The European Union and the dream of a common foreign policy based on the present Libya intervention (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,0, University of Bucharest, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction

If the European Union wants to be a serious actor on world stage they need more strategic thoughts and above all the real and permanent will of the Member States acting together. The national states are too small for the challenges of our epoch. How to save the climate, guarantee security or offer economic prosperity, if all these topics are interweaved within the international system?
Moreover a new constellation in the international policy becomes obvious. The unipolar moment of the USA is over. With the rise of China and India the multipolar world will be more and more important. Therefore a new balance has to be created by those states.
The European Union has no choice: It has to take up these challenges but it has also the potential to develop the rules of the new world order. The EU makes 35 percent of the world production and the world's biggest exporter of goods.1 Its population is with more than 500 million inhabitants bigger than the population of Russia and USA together.
The lack of the common foreign policy is so serious because European Union is liable to break down as an actor in the world policy. Its political and economic interests reach clearly over its territory. Moreover the European Union is affected directly from crisis or conflicts concerning raw material supply or energy supply.
Relating to security policy the European Union is currently threatened by really different groups (from Al-Qaida to Somali pirates). Because of those problems the EU has to be incomprehensible as a global actor.
Just because working together in the foreign policy is so important this paper has the goal to find out whether the Member States of the EU are able to cooperate concerning current crisis in Libya. Therefore follows at first a short historical overview about the historian steps to come closer to a common foreign policy in the EU. Then there is a short summary about the intervention of Libya. After that you have to analyze the behavior of the most influential Member States (France, Great Britain and Germany) because if they have common position in the field of foreign policy it is more easier for the EU to reach a common point of view for all Members. Last but not least you have to come to a conclusion whether a European Union common foreign policy exist or not.