The International Life of the European Union: Systems Theory, European Integration, and International Relations

The research problem addressed in this thesis concerns the definition of the international life of the European Union. After a review of the positions on defining the EU itself and a review of the related approaches, the authors turn to terms associated with the so-called “systems” approach, the aim of which is to argue for the hypothesis that the systems research tradition, although relatively unknown and rarely utilised, not only allows for a research-useful conceptualisation of the EU’s international life, but additionally provides an example of a corroboration of other theories already present in European research. Defining the EU as a complex adaptive system offers an example of a solution to the agent/structure problem from the position of conventional constructivism and opens possibilities for the future operationalisation of the complexity approach, of which the EU structural model is a surrogate.