Introduction

A bird’s eye view of EU external relations appears as a Harlequin’s costume of policies defined according to geography, initiatives delineated in a topical fashion, ad hoc co-ordination (or not) on major international events, commonly defined principles, and so on; all of which stitched together in pursuit of asserting an EU identity on the international scene. In that endeavour, the Union has famously suffered from ‘the capability–expectations gap’: ¹ the discrepancy between the increasing expectations vis à vis the EU within and outside the Union, and its ability to actually agree and engage its limited resources to certain common ends – the ‘Union’ interest in international relations. This perceived inability to meet these expectations can be partially attributed to the fragmented constitutional order underpinning EU external relations: the Member States’ and EU external policies in the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) which all need to interact in a coherent fashion to achieve ‘EU’ external action. ²