Constructing the CFSP : The utility of a cognitive approach

Traditional analyses of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security
Policy (CFSP) tend to characterise it either as an effete and declaratory
expression of lowest common denominator politics or as a limited framework for
median-interest foreign policy bargaining – yet another stall in the Union’s
policy ‘market’. Even at a modest empirical level, however, these
representations of CFSP fail to convince in view of the development of CFSP in
recent years. By contrast, this article will argue that a cognitive approach towards
the study of CFSP opens up new and crucial vistas for analysis and offers some
striking conclusions on the reciprocal relationship between CFSP and national
foreign policies and the transformatory capacity of the CFSP vis a vis national
foreign policies, including their ‘Europeanisation’. This approach, it is argued,
offers a potentially better understanding of and explanation for CFSP with its
comparative advantage defined in terms of its handling of roles, rules, identity
and ideas.