Conclusion

Abstract

This book set out to analyse the interactions between trade policy and foreign and security policy in EU external action as a nexus of practices. For want of a genuinely ‘common’ foreign and security policy, the EU has often had to resort to trade policy as a vehicle to pursue its foreign and security policy interests and to construct itself as a foreign and security policy actor in its own right. The concurrent use of the CCP as an instrument in the pursuit of both trade policy as well as foreign and security policy interests makes that the two policies are placed in an interconnected relationship with each other. Starting from the observation that EU trade policy and EU foreign and security policy function differently, the argument was made that each policy is structured alongside distinctive practices. Distilling various definitions of practices, this book has understood practices as the routinised and patterned ways of understanding and doing of a designated collective based on the belief that a certain course of action is the right and appropriate one under a given set of circumstances. Thus defined, practices embody certain beliefs and rules for action of which they are the enactment. Furthermore, practices both shape and are shaped by the organisational culture of the corresponding community of practice; I argued that DG Trade and the EEAS each form such a community of practice.