The European Union (EU) poses quite profound questions for scholars and students of the social and political sciences. This benchmark Handbook is designed to provide an authoritative state-of-the art guide to the scope of the field suitable for both established scholars and students of the EU; reflect and contribute to the debates about the nature of the field of EU studies and EU politics in particular; and explore in detail the development of the many approaches to the study of EU politics. Divided into four sections, the Handbook focuses on theorizing European integration; the EU as polity; politics and policy making in the EU; and the EU and the international system.

European Foreign Policy

European foreign policy

Introduction

Although the notion of a ‘European Foreign Policy’ (EFP) is currently an undisputed part of the study of European Union (EU) politics, it is a relatively recent addition to the disciplinary vocabulary of this field of research. Indeed, as recently as in the 1998 publication of the exhaustive Encyclopedia of the European Union, it is not even included as a subject-matter deserving to be defined or discussed by itself (Dinan 1998). The assumption underlying this omission is perhaps that since the phenomenon was presumed not to exist at that time, it did not merit attention as a topic or concept. This may or may not have been a credible stance to take a decade or so ago, even though one ...

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