February 1, 2025 - January 31, 2028

This PhD project explores how emotions influence the European Union’s foreign policy, particularly in the evolution of the EU's self-narratives as a global actor in the current international system. Traditionally seen as a 'normative power' promoting peace, security, and international law, the EU has faced increasing challenges in maintaining this identity amid geopolitical tensions. The project investigates how emotional rhetoric in EU foreign policy statements can reflect its deeper strategic motivations, especially when dealing with adversaries or navigating complex situations. 

To uncover these dynamics, the PhD project employs a mixed-method approach combining natural language processing tools with qualitative analyses. The project utilises the EmoRoBERTa model as a novel method of discourse analysis to identify emotional patterns in EU foreign policy statements. These insights are then enriched through qualitative historical analyses, document analysis, and interviews with EU officials, offering a comprehensive conceptualisation of how emotional catalysts - the internalised attachments, memories, and beliefs that steer a community's emotional expressions - impact the EU’s foreign policy rhetoric, and ultimately its decision-making. Moreover, by bridging international relations conceptualisations with psychological and sociological practices, the project aims to provide a novel understanding of strategic communications in an evolving global landscape.

The project is expected to yield various scientific articles. 1) The first article utilises the EU's rhetoric after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine to exemplify when and how the EU's emotional catalysts are triggered, and how the triggering of these catalysts affects its emotion norms. This is done by analysing the emotion rhetoric present in post-2022 foreign policy statements, and then inductively formulating a three-level analytical structure for tracing emotional catalysts, which forms the theoretical basis of the PhD project. 2) The second article utilises this analytical structure to investigate how EU rhetoric functions on an institutional level. Placing emphasis on the methodological contribution of the PhD project, a pipeline using the EmoRoBERTa model is applied to analyse patterns and divergences in the rhetoric issued by five different EU institutions between 2015 and 2025, and in doing so, building a corpus of over 30.000 EU foreign policy statements. This study opens the necessary discussion for the practicality of utilising large language models within humanities-based studies. 3) The third article, currently under development, brings a more empirical focus to investigations of emotional catalysts, qualitatively tracing the complex-level emotions of desire and despair within the EU's security (and defence) strategy documents published from 2003 to 2025.