| dc.description.abstract | Enlargement has been a constant feature of the European Communities and the European Union since the very early years, and has both profoundly influenced the development, self-perception and raison d’être of the EU, acting as a catalyst for change while itself evolving as a process and becoming a policy. Enlargement has helped to shape the EC/EU’s identity in multiple ways, assisting its evolution from a small homogeneous club of states into a powerful international actor, a transnational legal order with a global foreign policy strategy. If the EU’s external mission was articulated for the first time in the Lisbon Treaty (Article 3(5) TEU), it was built upon 50 years during which the EC and then EU defined itself through its external relations, through its ability to interact with and shape its external environment. The aim of this chapter is to explore the interaction between enlargement and identity through the relationship between enlargement and foreign policy in the EU from the first enlargement to the present, and the institutional / instrumental underpinning of that relationship. Taking a longue durée perspective, this chapter suggests a framework of analysis, proposing three ways in which that complex relationship has been configured since the first enlargement in 1973, each generating its own distinctive instruments, each offering different insights into the evolution of EU foreign policy, and which together help us to understand the importance of enlargement for the self-identification of the EU and its role in the world. In brief these are (a) enlargement as transformative of EU foreign policy; (b) enlargement epitomising the naturally integrative trajectory of EU foreign policy; (c) enlargement as foreign policy. It does not offer an in-depth study of any one of the enlargement rounds, but the hope is that the framework proposed here may be useful in structuring more substantial research into the relationship between enlargement and foreign policy. | |