Theories of the Making of European Union Foreign Policy (ePub)

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, London School of Economics (Department of International Relations), language: English, abstract: In spite of the growing empirical significance of the European Union (EU) as a 'soft power', scholars of International Relations (IR) have found it difficult to identify a single theoretical framework to explain the making of European Foreign Policy (EFP). The reasons for this apparent failure of rigorous theory-building may be twofold. On the one hand, there is still much debate about what the EU - the ontological object of inquiry - actually is. On the other hand, many authors have taken a self-critical attitude towards their own discipline, emphasising that there is still a multiplicity of convictions as to how we can best theorise EFP.

Though detailed analyses of the specific pattern of the EU's external relations have indeed been marginalised for a long time, it seems plausible to trace this lack of theoretical coherence back to the nature of EFP itself. It is often argued that the EU is a political system 'sui generis', a complex structure that is neither a state nor a non-state actor, and neither a conventional international organization nor an international regime. In a similar vein, some observers assert that the EU might most suitably be characterised as a hybrid political sphere that does not easily lend itself to classical Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA).

In fact, the major IR perspectives on EU foreign policy-making - neorealist, neoliberal and constructivist - appear to be largely incompatible in this respect. Within each framework, certain claims are made which effectively rule out or downgrade the validity and reliability of key premises in rival approaches. Therefore, the central question posed in this essay is: Which theory best explains the making of EU foreign policy? And if there is no single theoretical paradigm, might there be any potential for an analytical synthesis in order to understand the particular features of EFP more appropriately?

To answer these questions, I will first describe the main views on the development of EFP represented by the above-mentioned approaches within the broader context of theorising European integration. Secondly, I will outline in how far the EU's peculiar nature as a system of multi-level decision-making can be regarded as a core empirical challenge to the concepts of conventional FPA. I will conclude that different theoretical schemes ought to be applied to different issue areas of foreign policy-making in a more selective manner if the complex processes of EFP are to be fully understood.