ABSTRACT
One of the most striking and controversial aspects of European integration is the way in which the European Union (EU) has come to have its own external policies. In other words, in some policy issues it is the EU itself, rather than its member states, which is responsible for engaging with third countries and deciding their relationship to the member states as a collective. This is striking because it is without parallel in contemporary global politics: although there are powerful global institutions such as the WTO, they cannot by definition have an external policy while we still cannot be sure there are lifeforms elsewhere than on this planet. Other regional groupings, such as ASEAN, do have external policies of a kind, but they cannot match the EU for its breadth and depth of competence in this regard. This role for the EU is controversial because it can pose a threat to member state sovereignty in one of its core characteristics, namely the ability of a state to determine how it engages with the outside world.
