International recognition of European Union “actorness”: Language-based evidence from United Nations general debate speeches 1970–2020

The European Union is often portrayed as a global actor that is said to wield ‘economic’ or even ‘normative’ power. Such perspectives presume that states in the international system recognize EU ‘actorness’ along the modestly growing foreign policy capabilities of the Union over time. Does this hold true? In which contexts does this happen? And which third states have an incentive to do so? This article explores the explicit recognition of EU actorness on the international stage by applying novel natural language processing algorithms to 8,481 speeches in the United Nations General Debate 1970–2020. Dependency parsers help to identify all sentences in which the EU is presented to act while word embedding models uncover in which contexts this takes place. Along these measures the recognition of international EU actorness has indeed increased to comparatively high levels over time. But this is primarily driven by EU member states themselves and happens much more in economic than in normative contexts. Non-EU states recognize actorness when they are geographically close or economically dependent on the EU, while illiberal regimes and great powers systematically avoid presenting the EU in its capability to act on the international stage. The recognition of EU actorness is thus hardly a global phenomenon and rather mirrors power and value-based conflicts in the international system.