This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This cutting-edge book explores the practices and socialization of the everyday foreign policy making in the European Union (EU), focusing on the individuals who shape and implement the Common Foreign and Security Policy despite a growing dissension among member states.

This volume brings together senior practitioners and academic specialists to consider how the EU’s new foreign policy has been evolving and how the various actors are maintaining the holistic approach intended by the draftsmen of the 2009 Lisbon Treaty.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the policy-making processes of EU strategies in foreign and security policy and external action. It uses the European Security Strategy and the EU Global Strategy to assess their policy-making dynamics both before and after the Lisbon Treaty. Inter-institutional relations in strategy-making are put into the context of current debates in European integration, questioning the assumption that the EU is a body increasingly ruled by intergovernmentalism - as reflected by the new intergovernmentalism literature. The book also provides a categorisation of EU strategies and considers them as policy-inspiration documents, acting as frameworks for policy-making. This reading of strategies lies behind the analysis of the policy-making processes of the ESS and the EUGS, unpacked into four phases: agenda-setting, policy formulation, policy output and implementation. By looking at the shifting policy-making dynamics from foreign and security policy to external action, the author sheds light on the current shape of EU integration.

The emergence of a common security and foreign policy has been one of the most contentious issues accompanying the integration of the European Union. In this book, Michael Smith examines the specific ways foreign policy cooperation has been institutionalized in the EU, the way institutional development affects cooperative outcomes in foreign policy, and how those outcomes lead to new institutional reforms. Smith explains the evolution and performance of the institutional procedures of the EU using a unique analytical framework, supported by extensive empirical evidence drawn from interviews, case studies, official documents and secondary sources. His perceptive and well-informed analysis covers the entire history of EU foreign policy cooperation, from its origins in the late 1960s up to the start of the 2003 constitutional convention. Demonstrating the importance and extent of EU foreign/security policy, the book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and policy-makers.

In times of rapid change and unpredictability the European Union’s role in the world is sorely tested. How successfully the EU meets challenges such as war, terrorism and climate change, and how effectively the Union taps into opportunities like mobility and technological progress depends to a great extent on the ability of the EU’s institutions and member states to adopt and implement a comprehensive and integrated approach to external action. This Research Handbook examines the law, policy and practice of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, including the Common Security and Defence, and gauges its interactions with the other external policies of the Union (including trade, development, energy), as well as the evolving political and economic challenges that face the European Union.

A topical study that explores the EU's record as a global actor since the creation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy in 1993. The editors considers whether the EU can become a more credible, reliable and unitary global actor.

"Explores European foreign policy and the degree of European Union success in proposing itself as a valid international actor, drawing from the expertise of scholars and practitioners in many disciplines. Addresses issues past and present, theoretical and practice-oriented, and country- and region-specific"-- Provided by publisher.