ABSTRACT
In recent years, the European Union's (EU) nature as an international actor and global conflict manager has undergone considerable changes - changes in the foundational objectives, the raison d’être of its external action as such, and changes in the institutional set-up supporting and enabling it. First it was the formal establishment of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) for the EU with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 to mark the beginning of a new phase in the history of European Community (EC)/EU external action. Until then, the EC/EU's external portfolio had been mainly composed of its external trade policy, development cooperation, humanitarian assistance and regional cooperation as well as of loose intergovernmental coordination in the framework of the European Political Cooperation (EPC). The CFSP formalized the newly emergent conviction of the then EU-12 to substantiate the Union's external agenda with new institutional arrangements and, not least, with the establishment of a political union. Pushed by the rapidly changing global circumstances, the EU started to develop and assume a more proactive role on the international scene. In 1999, the inception of the European Security and Defence Policy (now Common Security and Defence Policy, CSDP) then added a security and defence political element to this new external profile of the Union, providing the basis for the EU to develop distinct operational capacities for the management of crises and conflicts in its immediate neighbourhood, the European continent and, ultimately, in the world.
