Reaching out together? A comparison of 4 European Strategies towards the Indo-Pacific region

Recently three European Union (EU) member-states, i.e. France, Germany and the Netherlands, formulated a strategy for the Indo-Pacific. All three countries pushed for an EU strategy as well, which was eventually published in September 2021. The EU Indo-Pacific strategy is part of the EUs aim to increase its strategic autonomy. In this paper, we analyze the EU Indo-Pacific strategy as an instance of EU foreign policy signaling. The main objective is to understand the choices made in the strategy and to assess to what extent the strategy reflects an attempt at signaling by the EU as actor and to what extent this signaling can be considered effective.