Following the 2017-2018 North Korea nuclear crisis and a decade of disinterest, scholarly attention to the EU’s involvement in the Korean conflict has steadily increased. This thesis compares EU actorness in the Korean conflict, spanning the periods 2011-2012 and 2018-2019, using parts of Rhinard’s and Sjöstedt’s (2019) new actorness framework. Following recent developments in Actorness studies and heeding calls for a greater focus on external factors, it situates the analysis within the Korean conflict's broader context. It concludes that while the EU has deepened its overall engagement in the Northeast Asia region – shifting focus from North to South Korea – the EU has shown little interest in getting involved, despite other actors perceiving further EU involvement favorably. Brussels has continuously been unable to define what role it wants to play. Internal disunity concerning how the EU should balance its troubled relationship with the US with commitments to Seoul has led to the embrace of a traditional passive status quo approach, hindering proactive engagement. The EU’s stance on North Korea remains hardened, making all further cooperation and engagement entirely conditional on progress in the denuclearization talks with the US. The analytical variables borrowed from Rhinard and Sjöstedt’s actorness framework address key concerns in previous actorness studies, allowing for a detailed analysis even when no comprehensive EU-DPRK relations are found.

The thesis explores the use of the term European Strategic Autonomy in the Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP) of the European Union. The security environment around Europe has become increasingly unstable in the last 15 years. The EU Commission has tried to take account of the deteriorating geopolitical landscape by publishing an EU Global Strategy document in 2016 to share its vision for a stronger Europe. The document calls for strategic autonomy without properly defining it. Since then, many policy papers have captured the term and used it as a popular buzzword. Because it has not been properly defined on the political level, European Strategy Autonomy (ESA) was subject to speculations and national interpretations which did not help to advance the debate. Based on an extensive literature review the paper provides a comprehensive understanding by giving an historic overview and presenting different configurations of ESA in the contemporary context. A comparative case study, including France, Germany, and the Czech Republic has been conducted to assess their interpretation of the notion. The result of the case studies showed inherently different perceptions underlaid by different motivations and identifies the political layer to be the biggest challenge for moving forward with the topic....