The Global Health policies of the EU and its Member States: a common vision?

This paper assesses the coherence between the global health policy of the European Union (EU) and those of its individual Member States. So far EU and public health scholars have paid little heed to this, despite the large budgets of the member states in this area. While the European Commission has recently attempted to define the ‘EU role in Global Health’, EU member states would like to keep a grip on the domain of global health as well. Therefore, this paper questions the existence of a common EU vision on global health by comparing the global health policy documents of the European Commission with those of four EU Member States (France, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands). The comparative analysis has been informed by a typology of four ‘global health frames’, namely social justice, security, investment and charity. Our findings show some general trends, including a broad interpretation of global health and an increasing ministerial cooperation in this area. Nevertheless, a common EU frame seems to be lacking. The European Commission largely fits the social justice frame, by stressing values and supporting health system strengthening. This social justice paradigm is to a certain extent present in all strategies, but the security and investment arguments are however dominating in the British, Dutch and German strategies. Furthermore, due to the financial crisis and the role of (vertical) multilateral aid for health, it is likely that the European focus on health systems strengthening remains a dead letter. Supplementary research that investigates the implementation of the global health strategies and examines the global health coordination mechanisms within the EU will be necessary to further elaborate on this topic