“A Simulated Hegemony?” A Critical Discourse Analysis of the EU’s Foreign Policy Discourse on Ukraine in the Years 2014 and 2021.

In the cooperation between the EU and Ukraine since the EU-Ukraine AssociationAgreement was signed in 2014, the EU has relied heavily on discourse to project power. Theinvasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation on the 24th of February 2022 caused a severeescalation of the conflict that has ravaged Ukraine since 2014, and the reactions of theEuropean Union have been strong. But what has the role, or more importantly, thediscursively constructed role, of the EU been in the Ukraine situation before the invasion?Additionally, how has this role been legitimised by the EU institutions responsible for theunion’s foreign policy? This study offers a poststructuralist analysis of how the EU constructsitself as a more coherent and powerful actor in European politics, than it actually may be.Employing Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulated power in a similar way to the study of theEU:s discourse with Serbia and Kosovo by Gashi Krenar, the analysis focuses on how theUkrainan national identity, and the conflicts facing the nation are discussed in official EUdocuments. Special attention is given to expressions of normativity and sovereignty, theambiguity of which may conceal more obscure meanings. The results I present are used as afoundation for my understanding of the EU’s discourse as constituted by a deliberatediscursive strategy of simulating power, a strategy that is used in very different ways in theyear 2014 and then seven years later, in 2021