"America First," "might makes right," "the liberal international order" – whether deployed by challengers or defenders of multilateralism, narratives shape global governance as much as treaties or institutions do. In a ruptured multilateral system, the EU is being forced to reconsider both its place in the world and its approach across different policy fields. As systemic rivals dismantle multilateral security institutions, the United States under President Trump abandons its multilateral leadership role, and authoritarian actors erode international organisations from within, each of these actors constructs new stories of global governance to legitimate the worlds they are building. No actor has staked more of its identity and influence on the global order now being contested than the EU – and the story it tells, and whether audiences find it convincing, will help determine whether it shapes what comes next or watches from the sidelines.
Against this backdrop, the report asks: what is the current state of the EU's strategic narratives around global governance, and under what conditions do these narratives enable – or undermine – its ability to shape multilateral outcomes? To answer these questions, it takes stock of the EU's strategic narratives across three levels – the system narratives it projects about the international order, the identity narratives that define its role within it, and the policy narratives it deploys within and across governance challenges. The analysis draws on 15 ENSURED case studies spanning trade, taxation, climate, health, human rights, migration, and digitalisation policy, a narrative analysis of 64 EU documents, and 12 interviews with ENSURED researchers conducted in 2026.
Across the policy areas, the EU's identity narrative stays remarkably stable throughout, but its system narrative fragments – oscillating between committed multilateralism in human rights, cyberspace, and AI, where existing frameworks are treated as legitimate and worth defending; constrained multilateralism in climate, health, and migration, where the system is narrated as under strain and in need of reform; and instrumental multilateralism in trade, taxation, and cryptocurrency, where multilateral action becomes conditional on the setting and the interests at stake. At the policy level, meanwhile, narratives across trade, taxation, climate, health, and crypto have drifted towards competitiveness, strategic autonomy, and conditionality, with human rights the most resistant to change. The upshot is that the EU's narratives are most aligned – and most credible – in human rights, cyberspace, and AI; most fragmented in climate, health, and migration, where its multilateral identity sits uncomfortably alongside geopolitical policy narratives; and strained in trade and taxation, where the EU's story changes depending on where it is speaking.
From here, a central argument emerges: while the EU has a consistent narrative about who it is, this identity is increasingly at odds with both the system it describes and the policy stories it deploys. The result is a set of tensions at the heart of EU strategic communications: between the identity it projects and the fragmented world it describes, between what it says and what it is seen to do, and between the story it tells in one room and the one it tells in another.
This also hits on a broader communications point: the EU’s story was written for a more cooperative world.
Evaluating EU Narratives
The report's evaluation of these narratives – drawing on the qualities of coherence, credibility, and context-sensitivity identified in the strategic-narratives literature – yields four central reflections:
- The EU's consistent identity is an asset, but it masks growing fragmentation across the narrative levels. Across seven very different policy domains, the EU returns to the same core claims about who it is, giving audiences a recognisable baseline and a degree of narrative resilience when others' communications are reactive and unpredictable. But while its identity holds steady, its account of the world does not: its system narrative is fragmented, oscillating between committed multilateralism in human rights and digitalisation, constrained multilateralism in climate and health, and instrumental multilateralism in trade and taxation – without an overarching account that integrates them.
- EU policy narratives are progressively drifting away from its system and identity narratives. Across several domains, policy narratives have moved away from solidarity, transformation, and collective ambition and moved towards competitiveness, feasibility, and strategic autonomy. This leaves the EU implying multiple things at once – that it leads by example and that it puts European competitiveness above all else – which are difficult to hold together convincingly without being honest about the tension.
- The EU adapts its communications to specific contexts, but lacks a meta-narrative to explain it. Adjusting the story to different governance arenas can be a communicative strength; telling contradictory stories about the same issue is a credibility problem. The EU currently does both, and without a meta-narrative to explain the former, audiences cannot easily distinguish it from the latter.
- The perceived 'say-do' gap threatens EU narrative credibility and cannot be solved by communications alone. When EU communications and perceived actions diverge, the narrative becomes less believable and invites counter-narratives that are hard to rebut because they contain a kernel of truth. These tensions stem from policy choices and a changing global order, and no communications strategy can resolve them on its own.
Yet better strategic narratives alone cannot solve what is ultimately a policy problem. The EU regularly faces situations in which there is no multilateral option available, and no narrative can change that. What narratives can do (but what the EU's current approach often fails to do) is stop circling around these constraints and acknowledge them openly. The report argues that this requires a move towards 'narrative realism': a policy story that can survive contact with reality, treats audiences as participants in a shared world, allows for contradiction because political life is contradictory, and names losses because trade-offs that cannot be spoken cannot be made legitimate. Applied to the EU's strategic communications, adopting a form of narrative realism would reduce the credibility costs generated by the say-do gap and provide a more flexible framework for a world in geopolitical rupture.
A narrative built on the claim that the EU always acts multilaterally is fragile, since every departure from that claim is a failure; a narrative built on honest acknowledgement of constraints is much harder to destabilise.
The good news is that the EU has a lot to work with: a clear sense of its values and where it comes from, its policy achievements, and a track record of showing up for multilateral institutions when others have walked away. That story is worth telling, but it needs to be told honestly – by acknowledging constraints, explaining choices, and being willing to name the pain points. That task may be harder than drafting a more compelling communications strategy, but it is also the best hope for building credible EU narratives that can hold water in today's disordered world.
Citation Recommendation: Pridmore, Amanda. 2026. "The Story of Global Governance: EU Strategic Narratives in an Age of Rupture." ENSURED Research Report, no. 30 (July): 1-35. https://www.ensuredeurope.eu.
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