Foreign Policy and Dyadic Identities: the Role of the CFSP

The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is a foreign policy tool that continues to defy easy description. It is a focal point of intergovernmental forces protecting their foreign policy-making power and also a forum for increasingly supranational coordination of all member states on EU third-party issues that has bestowed a quality of 'actorness' upon the EU. Introducing the role of identity to judge the national and trans-national tensions inherent in EU foreign policy making, the CFSP is seen to operate as a locale of dyadic identity construction, juxtaposing national and collective forms of self-reference in an effort to produce workable outputs and lend consistency to EU actorness. Following the existential questioning of a post-Constitution EU, common foreign policy making may require alternative approaches to the confines of the CFSP. The use of 'enhanced cooperation' encouraging groups of states to guide EU foreign policy is a possible remedy to the quantitative problems inherent in coordinating twenty-five policy stances and the qualitative attributes that reveal national identity as deeply connected to foreign policy practices.