Christopher Hill - The Actors in Europes Foreign Policy

This book is the successor to National Foreign Policies and European Political Cooperation,published by George Allen and Unwin for the Royal Institute of InternationalAffairs in 1983. The present volume advances the themes explored in the first ina number of significant respects. Unusually, it also draws on a high proportion ofthe same participants as in 1983, thus making possible a high degree of continuityand comparability.

National Foreign Policies met a clear need, being the first comparative study ofEuropean foreign policies which was also the product of a multinational group ofscholars from all the EC states. It sold out its print run and was thereafter inpersistent demand from students and observers of European affairs. It representeda particular perspective on European foreign policy which was otherwise barelyrepresented in the literatureand is still thin on the ground. This is far frombeing an ideological positionthe contributors disagree widely amongst themselveson, for example, the desired future path for the European Union. It is, rather, acorrective to the general tendency to discuss European Political Cooperation(EPC), and from 1993 the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) largelyin terms of the common positions and joint actions which they are supposed tohave produced, with the states left on the margins of the analysis. This tendencyis more common these days than the opposite, crassly realist mistake of assumingthat Europes international presence amounts to little more than the sum of thenational interests of the EUs two or three major states. Rather, the premise ofboth this volume and that of 1983 was that this important and fascinating newdevelopment in international diplomacy can only be understood properly interms of the interplay between the attempts at collective action on the one handand the national foreign policies which continue vigorously, on the other.

Accordingly, from the early 1990s I have had it in mind to produce a sequel toNational Foreign Policies which would do more than simply change dates and add apage or two of contemporary history to each chapter. That I was able to do wasthanks to the hospitality and resources of the European University Institute atSan Domenico di Fiesole near Florence, where I was privileged to spend a sabbaticalyear. At the end of that time, in July 1993, the European Policy Unit of theInstitute hosted an expert conference on the theme of The Community, the Member States and Foreign Policy: Coming Together or Drifting Apart?. Thetwin aims of the conference were (i) to examine whether or not EPC hadfundamentally changed in character over the previous decade, in particular as aresult of the upheavals of 198993; and (ii) to analyse the interaction betweenthe various participants in EPC, both states and Community institutions.