EU Foreign Policy via Sectoral Cooperation

This book conceptualizes the EU’s ambition at exercising a “joined up approach” (i.e. the mobilization of EU sectoral policies to realize EU foreign policy goals towards a third country). The framework is applied to three case studies: Switzerland and the Institutional Framework Agreement, Morocco and the Western Sahara issue, and Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the help of these, the author argues that the EU is more likely to follow foreign policy objectives by leveraging on sectoral cooperation ties when the foreign policy objective concerns the conditions of participation in the single market (Switzerland). He also shows that a lack of member states’ coherence concerning the compatibility of the foreign policy objective with overarching economic (Israel) or regional/geopolitical (Israel and Morocco) interests counteracts the exercise of a joined-up approach.