What accounts for the EU’s actorness within its “geopolitical awakening”?: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and effectiveness and cohesion of the European Union

Since mid-2010s, two concomitant processes have been going on in terms of the EU’s perspective on its foreign policy: The EU’s relatively proactive inclusion into some particular conflicts (and its deliberate self-exclusion in some others) on one hand and the rise of the geopolitical tone of the EU foreign policy and neighbourhood policy on the other. This recent “geopolitical turn” challenged the Union’s predominant position in crisis situations as well as its broader self-representation about its own foreign policy actorness. On top of this, there has been many question marks about the EU’s actorness in terms of its involvement in protracted conflicts. Despite good intentions and progressively improved capabilities, it is intriguing why the EU had been selective in the management of some territorial conflicts in its neighbourhood. The main argument of the paper is that current mainstream theoretical approaches of the European foreign policy, such as “normative power Europe”, are overly optimistic and do not allow to put in focus certain dynamics the understanding of which are crucial to understanding the shortcomings of the EU’s actorness in terms of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, where the actorness is captured throughout the paper in terms of the EU’s effectiveness and coherence. Key words: EU actorness, Israeli-Palestine Conflict, Normative Power Europe, geopolitics.