The European Union has long been acknowledged as a major actor in human rights debates within the United Nations, but much of the literature focuses on the EU’s pursuit of its own human rights objectives. Less attention has been paid to how the EU responds to the human rights agendas of other actors. This paper investigates how the EU is navigating the contentious context of the international politics of human rights, focusing on EU responses to the burgeoning debates regarding human rights and climate change within UN forums including the Human Rights Council, the General Assembly and the Security Council. The EU claims to be a leader in international human rights diplomacy and in climate diplomacy, but the debates raise uncomfortable issues for the EU particularly regarding demands for financial compensation by those damaged by climate change. The paper addresses two questions: 1) what are the EU’s positions on climate change and human rights in these debates and how united are member states? 2) how is the EU engaging diplomatically with other states on these- issues? The paper develops a framework of analysis based on the literatures on EU ‘performance’ in international organisations, and on evaluating diplomacy. It considers the internal process of agreeing EU positions within the debates, and the strengths and weaknesses of its outreach. It addresses the question of the extent to which internal unity is necessary for external effectiveness. The paper demonstrates that the EU faces challenges in confronting new human rights agendas, and that it could try to build new coalitions and adjust its message to strengthen its defence of international human rights.

This paper argues that the launch of the Global Gateway reflects three interlinked changes in how the EU has sought to reconceptualise its relations with the developing world over the past few years. The first is related to the controversial use of blended finance to leverage investment, particularly to support infrastructure in Africa, which may result in further drifting away from human development towards the pursuit of commercial interests and enhanced market access for European firms. The second refers to the fact that resources would be spent using a ‘Team Europe’ approach, so as to enhance coordination among all European donors as well as EU visibility and impact in international affairs, but with the risk of limited engagements with local private and public actors. The third is linked to the continuous attempt to move away from perpetuating donor-recipient dynamics towards establishing equal partnerships with developing countries, yet again the initial selection of flagship initiatives has revealed how local needs and priorities have been taken into account by the EU only marginally. Ultimately, the launch of the Global Gateway seems to expose trends towards blurred lines between development and other external policy areas, enabling the instrumentalization of EU development assistance for foreign policy goals and a possible shift towards the geopoliticisation of EU development policy.

From an interactionist point of view, EU, like any other international actor, is a social structure consisting of roles performed by its constituent units (Harnisch, 2012). It is proposed to conceptualize the EU's actorness as "the ability of a subject to imagine and realize a role for himself in a different context of international relations." This ability, as the theory of roles of interactionism suggests, arises in 1) a critical situation; 2) in the interaction of social and material resources, creative actions and (internal and external) expectations. The arena for role reversal is the EU-China strategic partnership, where both sides play out their respective international roles through a competitive role-playing process that develops within a given partner-rival dichotomy frame. The scientific significance of the project lies in the fact that for the first time an attempt will be made to comprehend the actorship of the EU with the help of its interactionist concept and in changing geopolitical conditions.

The aim of the paper is to determine the mechanism for building the EU's actorness in the changed geopolitical conditions through the "rethinking" of its roles, the field for which is the Strategic Partnership with China. The solution of the research problem involves a two-stage model. Firstly, rethinking the international role of the EU in response to problematic situations in international relations, such as the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, which increase the "anxiety" of the European society, actualize the request for ontological security and call into question the established approaches and practices of interaction with third countries. Secondly, an analysis of the attempt to realize their “imaginary role in social interaction, the arena for which the ambivalent EU-China strategic partnership is chosen, and serves as the arena in which the EU and China realize their respective international roles through a competitive role-playing process games.