The European External Action Service and the Legitimacy of the European Union’s Foreign Policy

Abstract

The article focuses on the institutional reforms of the European Union’s
foreign policy from the perspective of input and output legitimacy. It aims
at two objectives: to analyse the potential contribution of the establishment
of the European External Action Service headed by the Union’s High
Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the legitimacy of
the EU’s international activity, and to tentatively evaluate to what extent the
potential is being fulfilled in practice. It concludes that the new institutions
have the potential to raise the output legitimacy of the EU, but only if the
member states are considered constitutive actors of the EU and if the
institutions manage to keep a high level of input legitimacy. Nevertheless, it
is too soon to decide whether this will be possible in practice.