Conclusion

Abstract

This book has focused on a very specific issue relating to what is often referred to as ‘Europeanisation’: namely its impact on the role and organisation of EU member state foreign ministries (FMs). However, it is often difficult to separate the effects of the broader processes of growing global interdependence from those related to the membership of regional organisations such as the EU since, as one study has argued, ‘European integration interacts and intersects with wider processes of change in the contemporary nation state, international political economy and world politics!’ As we can see from the foregoing chapters, national foreign policy administration has confronted several ‘layers’ of change as it has sought to adapt to internal and external pressures, but the EU is an arena with distinctive qualities that set it apart and pose particular challenges for member states. One of these challenges relates to the uncertainty expressed by Laffan et al. in terms of the EU’s ‘betweenness’ (poised between politics and diplomacy and the international and the domestic, for example) and the ‘process of becoming’, that is to say its evolution towards an indeterminate end state which may prove to bear little relation to traditional assumptions regarding forms of political order.²