Duke, Simon --- "Consistency, Coherence in European Union foreign relations law" [2011] ELECD 221; in Koutrakos, Panos (ed), "European Foreign Policy" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: European Foreign Policy

Editor(s): Koutrakos, Panos

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849804097

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Consistency, Coherence in European Union foreign relations law

Author(s): Duke, Simon

Number of pages: 38

Extract:

2. Coherence in European Union foreign
relations law
Marise Cremona

I INTRODUCTION
The need for coherence in EC external policy made its way into the
Community Treaties as an expressly stated concern at the time of the Single
European Act, at a moment when Community external action was expanding
and European Political Cooperation (EPC) was institutionalized. The
Presidency and the Commission were mandated to ensure consistency
between EPC and the EC.1 In transforming the EPC into the Common Foreign
and Security Policy (CFSP) the Treaty on European Union reiterated the need
for consistency between the CFSP and the external policies of the Community,
linking it to the single institutional framework and imposing a duty on the
Council and Commission to ensure consistency specifically in relation to
external activities.2 The Treaty on European Union at this time also added new
EC Treaty provisions on development cooperation, a competence declared to
be complementary to Member States' development policies and requiring
coordination between the Member States and the Community.3 From the start,
then, we can see coherence appearing as a concern in terms of both inter-
policy coherence (so-called horizontal coherence) and coherence between the
Member States and the Community/Union (referred to as vertical coherence).
In the process of treaty reform that started with the Laeken Declaration in
December 2001 and ended with the Treaty of Lisbon, signed in October 2007,
the coherence of the Union's foreign policy has been one of the recurrent
themes. The Laeken ...