The recent enlargement had an obvious impact on the external relations of the
European Union. It has even been considered the most successful tool of European Union's foreign policy.
After all, many former neighbours now fall under the internal relations regime, which calls for a redefinition of both the Unions’ relations with its immediate surroundings and its position on the international plane.
In addition, the pre-accession strategy for these new members has been turned into a neighbourhood strategy for some of the European Union’s new and old neighbours in order to promise the extension of policies and law (in the form of the internal market acquis) to these countries without completely integrating them.
The European Union has simply become bigger and its external relations regime has further developed on the basis of both treaty modifications and case law.
At the same time, in practice,it has had to cope with a fragmented external policy.
To the traditional problems of vertical consistency and delimitation (often resulting in ‘mixity’), the pillar structure had added the problem of horizontal consistency and delimitation.
Practice shows that, although competences are generally strictly divided, both vertically and horizontally, issues cannot always be handled within the safe boundaries of one pillar.
Ironically, the legal institutional dilemmas caused by this situation seem to have resulted in a strengthening of the unity of the European Union’s legal order, as practice forced the Union to shoot holes in the dividing walls between the pillars as agreed upon in Maastricht.
This, in turn, seems to have paved the way towards an integration and consolidation of the external policy elements of the Community and the Union in the Constitutional Treaty.
More prominently than ever before, the enlargement of the European Union has raised the question of whether and to what extent the current Member States still have powers to formulate and implement an external policy of their own and engage in relations with their immediate neighbours.
After all, the complex division of competences between the European Union and its Member States in this field has been extended from fifteen to twenty-five states.
The main principles governing the multilevel regime of external relations have been codified in the Constitutional Treaty.
Thus, Articles I-12 and I-13 clarify the division of competences in the case of exclusive powers.
At the same time – and perhaps contrary to popular belief – it remains clear that external relations are the responsibility of both the European Union and the Member States.
This means that even the new European's Neighbourhood Policy is to be approached from a multilevel perspective.
Irrespective of the provision in Article I-57(2), which states that ‘the European Union may conclude specific agreements with the countries concerned’ (emphasis added), Member State participation seems to remain needed in the areas not falling under the European Union’s exclusive competence.
Under the Constitutional Treaty,however, Member State action in this field would be restricted to areas not covered by a legislative act of the Union or to cases in which it does not harm the
Union’s ability to exercise its internal competence (Article I-13(2)).
With the further development of the external relations of the new Union, for example triggered by the coming of age of the internal market, the introduction of the European Union Minister for Foreign Affairs and the establishment of a diplomatic External Action Service, a redefinition of the position of the Member States in the European Union could be foreseen.
Whether the European Union should be regarded as ‘a constitutional order of sovereign states’ or even ‘a federation of sovereign states’ is left open by the Constitutional Treaty, but so far the development of the external relations regime has revealed its limits whenever the issue of exclusivity or the invocability of international agreements has been at stake.
The Constitutional Treaty codifies major principles of the bits and pieces of the external relations acquis and simplifies provisions.
However, when we combine this with the continuation of the separation in the Constitutional Treaty of the economic and foreign policy areas in terms of procedures and competences, the external relations domain is bound to remain a complex legal regime, which even makes acquaintance difficult for our new neighbours.