The paper provides an analysis of the EU strategic partnershipson the basis of a review of EU documents, official and informal, as well as a certain amount of interviews with European officials.It demonstrates that strategic partnerships are not so strategic when looked at up-close for a variety of reasons, including that 1) not every partner is equally strategic; 2) the EU is not cooperating with its partners on most truly strategic issues; 3) the strategic partnership has no structural or institutional impact on the relationship; 4) or, finally, the EU itself is simply not considered as a strategic partner in many cases.

The paper concludes that the recent revival of debates on strategic partnerships is a positive step forward and that a strict implementation of the important conclusions of the 2010 September European Council is now awaited. Overall, this paper recommends reflecting on the EU’s global interests and priorities in search of the EU’s grand strategy. True strategic partnerships, as this paper brands them, could then be regarded as (sub-)strategies of the EU vis-à-vis great and emerging powers. In addition to this general recommendation, this paper makes several recommendations for the EU and itsMemberStatesto turn the existing strategic partnerships into true strategic partnerships.