ABSTRACT
The title of this book, European External Action, posits an engagement with the EU’s active role beyond its borders. What I deliver here is of course only a small piece of a much larger puzzle of the diversity of the EU’s wide and varied interactions with ‘others’. As those interactions are highly heterogeneous and diversified, so is the EU as an actor itself highly heterogeneous and diversified – internally, but even more so externally. This is the case to an even greater extent regarding external perceptions of the EU. I have described the EEAS here as a heterogeneous and composite institution; the same in fact also applies to the EU as a whole. The EU covers (almost) all policy fields, yet it is not a state. It is a bureaucracy, but not just that. It also has independent agency – both internally and externally. Yet it is always a composite of different institutions and individuals with different ideological and national backgrounds. Unlike a state government, usually constituted by one party or a coalition of parties with similar positions of the political spectrum, an ideological and national balance/diversity is inscribed in the EU’s structure. It is by nature heterogeneous and composite – and the building of collective agency is more complicated than in more streamlined, national, contexts. With respect to the EU’s international role, the EEAS was put in place as the key means for implementing EU external relations. In addition to its own heterogeneous and composite nature, the EEAS operates in an even more heterogeneous environment, that of a two-step diplomacy, i.e. it has to find a common position with EU member states first and then enter into interactions with external partners (see Chapter 1).
