ABSTRACT
Depicting how the EU ‘acts’ in the world is not necessarily a straightforward task for any discipline any more, not least for legal scholars. As a descriptive and normative evaluation, it involves many layers of enquiry, but also assumptions and dichotomies that require evaluation. An elementary layer might be said to be the relationship between internal and external rule-making processes through law.1 Yet even such an elementary layer is not straightforward. It is also ostensibly a multidirectional enquiry, as to its role ‘inwards’ and its role ‘outwards’. Such an enquiry relates to what the EU wants to do externally and how it reflects that internally in practices, processes and rule-making – for example, how the EU acts in the world is the normative dimension, whether the EU’s values are adequate internally,2 how it practises good global governance externally,3 how consistent the EU is between the internal and external,4 and how it integrates external
1 The empirical work in this chapter is developed further in Elaine Fahey, ‘Joining the dots: external norms, AFSJ directives and the EU's role in the global legal order’ (2016), 41 ELR 105.
