Beyond EU navel-gazing: Taking stock of EU-centrism in the analysis of EU foreign policy

Concerns on the EU-centric character of EU foreign policy analysis have become more frequent in recent years, yet a systematic toolbox for diagnosing and remedying this problem is still lacking. This article’s contribution is twofold. First, it proposes a new typology of three approaches to foreign policy analysis, giving conceptual body and nuance to the debate on EU-centrism. The typology can be used for scrutinizing existing analyses, as well as for shaping new research projects. The second part of the article applies this typology in a meta-analysis of post-Lisbon EU foreign policy scholarship. To this end, it analyses a built-for-purpose dataset of 451 articles, which covers all work on EU foreign policy published in 2010-2014 in seven key journals. It finds that academic work on EU foreign policy is indeed rife with EU-centric research questions. Moreover, this is the case irrespective of the policy area under study and of the focus of the journal.status: publishe