The European Union (EU) has tried to develop a foreign policy identity ever since the end of the Cold War. While a series of treaty revisions since the Maastricht (1993) laid a solid legal and institutional foundation of regional foreign policy-making, the EU continues to struggle with the normative goals (civilian or normative power?), economic implications (‘Fortress Europe’ or free-trade promoter?) and regulatory impacts (the ‘Brussels Effect’?) of its presence on the world stage. In the meantime, the increasingly polarized world triggered by the rise of China and the growing US-China rivalry has further complicated the international environment of the EU’s search for a coherent foreign policy identity in the past decade.
How to understand the unique experiences of the EU as a regional foreign policy actor? What are the challenges and dilemmas that the EU has been facing in developing its foreign policy identity? Moreover, in which way has the EU responded to the increasingly polarized world over the past decade, particularly regarding trade disputes, development initiatives, regulatory competition, and even political sanctions? This panel brings together researchers from China, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom to address these important questions. Maria Garcia’s (University of Bath) paper examines the competing objectives of economic security and the green deal in shaping EU’s trade policy-making. The paper by Min Shu (Waseda University) discusses the EU’s competitive engagement with China’s Belt and Road Initiative in development finance from a borderland perspective. Sungwook Yoon’s (Chungbuk National University) paper addresses the EU’s regulatory impact on the global market, offering a sobering assessment of the Brussels Effect. Finally, the paper by Fang Zhou and You Xu (Waseda University) looks into what the authors call ‘the reverse incentive effect’ of China’s political sanctions, that is, how such sanctions unintentionally boosted the popularity of sanctioned entities in Europe and beyond.