European Union Foreign Policy and the Political Development of the Union

Recent years have shown that dysfunctional outcomes still occur regularly in European Union (EU) foreign policy, despite various institutional changes concerning the governance of the Union of the past decades, and despite the various functional pressures with which the EU has been faced. The way in which EU has dealt with the myriad external crises, it will be argued, provides a context in which approaches to the study of the EU’s foreign policy should begin both to combine internal and external variables and to be more neutral in terms of their hypotheses concerning the development of EU foreign policy. It proposed that the literature on American Political Development (APD) provides a useful first cut in achieving this.