The point of departure in this article is the question of why the EU's policy focus can be said to be regional rather than global in spite of having access to considerable capabilities and instruments in its foreign policy and why the EU has made such little use of the (modest) military means at its disposal so far. The approach used is a constructivist approach drawing on discourse analysis of primarily EU Council documents and the speeches of the High Representative Solana. Successful enlargement and a successful EU role in the former Yugoslavia are presented as the keys to a truly future global role. Moreover, it is shown that the dominant discourse in the EU in the 1990s constructed the EU as a civilian power drawing on political and economic means, which has to a large extent also been the case after the St. Malo Process. In other words, dominant framework of meaning at the EU level provides a possible answer to the EU's regional policy focus and its limited use of military means.
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