8 - Unfinished business: coherence and the EU's global ambitions

Summary

European foreign policy cooperation has expanded considerably since the first tentative steps made under EPC in the early 1970s. Compared to the situation then, the CFSP today involves a far more sophisticated institutional structure and has produced a greater variety of complex common foreign policy actions. Moreover, compared to other regional organizations, such as the Organization of American States or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the EU's progressive and determined efforts to cooperate in foreign policy are highly unique. Despite these positive results, however, many observers and EU officials remain dissatisfied with the CFSP's procedural elements and its substantive output. We can describe these limitations as part of the “unfinished business” of the Maastricht era, where certain issues were raised but ultimately sidestepped owing to both general political differences and more specific questions about institutional architecture. These issues have intensified the pressures for institutional change since the late 1990s and deserve some attention here, given the EU's own growing ambitions and the major challenges faced by the CFSP since its implementation.

This chapter explores these difficult institutional questions, focusing in particular on the EU's goal to make its external relations functions more coherent. Improving the effectiveness and coherence of the EU's external capabilities was a key motivation behind the TEU and its single institutional framework. As we saw in the previous chapter, substantive coherence in the CFSP has clearly improved compared to EPC.