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.

This thesis explores textual and visual images of the EU in South Korea's three prestigious popular newspapers - Chosun Ilbo, Dong A Ilbo and Joong Ang Ilbo - and compares them to the imagery created by the internet versions of these newspapers. In recent years, much scholarly work has been done on the topics of EU imagery in print media, but no systemic attempt has yet been made to EU imagery in internet media. The thesis analyses EU news monitored daily in 12 months of 2008 (a year of the first G20 Summit in Washington and the 6th and 7th rounds of EU-Korea FTA negotiations). This study is interdisciplinary. The thesis draws on several significant theories and concepts from the media studies and linguistics. On top of this, a wide range of approaches of content and visual analysis were reviewed. The study then considers and adopts a multimethodological approach of content analysis (studies by Chaban and Holland) and of visual analysis (by Bain) based on visual semiotics. However, to cope with internet media it also adds several categories which add the notion of interactivity to the original content analysis. It incorporates categories originating from a social semiotic approach (elements of interactive and compositional meta-functions) into the original visual analysis. The results of this study are presented in three case studies. In the first section of each case study the thesis provides a comprehensive overview featuring the latest information and various perspectives (political, economic, social, environmental and developmental). The second section presents formal characteristics of EU images in print newspapers and their internet versions. The third section covers substantive characteristics in both versions. The last section suggests the results of visual analysis. The results of this thesis contribute to two areas of studies: EU external perception studies and internet communication studies: as well as enhancing a deeper understanding of EU-Korea relations.