EU Foreign Policy in the Information Age

I my thesis I challenge the assumption that the mediatization of politics is best studied at the national level by conducting an exploratory study of the European Union (EU). The emergence of the EU and the ever-closer integration project it has become has in many ways challenged the traditional conceptions of the nation state, sovereignty and territory. The development of a new transnational political union in the past decades have also been characterized by the intensification of media practices in terms of scope, speed and scale, the so-called mediatization of society. The thesis therefore offers a new approach to the little recognized issue of European Union politics in the age of media with special attention to foreign policy, a traditionally national policy domain that further raises the stakes of politics in late modernity.

In my phd project I study what it means for EU foreign policy to be formulated and practiced in a media society. By media society I mean the recent wave of media intensification through the rise of the Internet and social media. I study how this media society both influence the foreign policy process and is used by foreign policy actors.