The EU and the Peaceful Settlement of Cyber Disputes: The Goals, Tools and Normative Framework of EU Cyber Policy

In 2022, the Council of Foreign Ministers commissioned Josep Borrell, the European Union ’s (EU ’s) foreign affairs representative, and the European Commission to bring together the bloc ’s various strands of foreign, security, and defence policy in order ‘to ensure complementarity and coherence of external digital policy initiatives’. Indeed, the challenge of an EU cyber foreign and security policy lies in effectively assembling and streamlining the numerous EU and Member States’ initiatives and legal and policy instruments. The focus of our investigation in this chapter is the question of how the EU ’s approach to cyber policy is normatively framed and practically implemented internally and externally and how this contributes to the peaceful settlement of disputes. In particular the external implementation of the EU ’s cyber policies produces a cyber ‘Brussels Effect’.