The common foreign and security policy: the EU as a global actor

This chapter discusses the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy and its issues. It describes the historical evolution of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and reviews the theoretical discussions of CFSP. The chapter also reviews some of the future challenges for EU global action. The Lisbon treaty carried out an institutional overhaul of CFSP in order to achieve higher degrees of consistency and coherence in the EU’s presence on the international stage. The Single European Act institutionalized European Political Cooperation and strengthened political cooperation by requiring consistency between external and internal policies marking the decay of the economics/politics dichotomy. As the CFSP developes researchers identified a process of convergence of national foreign policies in which EU membership affected the way member countries interacted with third countries.