Constructing Bridges and Fostering Growth: Interdisciplinary Insights into EU Role Conceptions and Prescriptions

Informed by the IR’s and EU foreign policy studies’ novel focus on emotions and narratives, our paper studies EU official formulations and projections towards its Eastern Neighborhood (and Ukraine specifically). Analysing EU Global Strategy (June 2016) and EU EaP Summit’s Joint Declaration (November 2017), as well as 15 interviews with EU practitioners dealing with Ukraine (conducted in 2017), we propose an innovative interdisciplinary synergy between IR’s role theory (Elgström and Smith 2006) and cognitive linguistics’ conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Using the tool of conceptual metaphor, we systematically explore the EU’s role conception (self-image) as well as its perception and expectations of the EaP (role prescriptions). With conceptual metaphors revealing fundamental cognitive and emotional traits, we put forward a new method of the systematic analysis of emotive elements in understanding the EU’s foreign policy roles.