The European Union (EU) has developed a series of ‘strategic partnerships’ with a range of great power states. These partnerships reflect the emergence of an actor that seeks to establish foreign policy goals with an attendant institutional architecture and political commitment. This paper examines two of these partnerships with the United States and China to illustrate the manner in which the EU has constructed a collective identity for itself via discursive association with great power states, while claiming a normative character as an actor of a different kind, with the ability to act strategically with great power states via temporal and ethical forms of social distancing from these same actors. This paper consults recent survey research and policy developments to assess the success of these EU discursive strategies. It is concluded that these partnerships play a somewhat useful role in establishing the EU as an actor of global significance, whilst the EU is less successful in its inherent claims of normative superiority.