Expanding actorness to explain EU External engagement in originally internal policy areas

Despite its increasing importance for European integration, there remains a lack of scholarly attention to the growth of EU external action in originally internal policy areas. This article advances a comprehensive framework for understanding and explaining the emergence of EU external engagement in such areas. The framework combines insights from two sets of literatures: the EU external relations literature offers useful concepts – particularly ‘actorness’ – as building blocks for explanatory purposes, while the public policy literature provides relevant insights regarding policy entrepreneurship and agenda-setting. The article contends that EU external engagement results from a favourable interplay between an external ‘opportunity’ and the EU’s ‘presence’ in a given domain, which is identified and capitalized upon by a set of policy entrepreneurs, who are driven by interest-based and/or ideational motives. The article undertakes a qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources to apply the framework across multiple policy areas.