Leaderisation in foreign policy: performing the role of EU High Representative

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the mediatised context of foreign policy provides new opportunities for political leaders to both frame and project their own leadership role to new audiences. The past ten years have witnessed a sharp rise in political leaders’ use of new social media to communicate on a range of foreign policy issues. We argue that this new media context of foreign policy, combined with a bolstered leadership mandate, has been central to the construction of a more visible public leadership role for the EU High Representative in the post-Lisbon era. Departing from recent scholarship on performative leadership and new media in International Relations theory, we develop an original theoretical framework drawing on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy of impression management. We employ the concept of “leaderisation” to analyse how mediatisation shapes the leadership process in terms of personification and drama to enable new forms of interaction with followers. We apply this framework in an illustrative case study focusing on the process of negotiating the EU Global Strategy. This diplomatic process provided the High Representative Mogherini with a stage on which she could frame herself in a central leadership position vis-à-vis European citizens to mobilise greater legitimacy for the EU as a global actor.

KEYWORDS:

• Leaderisation
• leadership
• foreign policy
• EU
• public diplomacy
• new social media

Introduction

The communication of EU foreign policy leadership has historically been constrained by institutional complexity and crowdedness. In an effort to beef up the coherence, unity and representation of the European Union as a global actor, EU member states agreed in the Lisbon Treaty to delegate formal leadership functions in the field of foreign and security policy to the EU High Representative (HR) – key tasks they themselves had previously performed in the rotating EU Presidency. Moreover, the position of the HR was strengthened by double-hatting it with the role as Vice-President of the European Commission. This hybrid and sui generis location – straddling both intergovernmental and supranational institutional networks – could potentially be a key place from which to exercise and, not least, narrate strategic leadership in the European governance matrix. The post-Lisbon setup has provided the High Representative/Vice President (HR/VP) with a more prominent and more visible stage on which to perform leadership, even if agency continues to be constrained by intergovernmental state practices (Aggestam and Johansson 2017, Aggestam and Bicchi 2019, Amadio Viceré 2020, Helwig 2016).

In this article, we analyse an important dimension overlooked in previous research – namely that the EU Lisbon Treaty was implemented at a time when a fundamental transformation of the media context of foreign policy took place, which enabled new opportunities for leadership performance. The past ten years have witnessed a sharp rise in political leaders’ use of new means of strategic communication. Many political figureheads use social media as a key platform from which to communicate foreign policy and, more specifically, project their own leadership role. Around the globe, Foreign Affairs Ministries have adopted strategies of digital diplomacy to communicate and interact on foreign policy issues. The American State Department has described the use of digital media tools and efforts of increased transparency as the 21st Century Statecraft (Ross 2011), and academic scholars point to how the mediatisation of foreign policy is transforming diplomatic practices and communication (Holmes and Bjola 2015). Social media channels, like Twitter and Facebook, alongside traditional communication channels, offer leadership actors innovative new ways to project their self-image and novel opportunities to transform political communication that facilitate interaction with new audiences (Parmelee and Bichard 2012, Duncombe 2019).

We aim to investigate how the new media context influenced the structural opportunities and constraints of EU foreign policy with a focus on how it has shaped the leadership role of the EU HR/VP and the strategic communication of the European External Action Service (EEAS). While we recognise that the autonomy of the HR/VP is not unfettered, given the intergovernmental decision-making that still prevails in EU foreign policy, we argue that the bolstered leadership mandate, combined with the changing media context of foreign policy, have opened up new space and opportunities for the HR/VP to influence the construction and sense-making of leadership in EU foreign policy. One of the key objectives of the Lisbon Treaty was to advance the unity, coherence and representation of the European Union as a global actor in order to increase its effectiveness and legitimacy in foreign policy (Cross 2015). To achieve these objectives, we show in this article how a process of leaderisation was strategically pursued in EU foreign policy communication with a focus on the HR/VP. “Leaderisation” is a concept from theories of political communication where it is has been used to describe how the mediatisation of politics produces distinctive effects on leadership, such as personification, intensification, drama, and enables new forms of interaction with followers (Mancini 2011, p. 52). Particularly in relation to social media, this literature shows how new media tools can open up space for individual leaders to shape their own self-presentation to their followers in an effort to enhance their legitimacy and representation (Madestam and Falkman 2017, p. 300). We suggest that “leaderisation” is a process that results from the mediatisation of our time in which leaders have unprecedented opportunities to engage in the construction of their own leadership narrative. Social media is one aspect of this but mediatisation refers to a broader intensification of communication practices and increased media logic in politics in general. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how this process of leaderisation has informed the construction of a more visible and public leadership role for the HR/VP in the post-Lisbon era, designed to reach new audiences and brand the image of the EU as an effective global security actor.

How leadership is performed in a mediatised context of foreign policy has largely been overlooked in academic scholarship. We understand leadership in this article to be a social relationship and process of sense-making between leaders and followers (Weick 1995). We seek new theoretical insights in leadership theory by bringing this scholarship closer to theories of mediatisation and public diplomacy. In contrast to traditional functionalist perspectives of leadership, we draw on the dramaturgical approach in sociological role theory, which conceives leadership to be “performative acts” that are enacted on a stage vis-à-vis an audience (cf. Goffman 1959). In this view, leadership is not a fixed status but an ongoing process of inter-subjective understandings, where storytelling through media frames are vehicles through which leaders negotiate their roles (Sharma and Grant 2011). We use the concept of “leaderization” to depict this negotiation of leadership as an ongoing process of performance and recognition between leader and followers (cf. Mancini 2011, p. 59).

A decade of EU post-Lisbon foreign policy calls for an assessment of how the role of the HR/VP and the EEAS have evolved (Amadio Viceré et al. 2020). This article contributes to the aim of the special issue with theoretical and empirical insights into the process of leaderisation in EU foreign policy through an in-depth case study of the HR/VP Federica Mogherini, and her leadership in producing and launching the EU Global Strategy. We study how Mogherini embraced the new opportunities of performing the HR/VP role on a global stage. We argue that the leaderisation of Mogherini is one aspect of the development of post-Lisbon EU foreign policy. We hence assess the implications of leadership agency in a new media context that produced novel opportunities to shape the role expectations of EU foreign policy leadership. What characterises the process of “leaderization” is the prominence of media logic and use of public diplomacy strategies directed at European citizens. The launch of the EU Global Strategy process took place at a time of high drama in 2015 when the threats to the normative principles of European and global multilateral orders were escalating. Moreover, the EU had to consider – for the first time in its history – the prospect that one of its largest and most important foreign policy actors, the United Kingdom, would be exiting the Union. The EU Global Strategy (EUGS) is therefore of particular interest, because it was launched at a critical juncture when the multiple centripetal and centrifugal forces were at play in European politics. In such critical junctures, political leadership is widely considered important in terms of framing and mobilising collective action (Ansell et al. 2014).

The article is organised in four parts. In the first part, we outline the mediatised context of foreign policy and define the concept of leaderisation more precisely by drawing on three bodies of literature: the mediatisation of politics, leadership studies and public diplomacy. In the second part, we develop our dramaturgical approach to leadership which we operationalise as a framing process. The third part provides for a detailed study of Mogherini’s leadership performance during the formulation and implementation of the EU Global Strategy and draws on a triangulation of primary sources, such as interviews, speeches and social media observations. In the final part, we discuss our original theoretical approach to leadership in light of the empirical findings and assess their significance for future research on leadership in EU foreign policy.

Foreign policy leadership in a mediatised age

Leadership is a contested concept in the social sciences and scholarly work on leadership in the European Union reflects this (Aggestam and Johansson 2020). Leadership can be theorised and conceptualised in a variety of ways depending on whether we approach leadership in terms of person, position, process or outcomes. While it is important to distinguish these approaches from each other, it is relevant to recognise their interconnections (Byman and Pollack 2001, p. 140). In the scholarship on EU foreign policy and the EU as a global actor, the concept of leadership has been largely overlooked and mainly focused on the nature of European power with which the concept overlaps but is not synonymous to. Moreover, while there is a burgeoning literature on leadership that engages with media and communication research, there has been remarkably little attention to the specific issue of foreign policy leadership. In this article, we address these gaps in the literature. We start from the literature on public diplomacy where the role of media has long been recognised to offer opportunities to influence public attitudes in relation to the formation and execution of foreign policy (Cull 2014). New public diplomacy, in particular, builds on the assumption that ordinary citizens matter to diplomats and foreign policy leaders in a democracy and that the relationship between them can be managed and mediated (Melissen 2005). In this tradition, “digital diplomacy” refers to attempts by political leaders, diplomats and institutions, to foster such relationships online (Holmes and Bjola 2015).

The performative approach to leadership focuses on the meaning-making of leadership and departs from a critique of traditional functionalist approaches (Alvesson and Spicer 2012). The meaning-making of leadership suggests an understanding of “performance” as a dramaturgical act where leadership is performed by an actor (leader) (Gardner and Avolio 1998). Performative approaches build on the interpretive tradition and consider leadership to be a socially constructed phenomenon. In this view, the study of leadership is focused on the social role and practices of leadership that are less formal and more symbolic. Leadership is thus an ongoing process of inter-subjective understanding where narratives and storytelling are vehicles through which leaders negotiate their role (Sharma and Grant 2011).

The performance of political leadership depends on mediation that provides a scene on which to enact a leadership role. In the literature on political communication, the performance of leadership has been considered to be both constrained and enabled by the mediatisation of our time. In theories of mediatisation, technological advancements and commercialisation are assumed to be driving forces in the increasing permeation of media into society at large (Hjavard 2008; Hedling 2018). A key assumption is that the increasing relevance and dependency on media for human activities and social relations have introduced a “media logic” into different societal domains, including politics. When media logic, understood as both discursive strategies and performative tactics stemming from the news media, become accepted in political settings, a mediatisation has occurred (Strömbäck 2008). Similar assumptions of media logic in politics apply when considering changes introduced by social media (van Dijk and Poell 2014). With the rapid expansion of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discursive strategies and performative tactics stemming from the media are now everyday practices in the presentation of the self and interactions in social life. For political leaders in need of mediated communication to reach their followers, social media can also be a way of bypassing the traditional news media. The management of social media has therefore become professionalised, many leaders depend on skilled communicators to assist or even carry out their communication on these platforms. Social media have become a competitive scene where political influence is measured in terms of engagement. To compete for the online public, leaders and organisations therefore adapt to market demands by framing politics through engaging storylines (Hedling 2019).

Within mediatisation studies, “leaderisation”, “personalisation” and “presidentialisations” are concepts used to describe the effects of mediatisation on political leadership (Mazzoleni 2008). Leaderisation includes personalisation, which is a broader tendency in political communication to symbolise politics through the personal characteristics and lives of individuals (not necessarily leaders). Personalisation is in turn achieved through “dramatisation” (constructing politics as a drama around a person) and “intimisation” (framing politics through emotions). The framing of political leaders in these ways respond to commercial demands (in the news media sector) and consequently contribute to a general “simplification” of politics in which the public is considered to identify and connect with political leaders rather than with policy (Mancini 2011).

Historically, these processes of constructing political leaders have been considered a result of how the news media tend to favour particular personalities as “telegenic, controversial, and possibly colourful” (Mazzoleni 2008, p. 380). To fit this dramaturgy, politicians have adjusted to the media’s standards of newsworthiness (Strömbäck 2008). This political adjustment to media is reflected in the focus given to visibility, look, and image in election campaigns. Politicians are thus increasingly expected to engage in personalisation strategies themselves (Campus 2010). Importantly, social media have transformed the role of individuals in media representations from objects to subjects in political performance. In the current social media landscape, political leaders have more possibilities to engage in their own leaderisation by directly negotiating the sense-making of their leadership with an audience of followers. The role of social media grants more agency to the performance of leadership in relation to online audiences.

In the context of foreign policy leadership, such performances can be observed in the growing trend of leaders (heads of state, foreign ministers, diplomats and their organisations) to engage with social media. The increased emphasis on communication through social media in international politics has been conceptualised as a form of new public diplomacy. While the Internet offers new opportunities for influence in public diplomacy, it also challenges the divide between domestic and foreign policy publics. Domestic publics are now more aware of the stakes in international politics, but audiences have also become more fragmented as the lines between domestic and international audiences are increasingly blurred (Huijgh 2013, Pisarska 2016). Digital public diplomacy has therefore become a favoured strategy to target different audiences and mobilise public support for foreign policy by increasing transparency and opportunities of public engagement.

Leaderisation – a dramaturgical approach

Based on the intersection of leadership studies, mediatisation and public diplomacy that we outlined above, we conceive leadership performance to be concerned with strategies leaders adopt to shape their own leadership role to foster a connection with followers in foreign policy. We use the concept of leaderisation to study this process whereby leaders actively engage in sense-making of their own leadership role to reach, connect and resonate with the assumed expectations of different audiences (publics).

The dramaturgical approach to leadership that we develop draws on the concepts used by the sociologist, Erving Goffman, in his classic work, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959). In his dramaturgical perspective of social life, “actors” engage in “performances” on various “stages” and different “audiences” to “shape their definition of the situation”. In this view, actors are conceived in a cultural environment as performers with an ability to frame (manipulate) the presentation of the self within the scope set by the role requirements (Goffman 1959, p. 249, Schimmelfennig 2002, p. 417, Adler-Nissen 2012, 2016).

We propose that leaderisation can be conceived of as this type of dramaturgical process whereby leaders and their anticipated followers are both involved in the construction of a leadership role. We consider leadership performance to take place on a social “stage” which is characterised by a dynamic interplay between agency and structure that both enables and constrains. On this stage, leaders are strategically motivated actors with some freedom of action to frame their own role, but without complete autonomy as agents are structurally situated (within the scope set by role requirements).

Goffman’s dramaturgy contains a large body of ideas and assumptions. In our framework of leaderisation, we employ three key concepts: “interaction order”, “impression management” and “copresence”. The interaction order refers to when two or more people respond to each other’s presence which create demands and constraints on the presentation of the self. In other words, the social self is continually achieved through interaction and the response presence of others (Goffman 1983). Adopted to the process of leaderisation, we conceive the meaning of leadership to be constructed and negotiated through performances directed to followers. The interaction order can be influenced through impression management – the script that actors follow to influence how others perceive them, an object or an event. The script allows actors to create, defend or enhance their social identities by changing assumptions, settings or props on the social stage (Goffman 1959). While some interactions are habitual, impression management is essentially a form of strategic action seeking to influence the perceptions of others. Impression management is successful when a performance resonates with the intended audience. We consider leaderisation along these lines of strategic action to negotiate a leadership role. Copresence is the term Goffman (1966, p. 22) used to discuss how the presence of other actors shapes individual behaviour. Copresence is not just a matter of proximity, but a condition in which actors pay close attention to each other, making them subject to one another. In the context of leadership, copresence is often a matter of interacting with other leaders in institutional settings, or as we will suggest, in moments of significant political events, that influence the scene on which leadership is negotiated.

Methodology

We illustrate the process of leaderisation in EU foreign policy with a focus on the strategic communication of the HR/VP, Federica Mogherini, and the EEAS in the drafting and launching of the EU Global Strategy (EUGS). The illustrative case study serves to demonstrate the dramaturgical approach to the study of leadership we advance in this article. We depart from a performative perspective on leadership as practice, and the interpretive tradition in this field favors illustrative case studies that can provide detailed accounts of how leadership is socially constructed (Alvesson and Spicer 2012). We consider how Mogherini sought to frame the changing interaction order in EU foreign policy and how impression management was utilised to enable a performance that could reach an intended audience. However, as we will show, Federica Mogherini did not occupy the stage on her own, but had to act in copresence, especially in context of Brexit, which influenced her performance significantly.

To capture performance as meaningful action established between social actors, we draw on Goffman (1974, p. 10) and the idea of “framing” as an analytical device. Framing helps us conceptualise leadership as a form of engaging rhetoric that is essential for the mobilisation of consensus on collective action. A frame can be defined as “an interpretative schemata that simplifies and condenses the ‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences and sequences of action in one’s present or past environment” (Snow and Benford 2000, p. 137). A frame functions as a sense-making technique that is used to sort out and organise the complex stimuli of everyday life. The success of framing depends on whether there is a frame alignment – e.g. a link between the leader’s own interpretative orientation and those of the followers. While a leader will try to shape a particular frame to mobilise collective action, s/he will be constrained to draw on the socio-political repertoires that are available and acceptable to the followers.

In our empirical analysis, we study how particular frames assisted the performance of Mogherini’s leadership through attention to the interaction order, impression management and copresence. In our framing analysis, we focus on the process of developing a script – a leadership metanarrative – and how it was later projected to an intended audience under troubling circumstances. We do not study the more general frames of EU foreign policy present in the EUGS, such as “principled pragmatism” or “resilience” (see Bremberg 2020, Juncos 2017). In our analysis, the main frame concerns the negotiation of a new leadership role through an attempted connection with European citizens as the audience. The evaluation of successful resonance with intended audience is, however, beyond the scope of the present study.

Our empirical case rests on an extensive triangulation of data collected before, during and after the launch of the EUGS, 2015–2019. The empirical analysis draws on three primary sources: (1) Between January 2016 to April 2018, we conducted a total of 30 interviews with key officials working in the EEAS and the Headquarters of the HR/VP.¹ (2) We also draw on speeches by Federica Mogherini, autobiographical accounts published by special adviser to the HR/VP, Nathalie Tocci and key strategic documents published by the EEAS, and (3) social media observations on Twitter and Facebook. In the social media observations, we monitored the EEAS official social media accounts (and the HR/VPs official account) for any mention of the EUGS and the drafting process. After the launch of the EUGS, we studied how the EUGS was projected in these channels. We used these different sources to analyse the framing of the EUGS and the construction of Mogherini’s leadership narrative. These sources provide us with a rich material for our case study analysis of the process of leaderisation during Mogherini’s term of office between 2014 and 2019.

The empirical study consists of three parts. The first part provides a contextual background and discusses the role of individual factors. The second part examines the mediatised logic that permeated the consultation process of the EU Global Strategy as a stage on which to project the public leadership role of Moghereni, and identifies the metaframes in the leadership narrative. The third part shows how these frames were then projected through strategic communication in social media with the aim of reaching not simply European governments, but above all European citizens.

Leadership in search of a new script

The introduction of the empowered HR/VP was intended to simplify, make visible and consolidate EU strategic foreign policy communication. EU politics have always struggled with the gap to the EU citizens, often because of its lack of audience engagement. EU politics are considered elitist, bureaucratic and boring not least because of the news media’s lack of interest in its “spectacles and personalities”. In addition, Brussels is a crowded institutional set-up. While adding capabilities to the HR leadership was a sensitive issue during the drafting of the Lisbon Treaty, increasing visibility and coherence was agreed upon to enhance the legitimacy of EU foreign policy. Thus, while member states were reluctant to hand over formal competences to the HR/VP, they could be convinced of the value of increasing the symbolic power of the HR/VP to increase the EU’s global profile. In reality, the HR/VP’s representative role was also politically empowered.

Despite the anticipation of the new visible leadership, the selection of candidates for the new role of HR/VP did not exactly correspond to mediatised selection frames. While several high-profile names were circulated during the nomination process the choice fell upon Catherine Ashton, the former EU Trade Commissioner. Ashton was in the news media portrayed as a weak but competent leader. She was a little-known personality, lacked special skills in foreign policy and was not considered much of a speaker. The choice of Ashton was instead explained by the difficulty in negotiating and compromising between the member states. A low-profile consensus-builder was easier to accept as she was less likely to contest the principle of national sovereignty (Barber 2010, Howorth 2011). The tenure of Ashton’s leadership received mixed reviews, most of her shortcomings were linked to the difficulties of the HR/VP role, the multiple institutional belongings and her inability to successfully build a relationship with the EU public. There had been anticipation from the outset that social media would be engaged to foster the new connection between EU foreign policy and the EU public (Interviews with EEAS officials, December 2015). In fact, the EEAS official Twitter account (eu_EEAS) was set up more than a year before its official launch. In the EEAS, Ashton was however described as media shy and unwilling to perform the HR/VP role in the visionary and engaging way that had been anticipated.

Five years later in 2014, at the time of her nomination Mogherini was also a contested candidate but for different reasons. With brief experience as foreign minister of Italy, Mogherini was relatively young and to many she represented the Southern European perspective on matters of foreign policy (Interviews, EEAS officials, November - December 2016). Mogherini was however often praised for her communications skills and her abilities of reaching and engaging citizens (and especially a younger audience) (Davis 2014). Among other things, Mogherini (2014) wrote a lifestyle blog while building her political career in Italy (http://www.blogmog.it). Moreover, Mogherini was described as media congenial, known to be welcoming to press engagement and always ready to speak to and pose for the camera (Interviews EEAS officials, May 2016). She also had an active presence on social media when taking up the role of HR and has continued to manage her own Twitter account (FedericaMog).² These accounts by EEAS officials support the view of Mogherini as publicly visible leader:

It’s the “Mogherini effect”, she really thinks about these things [social media], about how to reach the public and make what we do visible. (Interview, EEAS official, November 2016)

She is a real politician – she understands media and she likes it. She is younger and that helps. Most importantly she sees the value of courting the media. She is always saying that there is no point in doing good work if nobody sees what you are doing. (Interview, EEAS official, April 2018)

In terms of leadership performance (as we have defined it in this paper), Mogherini thus took on the HR/VP role with different skills than Ashton (Calcara 2020, Koops and Tercovich 2020). While still representing a compromise, she was expected to better fulfil the aim of projecting visibility and coherence of EU foreign policy on the global stage. Mogherini had hence already positioned herself as a communicator prone to use new media opportunities to engage her followers in a new performance of foreign policy leadership.

The EU global strategy as a performative act of leadership

When Federica Mogherini started her work at the end of 2014, she inherited the task of producing a strategy to replace the European Security Strategy (ESS) from 2003. The initiative to begin a discussion on an EU Global Strategy was originally taken by a group of EU Foreign Ministers in a response to the perceived lack of strategic direction during the tenure of Ashton. When Mogherini succeeded Ashton, she quickly seized the opportunity this offered her to magnify her leadership role in shaping EU foreign and security policy and address what she perceived to be the erratic mode of foreign policy reaction – “like being a captain of a ship in stormy waters without a chart indicating the way” (Tocci 2017, p. 16). Initiating the process of drafting a new strategy was thus a way of controlling her new role by negotiating the expectations that she would be measured against, an act of engaging in scripting an interaction order. Mogherini made efforts to include the public in this process and thereby influence the expectations of her through the performance of leadership in the drafting of a common strategy.

Rather than producing a managerial manual, the goal of the EUGS was essentially performative: to frame a “shared vision” to mobilise “common action” (European Union 2016). To achieve this end, the HR/VP sought to exercise ideational leadership – enacting the identity of the EU as a global actor and promising future action. It shaped the diplomatic process that was adopted, the choice of frames and the targeted audiences. Mogherini’s start as HR/VP coincided with the new European Commission under President Jean-Claude Juncker. He was keen for Mogherini to move into the Commission and take up the post as Vice-President in order to lead the coordination between the Group of Commissioners with external relations portfolios (Juncker 2014) – something that Ashton declined to do during her tenure. This enhanced the strategic location of the HR/VP in the European governance matrix and demonstrated her hybrid position in between the intergovernmental Council and the supranational Commission. Mogherini swiftly moved her headquarters from the EEAS to the European Commission, where the ideological commitment to European integration is much more pronounced (Interviews HR/VP Cabinet, May 2016). In making use of the double-hatted post, Mogherini could move beyond the constraints of state-based European diplomacy and target new audiences in order to increase the legitimacy of the EU’s global role and by implication her own leadership role. In contrast to her predecessor, the speeches of Mogherini were clearly scripted to target not simply EU governments, but a broader “European public” identified as citizens of the EU. This imagined new audience was also signalled in the way that the EEAS and Mogherini’s own social media accounts gradually shifted from duplicating messages from press releases to using engaging language. For instance, the EEAS begun to frequently post quotes from Mogherini’s speeches on Twitter that addressed the public in this direct and targeted manner.

@eu_eeas 9 Oct 2015 #EUGlobalStrategy “Your ideas, the ideas of the European communities, are crucial to this debate and to the strategy” @FedericaMog

The format and process of negotiation was communicated as markedly different for the EUGS from how the ESS had come about. The ESS – which largely was a response to heal the divisions between Britain, France and Germany after the Iraq War of 2003 – was negotiated behind closed doors among a small circle of key diplomats, including the then HR, Javier Solana. In contrast, the EUGS consultation and drafting process sought to be open, transparent and public – sometimes against the wishes of national diplomats who complained of a lack of ownership of the process (Interview, May 2015). It did not have the hallmarks of a traditional diplomatic intergovernmental process with a limited managerial leadership role for the HR/VP. Instead, it drew inspiration from the 2014 German review of foreign policy that had sought broader societal participation (Interview, HR/VP Cabinet, May 2016). The EUGS public outreach involved a range of actors beyond EU national governments, such as, NGOs, experts, media and think tanks. Social media was a central component of increasing the visibility of this process by making use of online networking to both spread information and engage the followers of partner organisations with the goal of ultimately reaching a broader European public. For instance, the EEAS officials that travelled with Mogherini were actively encouraging the use of common hashtags (#EUGS and #EUGlobalStrategy) (Interviews EEAS officials, May 2016). More than 50 events were held throughout Europe – in some cases further afield in Washington, Moscow and Tokyo. These events offered Mogherini a public stage on which to perform her leadership of the process – frequently appearing together with a Foreign Minister – to many different audiences both offline and online. In addition to the publics invited to these events, Mogherini also engaged with digital audiences. The drafting process was reported in the EEAS and Mogherini’s social media feeds on Twitter and Facebook, often including live updates, Q&A sessions, photographs and videos. These photographs and videos often depicted Mogherini actively exchanging ideas with groups that in different ways represented the European public. For instance, on 17 March 2016, the EEAS shared two posts on Twitter with photographs and a video of Mogherini consulting members of the Erasmus Mundus Association on their views and opinions on the EU global strategy.

Mogherini frequently emphasised that the process was as important as the outcome itself.

… the drafting of this Strategy has been a very open process. … the whole process wasn’t simply at government level, and it never happened behind closed doors. This is a Strategy for all our European citizens, and it is a Strategy that speaks to our partners in the world. (Mogherini 2016a; emphasis added)

One of the reasons why Mogherini projected a transparent and public process was that one of the key targets of the EUGS was the audience of European citizens to increase the democratic legitimacy of the EU as a global actor at a critical moment in time (Interviews EEAS officials, May 2016. Indeed, it was framed as a “Global Strategy to promote citizens interests”:

… our first responsibility towards the EU’s citizens is the one that we have to meet when we represent their interest, their collective interest, their values, their expectations, but also, I believe, especially in these days, we have a collective responsibility to them to let them see and realise what the European Union represents in the world – the European Union is a key partner for peace, a key partner for stability, a key partner for economy … .(Mogherini 2016c)

This is indicative of a leadership strategy that aimed at expanding the role repertoires beyond the constraints of member states by broadening the audience, and hence the scope for autonomy and agency. This was informed by a belief that European citizens now think security is their number one concern (Mogherini 2017a) and support a stronger EU role in the world according to many polls. The Global Strategy can hence be seen as part of a wider effort of public diplomacy to establish a link between EU foreign policy directly with European citizens.

The EUGS functioned as an ideal setting for dramaturgical framing of action. Before the EUGS process began, a strategic assessment was conducted that allowed the HR/VP to “define the situation”. Again, in contrast to when the ESS was formulated, the geostrategic environment in 2015 was described as dramatically deteriorating, especially after the Ukraine crisis when Russia annexed Crimea. This strategic review allowed Mogherini and her closest advisors to interpret the situation, draw attention to issues and linkages of how the world has become “connected, contested and complex” (Tocci 2017, p. 11–16). This turbulent and hostile environment offered a window of opportunity for Mogherini to project a form of ideational leadership that was as much about performing the identity of the EU, as it was about making the Union an effective strategic actor. The performativity of leadership had three component parts to mobilise followers and generate legitimacy: social identification, European integration ideology, and the promise of future action.

… let’s try to give voice to all those proud Europeans who see very clearly why we count and why we deliver much more for our citizens and for the rest of the world if we act united as Europeans than if we are fragmented. And let’s try to give voice to all those who see very clearly that we are not losing sovereignty when we act as a European Union, but we are actually regaining sovereignty at the European Union’s level because in the world of today, in the global world of today, the only way which you can really and effectively exercise sovereignty is all together. No one of our member states can exercise sovereignty effectively in the global world of today alone. (Mogherini 2016c; emphasis added)

The attempt to mobilise a common European identity – a social identification of “togetherness” – was embedded in a discourse that the surrounding world is unpredictable, instable and dangerous. According to Mogherini, the Global Strategy has enabled Europeans to rediscover “the existential value of being together” and goes on to say that the EUGS is also an internal strategy for the EU itself “of the reasons why we are stronger together” (Mogherini 2017a; see also 2017b). The frame that is used to mobilise European collective action on the world stage is referred to as the “European way”. In fact, the European way continued to be a key narrative in the projection of the EUGS as a campaign banner and social media hashtag. The hashtag (#EuropeanWay) was for example used in the EEAS’s Twitter posts from Mogherini’s annual debrief to the United Nations Security Council in 2017 (eu_eeas 8–9 May 2017a, 2017b).

The discourse on Europe as a global strategic actor reiterates the norms of being a reliable, cooperative, and predictable partner (Mogherini 2017a; 2017c). The Global Strategy contains a number of key concepts, such as resilience, an integrated approach, and principled pragmatism, that should guide EU global action. These principles are intended to give the EU moral purpose and sustain action over time. As such, they could be seen as sense-making devices for orientation (meaningful action) and calculated performative statements that constitute an actor and promises future action.

This is the European way to engagement in the world: a hopefully effective, smart mix of soft and hard power. … Our Union is already more than a purely civilian power. The future of our security is one where hard and soft power are much more blended than in the past. (Mogherini 2016a)

The narrative of the EU as global actor is one of strength, resources and capability. In line with Mogherini’s ideational style of leadership, she does not shy away from depicting the EU as a superpower for peace and human development (Mogherini 2016b). She draws on the epithets commonly used in the discourse of the EU as a global “indispensable power”: the EU as the biggest market in the world; first humanitarian donor worldwide; provider of development assistance; first trade partner for most countries around the world; and a major diplomatic actor and security provider (Mogherini 2017a). These speech acts are performative in the sense that they describe the past and hold promises of future action.

The leaderisation of Mogherini in the projection of the EUGS

The planned launch of the EUGS coincided with the British referendum on whether to stay or leave the EU. Mogherini and her advisors had reasoned that if the “stay side” would win, the EUGS would offer a timely frame of moving ahead towards a strengthened union. If on the other hand, the “leave side” would win the referendum, the plan was to postpone the launch. These plans were discussed in a general belief that the stay side would win and the launch of the EUGS would therefore be a well-timed initiative to “turn the page” and reconquer the support of EU citizens after a time of crises (Interviews with EEAS officials, November 2016). In June 2016, when instead facing the news that the UK would be leaving the EU, in fear that it would have been “shelved”, Mogherini went ahead and presented it to the European Council in the middle of Brexit turmoil. This was by EEAS officials described as a decision taken by Mogherini alone who had expressed that “dropping the EUGS would have done injustice to the Union” (Tocci 2016, p. 470). Keeping in mind the exhaustive process of deliberation, reflection and communication that had preceded the launch, this was also a face-saving act, postponing the EUGS would at the very least have led to necessary revisions. More importantly, scrapping the EUGS would have endangered the new interaction order Mogherini had actively been creating. Leaving the EUGS to its own fate post-Brexit would have both undermined Mogherini’s previous performance during its formulation but also have stripped her of the script she needed to further her performance. Saving the EUGS was therefore both an act of face-saving and of long-term leadership strategy.

Still, there was no doubt that the launch of the EUGS was both politically and publicly overshadowed by Brexit. Despite of ambitious marketing through press events and on social media, it did not feature on the evening news in most of the member-states the day of its launch. The EU leaders that convened at the European Council meeting at which it was presented did not choose to engage in a discussion on the topic. They were preoccupied by Brexit. Mogherini’s leadership performance was, at least initially constrained by copresence. In the weeks following Brexit, it was instead interviews with high-profile member state and British leaders that dominated EU news reporting and social media often discussing the very questions of integration and disintegration that the EUGS was intended for.

Despite of the initial low interest in the weeks following the launch, Mogherini engaged in a tour that was acknowledged by most of the major EU media outlets. The launch had also been prepared with a social media strategy intended to amplify its role in EU politics and extend the reach of audiences:

The main goal of the EEAS social media channels is to develop a coherent narrative, that is what is needed and that is what the new strategy, the new leadership and these tools can offer. (Interview, EEAS official, November 2016)

Events and activities during the launch tour were again communicated using the designated hashtags #EUGS and #EUGlobalStrategy. While at this point in 2016, most EU institutions were actively using social media, at most they were treated as a secondary and complimentary channel of communication. The EEAS had however undergone a communications shift and increased its competence in strategic communications, above all as a result of new threats in the information environment (most notably Russian disinformation). The communication strategy of the EUGS was therefore more advanced and included new attempts of targeting audiences. Whereas Mogherini performed the traditional role of high-level EU leadership during press conferences, she addressed the public in a more personal tone on social media. On the 29th of June 2016, the day after Mogherini presented the EUGS to the European leaders, the EEAS published a video on all of their social media accounts depicting her presenting it to the EU public. The speech made clear that she was speaking to “citizens”, in “our countries”, in “our union” repeating the narrative developed during the drafting process. In addition, the speech was concluded by stating that:

This Global Strategy will now guide us in our daily work as a union that truly meets its citizens’ needs, hopes and aspirations, a union that builds on the success of 70 years of peace, a union with the strength to contribute to peace and security in our region and in the whole world. (EEAS [video] 2016; emphasis added)

This video marked the first of many videos published on Twitter and Facebook that aimed at communicating and more importantly, explaining the EUGS and convincing the EU public. This balancing of multiple communications channels and high-level press conferences was kept up during the launch tour. By the end of the summer, the communications strategy had paid off leading to attention and interest from European think tanks. Despite competing copresence, the EUGS had been thoroughly analysed and commented on by experts in the field and gained some, if limited, attention in European media (Interview, EEAS official, November 2016). Having pushed through the EUGS despite of Brexit, by the fall of 2016 Mogherini thus found herself in a good position to perform ideational leadership in which she could foster a connection between the EU public and the EU and by focusing on its global role. In this way, she was still able to frame the EUGS according to the problems and solutions it was intended to promote and, Brexit, in fact, strengthened the frame alignment by illustrating the chaos that would happen if Europeans do not stick together.

The leaderisation of Mogherini here depended on the performance of leadership both in terms of the EUGS as a new script, but also the reach of an audience through impression management. Turning first to the relationship between leadership performance and a script, we have argued that the EUGS filled the void of a missing narrative to match the post of the HR/VP and the EEAS. This argument in part resonates with the assumptions that the EUGS, just like its predecessor the ESS, was to some extent an exercise in the EU narrating its own identity (Mälksoo 2016). Even more so, it became a script needed to effectively perform the new HR leadership. The Lisbon Treaty was intended to make the EU more democratic, efficient and transparent which in relation to external action envisioned EU foreign policy to become more visible and more coherent. Specifically, the HR/VP was empowered and the EEAS was created to promote EU action on the international stage and to be better able to defend its interests and values abroad (Treaty of Lisbon 2007). The ESS had not assisted this role performance as it was no longer a narrative that had legitimacy in the EU public that had become aware of the interaction between internal and external polices. By 2016, the HR/VP instead needed a narrative that could unify and keep the faith of the EU citizens in the continued importance of EU integration:

Public diplomacy is becoming more important because of the internalisation of foreign policy. The lines between the external and the internal division are so blurred now and that creates a new need of explaining these things to the citizens. (Interview, EEAS official, April 2018)

While the link between Mogherini’s performance and the intended audience was established by the EUGS, social media provided valuable tools of impression management. Mogherini and her communications team actively used social media to reach new audiences of EU foreign policy beyond the governments of member states. This audience was broadly understood in the EEAS as “the EU citizens”, but in light of Brexit, communication efforts signalled a targeting also of multiple audiences of EU sceptics. Around this time, video was the favoured format on social media (Facebook had launched its “live” function in August 2015), and Mogherini was an early adopter of this trend:

She personally stressed the need of using attractive and simplified videos. One time after a meeting at the Council she was so frustrated with the fact that some of the things that we do, the EU leaders don’t even know. We have to educate them on EU foreign policy. (Interview, EEAS official, April 2018)

Essentially three types of online videos were projected in relation to the EUGS, speeches by Mogherini filmed up-close with her addressing citizens directly, informational videos describing facts and animated stories of EU’s foreign policy (Hedling 2019). These videos demonstrated media logic; they simplified the message; they provided a personal connection to Mogherini or to the EUGS and they used compelling dramaturgy – all known ways in which media logic assists the framing of leadership (cf. Mazzoleni 2008). These new opportunities of communicating in a more engaging way were actively used in the promotion of the EUGS. The simplification was related to the framing of the problem of and solution to EU foreign policy. For instance, susceptibility to threats such as migration, terrorism and cyber-attacks was continuously met by the “stronger together argument” and “the European way”. The personalisation of Mogherini as a friendly and reliable face facilitated the identification and frame alignment: “she is a person and she has the same fears as we do”. Finally, narrative techniques of framing “good” versus “evil”, “heroes” versus “villains,” and dramatical music to convey certain emotions, were actively used to both convince and entertain.

The use of strategic communication to communicate policy that built on the personalisation of Mogherini and the simplification of politics was unprecedented in EU foreign policy communication. The EUGS coincided with a growing awareness of the need to use strategic communication to counter the disinformation that was targeting the EU – stemming from the Brexit campaign, the US presidential election and from Russia. The communication of the EUGS was therefore also a reactive move, an attempt to project the truth of the EU’s global aspirations in relation to other myths. The emphasis on strong leadership was therefore also a reaction to external threats – weak and fragmented leadership had been a key narrative in Russia’s disinformation campaign towards the EU. These circumstances of copresence and the leadership of Mogherini led to the development of new expertise in strategic communication at the EEAS. Between 2016 and 2019, several campaigns have been produced by the EEAS that aligns with the leaderisation of Mogherini.

Conclusion

This article has called for more attention to the performance of foreign policy leadership in a new media environment. In a time characterised by challenges to the relationship between leaders and their publics, leaders are trying to find new ways to connect with different audiences and followers. The international arena today is a competitive information environment in which democratic leaders must present themselves in new ways that are engaging to mobilise political support and legitimacy. We argue that a dramaturgical approach to understanding leadership in this context offers important new insights into the process of leaderisation.

In our illustrative case study of the EU Global Strategy, we have traced how this process of leaderisation unfolded in EU foreign policy. HR/VP Federica Mogherini and her team used the opportunity of drafting a new global strategy to transform the interaction order of EU foreign policy through a new script. This new script was intended to foster a direct link of connection and identification between Mogherini and her followers, the EU public(s). The performance of the script was realised through strategies of impression management that allowed her to include new and legitimising actors to the stage and amplify the performances through social media opportunities. When the launch of the EUGS in June 2016 was overshadowed by Brexit, Mogherini persisted using impression management to turn fears of disintegration into a momentum to argue for the EU’s global role. By attention to the relationship between Mogherini’s leadership and the elements of her impression management, we also show how her performance depended on the perception of a new audience of EU citizens. Mogherini and her team attempted to reach this new audience through active and sophisticated framing of her leadership through media logic that simplified politics, personalised Mogherini’s leadership, and facilitated a connection to an audience through emotive and compelling stories.

While the generalisability of our study of one leader in one case is limited, we argue that the leaderisation of foreign policy is now a wide-spread development in international politics. The original theoretical framework of analysis that we develop in this article can therefore be applied across different leadership actors and cases to compare variations in the leaderisation process of foreign policy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Lisbeth Aggestam is Associate Professor in political science at the Department of Political Science and research fellow at the Centre for European Research (CERGU), University of Gothenburg. She is co-editor of the journal, Foreign Policy Analysis, from January 2021.

Elsa Hedling is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science, Lund University and an associate research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

Additional information

Funding

Lisbeth Aggestam gratefully acknowledges the financial support by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, RJ grant number P14-0030: 1).

Notes

1 These original sources of primary material were collected in two separate research projects: “The leadership paradox in EU foreign policy” (PI: Lisbeth Aggestam) and “Blending Politics and New Media: Mediatized Practices of EU Digital Diplomacy” (PI: Elsa Hedling). The interviews were semi-structured and ensured the anonymity of the respondents.

2 By April 2015, Mogherini had 123,000 followers on Twitter; an increase of more than 60% since she assumed office on the 1st of November 2014 (Mann 2015). Since then, her following has continued to grow. When she stepped down as the HR/VP in November 2019, she had more than 500,000 followers.