Equal Partnership or EU-Led Norm Diffusion? : The EU’s CRM Partnerships with the DRC and Zambia

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how the EU uses the discourse of equal partnership to legitimise its critical raw materials (CRM) partnerships with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia, and what kind of partnership model that discourse constructs. Using a structuring qualitative content analysis (QCA) informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study analyses four foundational policy documents published in October 2023: the EU–Zambia Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the EU–DRC MoU, the Lobito Corridor MoU, and European Commission press release IP/23/5303. Drawing on theories of discursive legitimation, equal partnership, and cooperative and coercive norm diffusion, the analysis examines how the EU discursively legitimises these partnerships and whether they are constructed as relationships in which norms, standards, and values are shared and co-defined with the partner countries, or as relationships in which the EU largely sets the normative terms. The central finding is that the discourse of equal partnership does not conceal the asymmetry of the partnerships but constitutes and legitimises it. Where present, partner agency is genuine in formal terms, but operates primarily at the procedural level, through instruments such as joint roadmaps and working groups, while the EU retains control over the substantive terms of cooperation, including the strategic frameworks in which the partnerships are embedded, the scope of what counts as a critical raw material, and the standards the partnerships must meet. The discourse of equal partnership is therefore not in tension with this asymmetric model. Rather, it is the means through which the EU constructs and presents that model as a legitimate partnership.