“NATIONAL INTEREST” CONCEPT IN EUROPEAN CONTEXT
“NATIONAL INTEREST” CONCEPT IN EUROPEAN CONTEXT

Summary/Abstract: The present study is meant not only to contribute to fathoming the understanding of the mechanisms lying beyond European actors’ behavior on the regional and international arena, but also to make some conceptual clarifications. Within this article, the concept of “national interest” is approached from the perspective of International Relations and the manner in which this concept is understood and utilized at European level is examined. The first part of this paperwork analyses from a theoretical point of view the concept mentioned above, relying on the visions of different International Relations schools on it. The second section is meant to study the way in which this concept is applied at European level. In this sense, there are considered not only the EU official documents, but also EU’s role on the international arena, with the purpose to identify the logic behind a certain action of the EU or of its Member States, to find if they act accordingly to the idea of “common good”, at the European level, or to that of their own interests. This study ends with a research on the way in which Romania’s national interests have been formulated before and after its adhesion to the EU, the objective of this demarche consisting in demonstrating the two-way relation between national interests and the common ones, defined by the European official documents.

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