ABSTRACT
The European Union’s (EU) foundational Treaties assign various of its institutions a coordination role in its external relations governance system. Different elements of its foreign policy are administered in the Council of the EU, the Commission and, since the Lisbon Treaty, the European External Action Service (EEAS). However, the EU Treaties remain largely silent on how these actors’ activities are meant to be coordinated, resulting in the establishment of mostly informal frameworks for institutional cooperation. This has contributed to a situation in which each actor vies to safeguard its institutional influence over others. While Treaty revisions have aimed to resolve such issues through the formalisation of a foreign policy bureaucracy, many organisational questions have been left unanswered. This chapter explores how the current weakness of informal coordination frameworks in the EU’s external relations governance system can ultimately be attributed to a repeated disruption of established mechanisms for (informal) policy coordination. These continuous alterations are in themselves a result of attempts to formalise the governance of the EU’s external relations regime. The chapter unearths these dynamics through a consideration of the effects of weak policy coordination in the EU’s ties with third actors after the Lisbon Treaty.
