To what extent can the EU be conceived as a global security actor and which are the perceptions of foreign societies about this issue? The basic aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of the EU as a global security actor through a large-scale multi-source study based on the use of advanced computational social science approaches. There is a common perception that the EU is an economic giant, but a political dwarf and a military worm. In line with this argument, the EU economic power should have been diminished after the outburst of the economic crisis in 2009 affecting as well its political, security and military presence in world politics. Drawing on a vast amount of text data from a rich variety of sources and exploiting a wealth of research instruments stemming from computational social science methods (more specifically, automatic content analysis and sentiment techniques), I will try in this study to test the validity of the above-mentioned argument by identifying and examining the external perceptions of the EU as a global security actor. Namely, I will attempt to recognize the dominant beliefs and the correlated discourse the citizens in foreign countries (like the USA, Russia and China) have constructed with regard to the EU as a global security actor. To do so, I will create a large event database capturing events that happened in the timespan of the last ten years and which are related to the phenomenon under study. All entities (people, organizations and locations) involved in these events as also as the sentiments and emotions expressed will also be captured and coded in a knowledge network facilitating the exploration of the external perceptions regarding the EU as a global security actor.
