The EU in the views of Korean 'elites': new findings and some lessons

Abstract

The last two decades have seen most significant developments, which led to incremental upgrading of the Korea-EU bilateral relationship, including the adoption by the European Commission in 1993 of a strategy paper toward Korea, the presidency role played by Korea in the third Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in 2000 and the launch and entering into force of the bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) in 2007 and 2011, respectively, as well as the upgrading of the relationship to a strategic partnership in 2010. The imagery of the EU, however, does not seem to have improved substantially as these series of positive developments in bilateral relationship might suggest, as manifested in a few recent studies conducted on the EU perception in Asia and Korea. As an extension of the two previous interviews of Korean elites carried out in 2006 and 2009, a new round of elite interviews has been conducted to find out how the perception of the EU in the mindset of Korean elites has changed over the past years. The main findings of this paper are as follows. First, among a number of changes found in the comparative analysis of the three interviews, the bilateral FTA that appeared at the top as an immediate image of the EU in the two previous interviews lost its place substantially. Instead, the Eurozone crisis has become one of most influential EU images in the mid of Korean elites. Second, the global actorness of the EU has become substantively weakened in the eyes of the Korean elites over the past few years. As this was most strongly pronounced in the group of media representatives, the authors expect it to have lasting impacts on the images of the EU in the wider Korean public.