The protean and control powers of the four European Unions : the EU’s external natural gas policy

Abstract

This thesis explains the four modalities in which the European Union projects its power in its external gas policy by drawing from the theory of protean and control power formulated by Katzenstein and Seybert (2018b, 2018d). Therefore, this study adds to the scholarship on the EU’s foreign policy by developing the concepts of the EU’s power and contributes to a better understanding of the EU as an international actor. The central argument of my dissertation is that the EU acts externally in four forms, conceptualized as four EUs: Geoeconomic Power, Occasional Geopolitical Power, Constrained Underachieving Power, and Broker of the Strongest. Therefore, this thesis poses three questions: How do control and protean power affect which of the EUs is acting externally? Why do the EUs act to different degrees of effectiveness in the external gas policy? How does the dynamic among the four EUs work? To answer these questions, I examine the EU’s external gas policy from 2006 until 2021 by breaking it down into thirteen cases. In the analytical process, I applied a Foreign Policy Analysis to extract four models and then examined models with explanatory factors. In the thesis, I came to the following conclusions. First, each of the EUs is shaped by a combination of protean and control power and possess relevant properties: Geoeconomic Power is formed by control power, Occasional Geopolitical Actor by protean power, and both Constrained Underachieving Power and Broker of the Strongest are molded by combinations of those two. Second, the EUs acting predominantly as control or protean power exercise the most effective power projection. Yet, the EUs representing other combinations of powers produce mixed or ineffective results. Third, in terms of the dynamic among the EUs there is a strong influence of protean power in shaping the coexistence of the four EUs.