Abstract
In her foreword to the 2013 EEAS Review, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (High Representative or HR) Baroness Ashton likened the early days of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and its setting-up phase to ‘trying to fly a plane while still bolting the wings on’ (EEAS, 2013, p. 1). This chapter explores the legal nuts and bolts of the construction of the EEAS. An astonishing amount of law is involved. While foreign policy and law have forever been strange bedfellows (De Baere, 2012, pp. 359–360; Wessel, 2015), European integration is essentially a legalisation project (Cappelletti, Seccombe and Weiler, 1986), for the EU is a system constructed on the basis of law. It has created its own distinctive legal system, and legal niceties and practical legal implications dominate its everyday functions (Allott, 1999, p. 37, 46; De Baere, 2012, p. 364). Law also played a determining role in the fraught negotiation process setting up the EEAS (Erkelens and Blockmans, 2012; Van Vooren, 2011), and it continues to have a crucial impact on its daily functioning. At the same time, the EEAS is a groundbreaking legal construction, and as such it has had an impact on EU constitutional law, 1 which it has influenced and even transformed.
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© 2015 Geert De Baere and Ramses A. Wessel
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De Baere, G., Wessel, R.A. (2015). EU Law and the EEAS: Of Complex Competences and Constitutional Consequences. In: Spence, D., Bátora, J. (eds) The European External Action Service. The European Union in International Affairs series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383037_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383037_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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