Beyond the Dichotomy of Hard and Soft Power: A Case Study of the EU's Naval Engagement in the Indo-Pacific

Chen, Xuechen (2023) Beyond the Dichotomy of Hard and Soft Power: A Case Study of the EU's Naval Engagement in the Indo-Pacific. In: The EU in a globalized world. Routledge.

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed the development of the European Union (EU) as a distinctive security actor, seeking to position itself as a “global security provider” in world affairs. A growing volume of scholarly literature has been dedicated to unpacking the EU's global security strategies (e.g., Biscop, 2016) and the Union's efforts to engage in global security governance across different policy fields, such as energy security (Prontera, 2020), anti-terrorism (Bossong, 2008) and maritime security (Germond, 2011). Whilst it has been widely accepted that the EU has manifested increasingly strong ambition in global security governance, there is a lack of consensus on how to interpret the nature of the EU's power in the security domain and how to gauge the impact of the Union's external security strategy vis-à-vis third actors. This chapter probes the question: How can we understand the EU's power projection in the Indo-Pacific in the security domain? Reflecting upon the matrix developed in the introductory chapter, this chapter shows that the study of the EU's role as a newly emerging security player in the Indo-Pacific region requires a more nuanced analytical framework which transcends the dichotomy between soft power and hard power, between high politics and low politics.

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