ABSTRACT
The European Neighbourhood Policy pursues objectives that require action through policies based on the whole catalogue of EU exclusive and shared competences, including competences still largely retained by the Member States: trade, customs, migration, aviation, energy, CFSP, defence, police and judicial cooperation, taxation and so on. A core organizing concept underlying the ENP is that it seeks to draw together norms, actors and instruments within all of these fields towards common objectives: security, stability and prosperity. This has been defined as third level coherence, or establishing positive synergy between various external policies of the Union broadly defined. That policy objective is to be carried by a Union composed of legally distinct spheres of authority: The Union has been assigned a number of external goals to pursue (Art 21.2 TEU) and values to uphold (Art 3 TEU). However, it shares those objectives and values with its Member States, and has only been conferred a limited catalogue of competences to bring them to fruition (Art 5.2 TEU). The consequence is that a coherent ENP in the policy sense is inevitably dependent on the functioning of legal rules that organize that reality of common objectives and divided competences: EU external relations law. The rationale behind this and the fourth chapter is then one of legal coherence affecting policy coherence at those different levels. This chapter thus deploys the following argument within the integration–law–policy trichotomy analyzed in Chapter 1: If principles organizing EU–Member State action are contradictory to each other, insufficiently clear in what their respective functions are, or biased towards a particular mode of integration, this will negatively influence the ability of the institutions and Member States to establish interconnections between different sub-policies towards an over-arching objective shared by the different spheres of legal authority.
