The question of whether Europe has a collective foreign policy is an issue that has surfaced with prominence during many recent crises, most notably when Iraq invaded Kuwait and over the recent war in the Balkans. The contributors in this book argue that the European Union has certainly made strides towards acting as a single bloc, but that expectations have raced ahead of achievements.

The aim of the book’s multinational authorship is to look at the reality of European foreign policy-making rather than the hopes held out for it. They do so by examining the policy of the member states and their experience in trying to make their national concerns converge with the collective view. The Commission, the main supranational institution to be active in external relations, is discussed in a separate chapter. The authors seek to go beyond generalities about Europe to portray the actual positions of member states and to what extent they are moving towards a collective voice.

The book shows how the foreign policies of the individual states now work within a broad common framework and that the key to an understanding of the international politics of Western Europe is the interplay between the national and the collective.

The author

Christopher Hill is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. He has written widely on issues of foreign policy analysis, particularly British foreign policy and the external relations of the European Community.