Taking Stock of the “Common” in the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy

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This chapter takes stock of “the common” in the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Doing so, the chapter analyses the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) both in terms of institutions and substantive policies. Showing how European Union (EU) foreign policies after the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty have partially been crafted without the necessary institutional consolidation, it sheds light on the many policy challenges that EU diplomacy is confronted with. Cases that this chapter analyses by way of illustration are policies in reaction to the so-called “Arab Spring” and the transnational war in Syria, the EU’s foreign policy performance at the Iran nuclear talks, and the impact of the “Ukraine crisis” on both the EU’s foreign policy manoeuvrability and the perception thereof in other parts of the world. Likewise, the 2015 refugee crisis has become a stress test for common foreign policy responses, and will therefore be assessed in its impact on the perception of EU foreign policy. Finally, the chapter also touches upon the Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and its intricate interplay between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) structures and EU autonomous defence instruments. The European Union’s credibility as a foreign policy actor, it will be argued, hinges on its ability to both formulate common strategies and policies internally, and to hold such policies up in the face of third parties in order to see such European foreign policies implemented beyond declaratory rhetoric.