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Samarkhan S.A., Serikova R.E.
Supervisor - G. Zh. Kenzhlina
The EU is a unique international organization as compared to others in terms of complexity, wide range of responsibility and supranationality. The EU’s soft power is related with aid, trade, investment and expertise whereas the concept of the rule of law based on respect for human rights and international treaties plays a significant role. Also, at present, the EU has begun to use its cyber power to reduce security in the world.
Soft Power
There are serious economic reasons allowing speaking on soft power of the European Union. Such international statistical indicators as population size, territory area, annual GDP per capita, economic growth rates, volume of foreign trade, foreign trade turnover and share in world trade indicate that the European Union possesses powerful economic foundation and it is the biggest participant of international trade. On the whole the countries of the European Union cover 32 per cent of world trade.
Cultural and political influence of the European Union that has global nature is an important element of soft power. Today the conception European values has become quite broad. An important tool of cultural and intellectual leadership of the European Union has become a successful EU integration experience. Now European Union can be called global intellectual center for many countries, especially those that have an interest in integration projects.
The European Union is the largest and influential player in the field of world politics. It carries out its political activities in the framework of the mechanism of the Common Foreign Policy and Security Policy, incorporated into the structure of the working bodies of the European Union. The political influence of the European Union allows adjusting the long-term changes in international development. It is through this resource that the European Union can influence political processes taking place in geographically proximate or remote regions.
European Union efficiently uses in international activities its organizational resource that is determined by the participation of the European Union in a number of multilateral world and regional organizations, regimes, dialogues, forums, etc. The use of organizational resource is much more consistent with the objectives of EU foreign policy than the power resource used by the United States. This is another important difference of the strategy of soft leadership characteristic to the European Union.
Cyber Power
The compulsory form of cyber power is the most pertinent to the traditional-realist understanding of national power. Just as imposing economic sanctions on Iranian or Korean entities or individuals, the EU may and should be able to operate in the realm of the cyber domain by fighting back to protect data security in the case of cyber crime or cyber espionage, especially if such an attack is directed at EU institutions. In this respect, the already established Computer Emergency Response Team for European Institutions should become a key defensive-offensive tool in future EU cyber security strategy.
Institutional cyber power rests on indirect control of one actor’s ‘manoeuvring field’ through third party formal and informal institutions. This part of the paper will address two elementary avenues for an institution such as the EU to shape its institutional component of cyber power: international cooperation and facilitation of member states’ approaches to cyber security threats. As regards US and EU cooperation, it has been developed under the general framework of the trans-Atlantic cooperation in cyber security that allows the creation of the concurrence.
Structural cyber-power is best understood as one that allows a particular actor to uphold the structures of power relations in which all actors are positioned and which in turn permit or constrain their actions. In fact, EU documents increasingly emphasize the potential for individuals and public/private partnership especially in the fight against cyber crime. EUROPOL for that matter is planning to get net users directly involved in catching cyber crime gangs. This would supposedly empower EU citizens not only to look out for themselves but also to report criminal activity.
Productive forms of cyber-power. This form of cyber-power is manifested by identifying certain actors as threats to national security, which in turn allows states to treat them as legitimate targets. Let us take a look at the ENISA approach to this issue. In one of its latest publications, Cyber Security: future challenges and opportunities, the author of this paper that the productive power of the EU in the field of cyber security seems to be driving the conceptualization of security towards its human aspects and a social constructivist approach.
In conclusion, you can see that the soft power of the EU is developing in different areas to achieve leadership, as well as developing its cyber-power for the same task. The discussion of the EU's cyber-power can contribute to the discussion about EU's power in world politics more generally. Power is multifaceted and the different facets come with strengths and weaknesses that are context and issue dependent.