EU Foreign and Security Policy in a Mediatized Age

This chapter provides a critical discussion of the mediatization of policy in general, and of EU foreign and security policy in particular. A common argument in public debate and research is that the media logic is increasingly affecting how policy is formulated. Brommesson and Ekengren are critical of this (as they see it) oversimplified perspective, and they analyse EU foreign and security policy from the opposite point of view in this chapter. Foreign policy is usually described as a conservative policy area, in as much as it is informed by a long-term perspective, and foreign policy is not the subject of public debate to the same extent as other policy areas. Based on this reverse perspective, the authors ask whether policy actors are actually taking advantage of the opportunities provided by mediatization to strengthen long-term policy objectives. The chapter sheds light on the relationship between policy and mediatization through a comparative analysis of two important strategy documents of EU foreign and security policy: the European security strategy of 2003 and the EU global strategy of 2016. The authors discuss the overarching question of whether the formulation of EU foreign and security policy is dominated by media logic, in other words, whether this policy has been mediatized