| EU-China relations have intensified in the last two decades, and today are organized as a strategic partnership that encompasses over 50 sectors of cooperation. This relationship, and the manner in which it has been approached by the EU, reveals some of the ways in which the latter organizes itself in its foreign policy capacity, and the kind of actor it tries to be in this relatively new policy field. The case of EU-China relations reveals that the EU has constructed two narratives about its actorness in foreign policy-that of a strategic partnership, and that of normative actorness. Three cases- Market Economy Status, the Human Rights Dialogue, and cooperation on Africa- allow us to see the extent to which the EU presents these narratives discursively, and in a second time, instrumentalizes them. The question is raised as to whether the EU's discursive exercises, as well as the actions generated by these, contribute to any substantive power or ability to shape its relations with China. |
