Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the European Union's (EU) Member States have embarked on a unique project in seeking to create a collective foreign, security and defence policy. This collective foreign policy endeavour has been pursued whilst national foreign policies themselves have evolved. EU foreign policy and Member State foreign policy therefore operate in a symbiotic but uneasy relationship. Having established, and on occasion taken for granted, the actorness and uniqueness of the EU in foreign policy terms, recent studies have also explored the unique nature of power as represented, and utilised, by the EU. The ambiguous nature of EU power complicates the ongoing vertical tensions between Member States determined to keep a firm hold over their individual foreign policies, the force exerted by EU institutions and the horizontal clashes spilling out into key external policies.