The purpose of this project was to examine the changing nature of leadership in EU foreign policy. The post-Lisbon governance system brought about significant institutional and policy-making changes to the formal leadership functions in foreign policy. It empowered the position of EU High Representative (EUHR) and created a new European diplomatic service (EEAS), while EU Member States lost their formal leadership competence they enjoyed in the rotating EU Presidency. These changes unsettled leadership role relations in EU foreign policy and raised questions about who, how and when leadership is exercised.

The project had from the start a twin-track approach which involved theory development and empirical data gathering. All the publications from this project reflect this strategy of combining conceptual innovation with findings derived from new empirical data. In the first phase of the project, when I employed a research assistant, the ambition was to collect new data by mapping leadership role expectations at the general level through a telephone interview survey. The respondents included top diplomats from the national Ministries of Foreign Affairs and EU institutions, as well EU-delegations around the world. The interview guide contained a wide range of leadership questions relating to perceptions of trust, autonomy, agency, types of leadership styles, and ranking of influence by different actors. A very high response rate was achieved at 81% with a final count of 120 interview respondents. This proved to be a rich source of empirical data, which all the subsequent publications could draw on in this project, while additional in-depth personal interviews for the specific case studies were also carried out in Brussels and in a range of national capitals around Europe.

The project has been undertaken at a critical moment in the history of the European Union, when internal and external challenges have been at an all-time high, such as the Ukraine crisis, the election of Trump as US President, Brexit and the migration crisis. The findings of this project are able to point to some new important developments in European foreign policy. Three findings are particularly significant.

(1) First, the empirical investigations in this project uncover a role conflict between EU Member States and EU institutions about the type of leadership that should be exercised at the European level. Based on the findings from the interview survey, this project is able to show that the exercise of different leadership functions is contested. National diplomats from EU Member States primarily accord a representative role for the EU High Representative, while European diplomats working in the EEAS think they should play a key role as a broker and initiator of policy proposals that shape EU foreign policy-making.

(2) Second, this project provides in-depth knowledge of the unique position of the EU High Representative in the post-Lisbon foreign policy governance system. The position is hybrid in nature, as it is double-hatted with the post of Vice-President in the European Commission. It thus combines both intergovernmental and supranational features and constitutes a strategic position in the European diplomatic networks. The project conducted an in-depth case study of the leadership performance of the EUHR during the negotiation process of the EU Global Strategy (2015-2016) to explore the leader-follower nexus in EU foreign policy. This study showed that the current EUHR, Federica Mogherini, in contrast to her predecessor, Catherine Ashton, adopted an expansive leadership style to enhance the legitimacy of the EU at a critical juncture by appealing directly to European publics, thereby seeking to circumvent the constraints of EU Member States.

(3) Third, in response to the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty changes, the findings of this project reveal how new informal leadership practices have emerged among EU Member States. Contrary to the expectation that the formal delegation of leadership to the European level would lead to an increase in top-down Europeanization of foreign policy, this project shows how a new horizontal ‘cross-loading pattern’ of Europeanization has emerged between Member States. In response to deepening internal divisions between EU Member States, a new pattern of informal groupings of ‘like-minded’ countries is emerging where leadership is exercised in novel ways - not necessarily embedded within EU institutions - while still broadly anchored to the EU foreign policy framework. Two case studies were able to point to this emergent pattern of diplomatic practices: (1) the Ukraine crisis, where Germany took on a leadership role, and (2) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where Sweden attempted to lead by example.

These central findings are important contributions to international research on leadership in the European Union specifically, and Foreign Policy Analysis and International Relations more broadly. There is currently much debate among academics, both theoretically and empirically, about how to explain and interpret leadership in context of the fundamental power shifts in the international system. This project contributes to this emergent scholarship with a conceptual refinement of leadership based on role theory grounded in sociological institutionalism. The first major publication from this project attracted considerable scholarly attention as one of the most downloaded articles in that year (2017) in the top-ranked Journal of Common Market Studies.

This project was motivated by research questions derived from a paradox in EU foreign policy between the demand for leadership effectiveness and the constraints of leadership legitimacy. As the work progressed, some new research questions arose that I have begun to examine towards the end of the project. The first new question is focused on the impact that external leadership role expectations have on EU leadership performance. This project has been focused on the internal leadership process in EU foreign policy, but if we want to ultimately assess the effectiveness of EU foreign policy leadership in international politics, we need to incorporate an analysis of external role expectations, especially those relating to United States. This work is planned to be carried out during a research stay at the Centre for European Studies, Harvard University, where I have been accepted as a Visiting Scholar for the spring of 2020. The second new research question addresses the role of social media and the strategic use of public diplomacy to legitimise leadership in EU foreign policy (‘leaderization’), which was triggered from evidence found in the empirical study of the EU Global Strategy. The third new research question that evolved during the course of the project was the role of gender in leadership. While women are still underrepresented in contemporary international diplomacy, it is noteworthy that the last two EU High Representatives have been women. The key question is whether gender is a variable when we consider the leadership styles, behaviour and patterns of performance? This question will be examined as part of a larger European research collaboration on female leadership in the European Union.

The international embeddedness of the project has been strong from the start. I have presented my research at workshops and conferences in Europe and North America, including the ISA, EISA, ECPR, UACES and EUSA. A high level of academic international exchanges has been maintained throughout the project, drawing on my wide international network of scholars, which resulted in a number of co-authored joint articles. In the course of this project, I have also been part of the creation of new networks of scholars with a shared focused on leadership that resulted in a special journal issue in a top-ranked journal (West European Politics) and a forthcoming book on female leadership in the EU.

The dissemination strategy of the project to a wider public audience has been much aided by the fact that the project had its base at the Centre for European Research at Gothenburg University (CERGU) - which facilitated the engagement and communication of research results to a wider public. During the course of this project, I published Working Papers at CERGU with open access and engaged through policy seminars with the general public. More broadly, I have been engaged in media interviews and also participated in the annual policy exchanges that take place in Almedalen.

The publication strategy of this project was focused on submission of articles to top-ranked international peer-reviewed journals. In the field of EU studies, the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCSM) is one of the most prestigious journals and I am very pleased to report that in this project, two articles have been accepted and published there. As is evident from the publication list, all the articles and book-chapters generated from this project have achieved international peer-reviewed publications.