The Foreign Policy of the EU (3rd ed.) | Chapter 1: The nature of EU foreign policy

we are pleased to welcome you to this presentation of the Third Edition of the book the foreign policy of the European Union published by Bloomsbury academic I am Stephen kirkler Germany professor at University of Louisville in Belgium where I teach the course European foreign policy in various Master programs I'm a professor of European politics at the USA Louvre in new venadev and I'm also a visiting professor at the College of Europe and at cyan sport party the aim of these videos is not to give a comprehensive summary of all the chapters of the book but

rather to draw your attention to some of the key points of each chapter to provide some additional insights and to point to some recent developments which have been triggered or reinforced by the Russian invasion in Ukraine by the changing geopolitical context or by internal developments within the European Union or its member states in this video we focus on one of the main themes of the first chapter of the book and that is the complex nature of you foreign policy because the use foreign policy is not exclusive it's not all-encompassing and we also conceptualize it as

multifaceted multi-methods and multi-level and to explain the nature of you from policy it's important to see that the EU is not a state and this implies that you can only have and develop a foreign policy as far as the member states allow the EU to develop such a foreign policy and member states never intended to transfer all competences regarding foreign policy to the EU because they wanted to keep control over the use foreign policy and they also wanted to keep their own natural foreign policies and this also implies that it's only in a limited number

of policy Fields like trades that the EU indeed has exclusive foreign policy competences and that's also what we explained in several chapters of our book like chapter 4 and 8. and these non-exclusive and non-all-encompassing foreign policy of the U has also made implications for our analysis and evaluation of the use foreign policy because perhaps observers and Scholars and journalists might expect that EU intervenes in all parts of the world or that the EU develops a foreign policy towards all foreign policy Dimensions but that is not what member states wanted and that explains also the limitations

of the use foreign policy it's in that context that understanding the multifaceted nature of EU foreign policy is important indeed the way we conceptualize EU foreign policy in the book is that it is composed of four partially interrelated facets which are also treated in different parts of the EU treaties and in different chapters of the book the four facets of EU foreign policy are the common foreign and security policy the cfsp second the common security and defense policy the csdp third the external action and forth the external dimension of internal policies the first facet the

common foreign and security policy is the main platform for the political and diplomatic dimension of EU foreign policy it's in it's organized in an intergovernmental way which allows member states to keep control over the cfsp also the second facet the common security and defense policy is organized in an intergovernmental way the common security and defense policy is the main platform for launching limited Military and civilian crisis management operations it's based on voluntary contributions by member states and what is important to understand is that the csdp is not about the territorial defense of the European Union

or about large-scale military offensive actions but over the fact that the European Union has a csdp does not mean that the European Union has an army the third facet of EU foreign policy is external action external action encompasses the long-standing external policies such as straight development cooperation sanctions humanitarian Aid enlargement and so on it's in this it's in that facet that the EU has the strongest legal competences that the EU has substantial financial resources and a strong institutional apparatus to prepare and to implement those policies the fourth facet of EU foreign policy is the external

dimension of internal policies nearly all internal policies of the European Union indeed have four policy relevance and have an external dimension the most Salient policy Fields with an external Dimension include for instance energy policy I mean think about the conflict with Russia or the eu's relations with the Gulf States external Environmental Policy think about the climate change Challenge and the eu's ambition to address that challenge and to play a leading role in addressing climate change or the external dimension of migration policies think about the crisis in the Mediterranean or the eu's relation with relations with

Africa what is important to emphasize is that those four different facets of EU Forum policy are or can be complementary and can reinforce each other but on the other hand in some cases they can also contradict or undermine each other it's important to emphasize again that the eu's foreign policy is composed of those four facets cfsp csdp external action and the external dimension of internal policies and Tom already referred to it the EU has two different policy making methods the intergovernmental methods and the community methods and in csap and cfsp we see that the governmental

method is the most important one what does it mean it means that member states keep control over policy making and how do they do that they organize it through the Council of the EU and through the European Council where the member states are represented so they can control policy making and secondly decisions are adopted through unanimity unanimity is required which implies that all member states have to agree the second method is a community method and the community method what does it mean it means first of all that not only the Council of the European Union

but also the commission and European Parliament do play an important role secondly in the Council of the EU decisions are adopted through majority voting and this means that even if one two or three member states don't agree that nevertheless the decision can be adopted and thirdly it also implies that the court of justice has jurisdiction over these policy fields and in the treaties there's a clear difference between the two methods the intergovernmental method and the community methods but it's important to see that in practice for most important policy Fields the EU develops the policy through

the interaction through those two methods of policy making EU foreign policy is not only multifaceted a multi-method but it is also multi-level in nature the multi-level nature of EU foreign policy reflects the interconnectedness of multiple levels of governance including the national level the European level and also a more Global multilateral International level as it is the case in many EU form or in many policy fields of the European Union EU foreign policy is shaped through the interaction between what happens at the national level and at the European level but EU foreign policy is also embedded

within a wider set of multilateral settings including NATO WTO United Nations IMF but also more informal settings like the G7 or the G20 a member states often prefer to conduct their foreign policy within one of those other multilateral settings and not through the EU so in that sense it's important to understand that the EU is not the only and in many cases not the main Forum or venue for member states to conduct their foreign policies on member states might also give priorities to conduct National foreign policies and thus to sideline the EU so by emphasizing

the multi-level nature of EU foreign policy we aim to avoid in this book the pitfall of too much EU centrism in this video we focused on one dimensional of the first chapter of our book The Complex nature of inform policy but we also discuss some other themes for instance the major importance between National foreign policies of the member states differences in terms of power of member states their interests their identity their worldviews because these differences do also shape the ultimate policies that you can develop we also focus on for instance a set of areas of

tensions that continuously can be seen in European foreign policy making for instance the area of tension between Atlantic solidarity and European integration or between the EU as a civilian power or the EU as a potential military power and finally in that first chapter we also explain one of the main conceptualizations that we use in our book and that is the difference between the relational foreign policy and threshold foreign policy in relational foreign policy is mainly focused on shaping the relations between the EU and other countries regions in the world or shaping the relations between other

countries structural foreign policy aims to develop and influence in the long term the rules of the game that are used in relations between all the countries in the world and it can be focused on economic relations political relations judicial relations social relations and as we see in several chapters of our book on paper we might expect that EU has much more capacities to develop an effective structural form policy much more than a relational foreign policy but we see that also structural foreign policy has been much more problematic for the EU as we will discuss mainly

in the chapters 10 and 11 of our book