The Common Foreign and Security Policy

Abstract

To non-specialists, the European Community and European Union are interchangeable terms for the same organisation. To the serious student of decision-making, they are entirely different animals. The EC is a system for legislating according to the ‘Community method’ of decision-making (Devuyst 1999), which carefully weights Member States and EU institutions. In contrast, the EU is a symbolic construct, created by the Maastricht Treaty, which itself made the EC ‘just one pillar of a grander edifice called the European Union’.¹ Two separate ‘pillars’ created for justice and home affairs policies (pillar III) and the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP, pillar II) produce ‘legislation’ relatively rarely. Decision-making within both is effectively intergovernmental and almost always requires unanimity.