EU Trade Policy: Strategic, Coherent and Effective?

In its 2014 "Strategic Agenda for the Union in Times of Change", the European Council agreed that one area in which the Union 'definitely promises maximised EU clout in global affairs is trade'. But how and under what conditions can the EU maximise its clout in external trade relations? This paper posits and develops a number of hypotheses - derived from the literature - about the relationship between coherence and effectiveness that are then tested empirically in EU external trade relations. The project draws from Gebhard's 4-part typology of coherence and tests the hypotheses with evidence collected and analysed across justified case studies and with innovative and multi-disciplinary methods – such as new and big-data quantitative informatics approaches in Natural Language Processing. This multi-disciplinary empirical approach promises significant new insights for analysing and understanding the causes and effects of Gebhardian incoherence and the conditions under which different types of incoherence reduce effectiveness in EU external trade policy.