This doctoral research is a multi-disciplinary study which draws from discourse theory, linguistics and European Union studies. It aims to explore the meaning, and linguistic representations of the European Union (EU) in the context of its relations with the Pacific Region, while taking into account contributing ideological and political factors. This study contributes to several academic fields, and specifically to the practice of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and to the continuum of study on the linguistics-politics interface. CDA research observes the structure and function of signifiers. Discourse analysis provides means to critically observe elements of social and political power, identities and issues through both contextual and linguistic features of discourse. It offers a unique approach to analysing international relations with the application of tools that can decipher meaning and ideologies in discursive structures. This approach stems for the post-structural outlook that linguistic features reflect ideologies and power relations that condition interpretation of political and social issues. Through a critical observation, the role and influence of the EU in the Pacific region is examined and evaluated. A wider grouping of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries is relevant to the discussion of the EU’s development action and French territories are also taken into account as they are located in the Pacific region and have aspirations to become more integrated to the Pacific community. This study reveals how the EU is defined and how the EU influences the developing world. It also reveals how the Pacific countries are responding to the EU’s interests and values such as regional integration and trade liberalisation. The discourse formation of EU-Pacific relations articulates and reinforces ideologies of identity and power behind the entirety of EU-Pacific relations. The nature of EU identity and role in relation to an ‘Other’ is thus explored in this thesis.

Cette thèse propose une étude disciplinaire des Relations internationales en France. Dans ce domaine très peu exploré, elle discute un ensemble de conventions historiographiques qui incitent à justifier la situation déficiente dans laquelle se trouvent aujourd’hui les RI françaises. En discernant à la place un ensemble de croyances partagées, la thèse entend renouveler la façon dont il faudrait appréhender la position actuelle des RI françaises.Les résultats de l’étude mettent en cause le label franco-français « sociologie des relations internationales » comme n’étant pas parvenu à représenter une école de pensée française et à instaurer une conversation scientifique telle qu’a pu l’accomplir avec succès l’Ecole anglaise.La figure de Raymond Aron, précurseur de la sociologie des relations internationales, apparaît à ce titre en pleine lumière. Incarnant une étude autonome des RI qui s’est déployée un temps avec vigueur en France, son rejet actuel symbolise les difficultés d’ordre avant tout scientifique dont souffre la sociologie des relations internationales contemporaine.Sont principalement mis en question les rapports de cette dernière à la théorie, à la distinction entre objets internes, étrangers et internationaux et à la conception pluridisciplinaire de l’étude des relations internationales. / This thesis is a disciplinary study of French IR. It challenges a set of historiographic conventions that rationalize the marginal status in which French IR is stuck at present. By relegating these conventions as shared beliefs, this study intends to renew the way the current situation of French IR should be understood.The results of the investigation implicate the purely French label « Sociology of international relations » since it has been unable to represent a French school of thought and to establish a scientific conversation as successfully as the English school did.It sheds a critical light on the role of the precursor of the French Sociology of international relations Raymond Aron. Given the facts that he embodied an autonomous study of IR which has well spread in France for some time and the rejection he is subjected to nowadays, R. Aron symbolizes the very scientific issues that are at stake when considering the contemporary French Sociology of international relations.Thus, the main controversial points emphasize the latter’s intellectual premises regarding theory, the distinction between internal, foreign and international objects, and the multidisciplinary conception of the study of IR