The Russian war in Ukraine and the fact that Russia and especially Ukraine are important agricultural players had implications for the already deteriorating global food situation. As food prices are rising together with production, transport, and energy costs, countries and regional trade blocs are considering the consequences for their food policies. These debates have become particularly politicised in the EU and here especially those member states that strove to shield local producers from Ukrainian grain, or to present a protectionist narrative to local electorates. Above all, these developments highlight the importance of food and agriculture in how the EU interacts with the rest of the world.

The analysis of food and agriculture in the EU’s external relations is not novel. The Common Agricultural Policy, the EU’s most expensive and one of its most controversial policies, has formed and been formed by successive GATT/WTO negotiation rounds. The EU’s regulations on food safety, and associated narratives such as on chlorinated chicken, have been topic of and stumbling block for trade negotiations.

However, the role that food plays in the EU’s external relations beyond the narrow arena of trade negotiations has hardly attracted any research attention in EU Studies, leaving crucial processes underexplored. This involves the ways in which EU regulations on food interact with geopolitical dynamics, specifically in the EU’s neighbourhood, in which they clearly illustrate its competition with Russia. There also remains a crucial gap in studying processes of EU gastrodiplomacy. The EU regularly presents itself as the world’s leading gastronomic actor and broadcasts widely the supposedly supreme range of authentic, traditional, high-quality foods and drinks available all throughout the region. Given the centrality of food and drink for national identity constructions at the same time as the EU’s extensive competences in the trade of these commodities, the study of the EU’s gastrodiplomacy also reveals complex interactions with its member states.

To promote the study of these thus-far underappreciated facets of EU external relations, this panel investigates the EU’s external relations around food, specifically how they come to be through interactions with its member states, how they reflect the EU’s self-understanding beyond its borders, and their role in geopolitics.

This paper aims to examine the intricate interplay between European Union (EU) conditionality and two pivotal geopolitical events—Moldova's EU candidacy status and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine—and their profound impact on the strategic choices of winemakers. The study is grounded in 28 qualitative interviews conducted in Moldova between April and July 2023 involving winemakers and Moldovan wine experts.

The central focus of the analysis is to comprehend how these factors collectively shape and influence the decisions of Moldovan winemakers, particularly their inclination to prioritize the EU wine market and adhere to the requisite EU standards. The decision to concentrate on the EU market is primarily a response to the crisis of Moldovan-Russian economic and political relations resulting from Russian wine embargos, the first occurring in 2006. Despite being perceived as still a crucial market by winemakers, Russia is considered unstable and risky. Consequently, Moldovan winemakers, facing the need to establish relations with more stable markets, turn to the EU.

The following adherence to EU standards, as indicated by research participants, is viewed as manageable but rather as a necessary condition without exception not showing socialization elements. A strong conditionality for enforcing EU market rules emerges to avoid exclusion from this trade opportunity.

Simultaneously, winemakers express a conditionality dictated by existing geopolitics—opting for and adhering to a European path rather than a Russian one. This sentiment, accelerated in 2023, offers concrete economic advantages and cost reductions for winemakers. Furthermore, the war in neighbouring Ukraine presents logistical and cost challenges in the wine sector and prompts a proactive response from wine producers to engage more in the EU market.

This exploration of multifaceted influences contributes to a nuanced understanding of the broader economic and geopolitical dimensions guiding decision-making within the wine industry in the context of Moldova's EU aspirations and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

This paper contributes to a new research agenda on comparative neighbourhood policy studies examining how the interaction between two aspiring regional powers affect the countries in their shared neighbourhood. The existing scholarship on regional power and hegemony omitted hitherto to sufficiently conceptualize the ways in which major powers interact and the effects these interactions have on other regional actors. This paper zooms in on hegemony as a key strategy of regional powers focusing on how regional powers prescribe sectoral rules and practices and thereby set up, shape, and maintain regional economic regimes. It conducts a cross-sectional case study analysing EU and Russian prescription of food safety rules in one EU associated country (Moldova) and one Eurasian Economic Union member state (Armenia). Contrary to the prevailing dichotomous images of the two neighbourhood countries’ foreign policy choices, the findings show that the differences in EU and EAEU food safety regimes are not irreconcilable and that exclusive macro-integration choices are not reproduced at the sectoral level. Rather, the competition between the two regional hegemons provides more room for manoeuvre to the neighbourhood countries’ domestic actors to exploit economic opportunities in both regional powers’ sectoral regimes. The differences between neighbourhood countries’ macro political integration choices and sectoral compliance provide a more nuanced picture of competitive interactions between regional powers emphasizing the role of partner countries’ domestic actors and interests in explaining the effects of competing regulatory policies.

Gastrodiplomacy does not represent a new diplomatic instrument in EU countries. It builds on cultural diplomacy and cultural relations strategies and mobilizes stakeholders who are at the intersection of food and diplomacy. In this context, Central and Eastern European EU members have had to face specific cultural, legal and political challenges when dealing with food related issues, both externally and domestically.

The main purpose of the paper is to map the increasing awareness of importance of gastrodiplomacy in Visegrad states and the translation of this trend into V4 growing assertiveness in the EU policy-making, covering both the identity/image-centred activities (EU soft law, image and reputational capital of EU states, new forms of diplomacy) and the developing hard EU regulatory framework (binding EU legal acts, agreements with non-EU states, jurisprudence). The paper follows two lines - the Europeanisation of gastrodiplomacy as part of external food policies, and the way how Member states do influence the EU activity in this area. It does also offer an analytical framework for cooperative and individual strategies in EU gastrodiplomacy and external food policy.

The literature on EU diplomacy has become a widening field of EU Studies research especially since the creation of a diplomatic corps through the European External Action Service. In the study of diplomacy, there has been an extensive expansion of the literature on public and cultural diplomacy. Yet, much space remains to combine the efforts in these two fields, especially considering the notion that the EU is a comparatively weaker actor in public and cultural diplomacy, with member states often perceived to take a more active role. On the other hand, trade diplomacy is typically seen as the ‘gold standard’ of EU diplomacy. However, in the area of gastrodiplomacy, all three of these fields interact: foods and drinks are subject to trade and trade negotiations, but they are also crucial in the imagination of cultures and can be a (tasty) ingredient for public diplomacy.

Therefore, this paper studies how the EU, through practices of gastrodiplomacy, constructs itself as *the* global power on food and drinks. To this end, the EU relies primarily on its promotion of foods and drinks protected as Geographical Indications abroad. This happens at the level of trade negotiations, in which the contestations around ‘traditional’ EU-ropean foods and drinks have been a crucial stumbling block, considering food-based criticism of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the United States, or the Cypriot parliament’s resistance to ratify CETA due to their perceived lack of protections for halloumi. However, the narratives on EU-ropean foods are also clearly exported beyond the negotiating table and through public diplomacy, including at culinary conventions, wine tastings, and social media posts. But what characterises “EU-ropean food”? This paper unpacks the imaginaries of what the EU views as traditional EU-ropean foods, posing critical questions for EU external relations and the imaginaries of EU identities more broadly.