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This article offers a comparative assessment of the current roles of the European Union (EU) in the governance of the Global Spaces − the atmosphere, the high seas, the poles, outer space, and cyberspace. It does so from a twofold perspective: first, it compares the EU's capacity to act and roles across the Global Spaces, drawing on actorness and role theory. Second, to contextualize the EU's roles, it contrasts them with those of the United States, China and Russia. The findings show that the EU is still in the process of calibrating its roles in the governance of most of these Global Spaces. It is primarily a norm defender, which distinguishes its external action from the more competitive approaches of other major powers. The EU's recent attempt to become more strategic has, for now, led to a gap between its role conception and performance, largely due to its limited actorness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its increasing importance for European integration, there remains a lack of scholarly attention to the growth of EU external action in originally internal policy areas. This article advances a comprehensive framework for understanding and explaining the emergence of EU external engagement in such areas. It combines insights from two sets of literatures: the EU external relations literature offers useful concepts – particularly 'actorness' – as building blocks for explanatory purposes, while the public policy literature provides relevant insights regarding policy entrepreneurship and agenda-setting. The article contends that EU external engagement results from a favourable interplay between an external 'opportunity' and the EU's 'presence' in a given domain, which is identified and capitalized upon by a set of policy entrepreneurs, who are driven by interest-based and/or ideational motives. To evaluate the salience of the framework, the article applies it across several policy areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]