EU Strategies and Their Purposes

Abstract

EU strategies can be understood as documents revealing the EU's strategic culture, as milestones for assessing the impact of the EU as a global actor and as a tool for policy-inspiration in foreign policy and external action. This chapter prioritises this third reading of EU strategies and argues that they should be considered as milestone documents informing about policy-making in these areas. The chapter locates EU strategies in the broad external action framework and reviews the various sorts of strategies produced by the EU until today. It considers that while being a coherent actor tends to reflect a preoccupation with the internal (mal)functioning of EU external action, acting strategically is considered a prerequisite for being an effective global actor.