The volume’s great strength is its comprehensiveness. Through a set of case studies, the chapters effectively map the scale and scope of the EU’s strategic partnerships. And collectively its contributors provide a comprehensive basis on which to critically evaluate a key component of the EU’s foreign policy. (Richard Whitman, Professor of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, UK)

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Political Science and Research Center in Political Science (CICP-UMinho), University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira

  • PAIS, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Michael Smith

About the editors

Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Minho and Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo. She has published extensively on EU’s Foreign Policy in several journals and edited volumes. She is a founding member of the European International Studies Association.

Michael Smith is Honorary Professor in European Politics at the University of Warwick, and Emeritus Professor of European Politics at Loughborough University. He has published a large number of books, articles, chapters and papers on EU diplomacy, transatlantic relations and the EU’s external action in general.


Bibliographic Information

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