Foreign Policy beyond the Nation-State: Conceptualizing the External Dimension

Abstract

In the current literature on the history of European integration little space is devoted to the external dimension of the present-day European Union (EU) — the principle reason being that, more or less explicitly, most authors share the idea that the main actors of foreign policy were, and remain, national governments. This is confirmed by the nature of the sources that historians of European integration have mainly used, until recently, to write their histories, namely the archives of national ministries of foreign affairs. The existing general histories of the EU contain no extensive accounts of how its formation and evolution affected international relations. Although some studies have been devoted to analysing the negotiations leading to the various enlargements of the European Communities (EC) and the vagaries of transatlantic relations, as discussed separately by Mark Gilbert in his chapter, John Gillingham (2003) does not even mention the association agreements with African countries and considers the EC’s external dimension nonexistent up to the end of the 1970s.