One of our analytical ambitions for this volume is to shed light on the EU as a foreign policy actor by comparing its policy choices and policy effectiveness in response to the Ukraine crisis with those of the US. The existing literature on the EU as a foreign policy actor, in the words of Niemann and Bretherton (2013: 263), has tended to be ‘EU-introverted (or even Eurocentric).’ The literature tends to emphasize that the EU is a sui generis foreign policy actor. This depiction entails an implicit comparison of the EU with traditional foreign policy actors, most commonly the US. This literature focuses on what kind of foreign policy actor the EU is—a civilian power (Duchêne 1973), normative power (Manners 2002) or market power (Damro 2012), among others (for a review see Peterson 2012). These depictions emphasize the distinctiveness of the EU’s power resources and/or its identity.

There is another, even more voluminous, strand of the literature that describes specific EU foreign policies. This literature tends to be particularly ‘EU-introverted’ (Niemann and Bretherton 2013: 263), lacking even implicit comparison to the policies of other actors. There are, however, a few exceptions that explicitly compare EU policies to those of other actors, but these primarily concern external policies in which the EU is most ‘state-like’, such as climate change (see, e.g., Kelemen and Vogel 2010), regulatory cooperation (Drezner 2007) and promoting norms through preferential trade agreements (Postnikov 2014). There are two notable exceptions with respect to traditional foreign policy.² Möcklie and Mauer (2011) compare American and European foreign policies toward the Middle East . Although empirically rich, this work is largely descriptive, and the EU qua the EU is only a peripheral actor. The other exception is Brown (2014), who contrasts the different perceptions of China’s rise in the EU and the US in order to explain differences in their policies toward China . To an extent, our argument is a nice complement to Brown’s; similar perceptions of threat lead to similar responses. Comparison, thus, helps to illuminate the EU’s foreign policy choices and begins to contextualize how distinctive a foreign policy actor the EU is.

Comparison is particularly useful in assessing foreign policy effectiveness (Niemann and Bretherton 2013: 268). The literature on EU foreign policy effectiveness, whether reflexively or not, echoes Laatikainen and Smith’s (2006: 16–19) distinction between internal and external effectiveness. One strand of the literature, reflecting the limited centralization of foreign policy authority in the EU, focuses on the EU’s ability to agree and sustain common positions, what Laatikainen and Smith called internal effectiveness and which is frequently referred to as ‘coherence’ (Niemann and Bretherton 2013: 267). As Hiski Haukkala argues in Chap. 4, the EU’s coherence in response to Russia’s aggression was unexpectedly high.

Given EU coherence/internal effectiveness, the next question is whether the EU is also externally effective. Much of the EU foreign policy literature concerned with external effectiveness uses goal attainment as the metric of effectiveness (Jørgensen et al. 2011: 603; see Dee 2013: 28–31). Goal attainment, however, may be an unrealistic objective. Foreign policies frequently fail, at least for some considerable time, to achieve their objectives because the goal is ambitious, the problem is intractable or other actors are uncooperative (Jørgensen et al. 2011: 604). Influencing the behavior of another great power when the policy in question is seen as affecting a core interest of the state, as is the case with Russia and the crisis in Ukraine (see Chap. 6), is a particularly tall order. Reference to goal attainment in such cases, therefore, may yield an unfairly harsh assessment of effectiveness. Comparison with another foreign policy actor, therefore, helps to contextualize how demanding the policy objective is, thus permitting a more nuanced assessment of effectiveness (see also Niemann and Bretherton 2013 (eds)).