Supranational entrepreneurs: the High Representative and the EU global strategy

Abstract

Abstract By applying the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) developed by Kingdon and adapted to EU policy-making, this article explores a new analytical lens that provides a more substantiated insight into the role of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR) in the policy-making process. According to the MSA, policy change happens when policy entrepreneurs successfully explore a window of opportunity that opens in the problems or policies stream. Applying a single case-study approach, this article argues that it was the entrepreneurship of HR Federica Mogherini that coupled problems, politics and policies streams which presented themselves between 2014 and 2015, made use of the window of opportunity, and pushed for policy change in EU's foreign and security policy. By finding observable evidence for the HR's deployment of entrepreneurial strategies during the drafting and implementation of the European Union's Global Strategy, this contribution unpacks Mogherini's footprint in the recent progress. The conceptualization of the HR office-holder as a policy entrepreneur lets us systematically investigate their agency and impact on the policy change within the existing formal constraints, and thus it paves a way towards a more fruitful research direction regarding the HR's role than the concept of the constrained agent that is dominant in the literature. More broadly, since the office-holder can be perceived as a supranational agent that is dependent upon an intergovernmental system for its mandate, by examining its entrepreneurial strategies this article offers insights on the role of supranational agents beyond the EU context, i.e. within UN and NATO.