"The Commission and the European Union’s external policies"

This paper comes out of a study of the Commission in which I am currently engaged. The main focus of my study is the Commission’s institutional and decision-making structures. As part of the study, I am taking a particularly close look at external relations policy areas and am focusing most of my attention therein on the following questions: what are the Commission’s responsibilities?; how and why have these responsibilities changed over the years?; what are the structural arrangements within the Commission for handling the responsibilities; and how does the Commission deal with the potential problem of policy coordination, given the wide scope of its external relations responsibilities and the many different parts of the Commission which are involved with external relations in some way? In this paper I set out my early observations on these questions. Particular attention is focused on the difficulties which the Commission has experienced in creating organizational arrangements that enable it to handle its increasing responsibilities in an efficient manner