With the aim of methodological reflection, this article analyses the three approaches (realist, constructivist and relational) in international relations theory most commonly employed to study foreign policy and the global influence of the European Union. Pivotal notions such as ‘agency’, ‘identity’, ‘norms’, ‘system’ and ‘practice’ provide us with navigation points between these approaches, enabling us to achieve a clearer impression of the many different meanings these terms can contain. These meanings, in their turn, fix the direction, limitations and scope of any concrete theoretic analysis. This article is meant to draw particular attention to Bourdieuvian practice theor y and Alexander Bogdanov’s tektology as two differing variants of relationism, with a view to overcoming certain deficiencies in application to the studies of the EU of methodological individualism, as employed in more ‘traditional’ theories. To illustrate the relationalist way of theorising when dealing with the paradoxes of the EU external policies and global role, a follow-up interpretation, based on tektology, is given in conclusion to the resilience turn in the EU global strategy.