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Victor, Kyle (2012) The Euro Crisis and the Future of EU Foreign Policy. Global Policy Institute Policy Paper (23). pp. 2-19.
There is little doubt that the on-going sovereign debt and banking crisis within the Eurozone will have an enormous impact on the future of the European Union (EU). Indeed, the fate of the entire European project hangs in the balance. The eventual outcome of the crisis cannot yet be known as of this writing in August 2012, but anything within the wide array of possible outcomes—from a total collapse of European integration to a ‘two-speed’ Europe to a tight political union—will have a profound and lasting impact on the way the European states and peoples interact with each other.
For scholars interested in European foreign policy, it is crucial to note that he trouble in the Eurozone struck at a time when European foreign policy was already in flux: Greece reached agreement with the IMF over its first bailout package only five months after the Lisbon Treaty went into effect, creating the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the post of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR). These two institutions were designed with the intention of facilitating the coordination of national foreign policies among EU member states, but the novelty of the Lisbon Treaty left considerable uncertainty about how member states would incorporate the EEAS and the HR into their foreign policymaking procedures.
The turmoil in the Eurozone has only magnified the uncertainty surrounding the future of European foreign policy, both in areas related to the Lisbon Treaty and in other areas as well: can an economically weakened EU continue to use trade as a foreign policy instrument? Will austerity-induced cutbacks to national defence budgets mean the end of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)? Might, on the other hand, a new fiscal and political union finally make a ‘European Army’ feasible?
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