Wide-awake diplomacy: reconstructing the common foreign and security policy of the European Union

Abstract

The dismal history of European foreign policy co-operation has traditionally been told by realists and intergovernmentalists. Hence, a preliminary introduction of constructivism to the study of political co-operation history leads to highly unorthodox conclusions. Adopting a sociological vocabulary for the difficult task of first order theory, constructivism points to a symbolic content in European political cooperation that is not captured by traditional statist approaches and which, crucially, is wholly constitutive of co-operation. Moreover, constructivism supplies dubious and controversially optimistic conclusions to the integration within present-day common foreign and security policy.