Beyond Intergovernmental Coordination: EU Corporate Foreign Policy Action and the Crisis over Ukraine

Introduction: Since 2014, the European Union (EU) finds itself in the midst of an international crisis over the status and territorial integrity of Ukraine that might have the potential of creating a new conflict among great powers in Europe (Smith 2014, Ferreira-Pereira and Vieira 2014). Moreover, the EU seems to be a major Western player in this conflict– not its member states, nor the United States. The EU seems to behave as a great regional power in its own right that is capable of confronting the newly empowered Russia that is gradually recovering from its defeat upon the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1990. And Russia seems to take the EU serious as a regional power in Europe (Dragneva and Wolczuk 2012, Aslund 2013). This is puzzling for those many observers holding the widely shared belief that the shortcomings of its intergovernmentally organized Common Foreign and Security Policy preclude decisive EU action on issues of high politics