The EUHealthGov network is delighted to welcome Dr Ertila Druga on Thursday 5 November 2026 at 2pm GMT / 15:00 CEST for a work-in-progress presentation
Legitimating health as foreign policy: European global health strategies, 2006–2025
Eight European governments and the European Union have adopted dedicated global health strategies that position health as a foreign policy concern alongside public health and development cooperation. Existing scholarship has examined such strategies primarily as instruments of global health governance or expressions of national interest, but we know little about how European governments have sought to legitimise health as a foreign policy issue across time. This study examines nine current and five earlier strategies adopted between 2006 and 2025, asking how they justify this role. Using an interpretive analysis of the reasons they advance, the instruments they prioritise, and the populations they position as objects of concern, Druga identifies both convergence and divergence across generations. References to global health as a global public good become more prominent, yet the normative frames organising individual strategies remain distinct. Instrument choices show greater continuity, with most governments retaining their established policy tools, while legal references to the right to health vary primarily across countries rather than generations. Druga discusses the implications of these patterns for European health diplomacy.
Dr Ertila Druga is a political scientist who studies how global and domestic politics meet in national health policy. Her doctoral research at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), University of Bremen, Germany examined the ideational influence of international organisations, including the World Bank, on the transformation of post-communist health-care systems in Central and Eastern Europe. She has since extended this focus on the interdependence of international and national factors to new research areas, including the politics of pandemic preparedness negotiations, the governance of AI, global health strategies in Europe, and nursing policy and reform in Germany.
EUHealthGov is a research network, funded by the University Association for Contemporary Studies (UACES) and the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, focused on the governance of health in the European Union. This event is part of its quarterly online seminar series, which provides a forum for discussion of a range of EU health governance topics, presented in roundtables, in-conversation sessions, work-in-progress seminars, practitioner perspectives and other formats.
The event will last 60 minutes, including a Q&A session, and will be chaired by Dr Mary Guy (Trinity College Dublin). It will take place on Microsoft Teams, you can register via this link.