Horizontal Consistency in the European Union External Action

The Lisbon Treaty brought about substantial legal and institutional innovations to the external action of the European Union: In line with the principle of horizontal consistency, the dissertation aims at assessing how the Lisbon changes have affected areas of external actions individually and collectively as well as to what extent these changes have contributed to more consistent external policy. In the beginning of the analysis consistency is discussed as a multi-dimensional concept. The dissertation has focused on two aspects of horizontal consistency – inter-institutional and inter-policy horizontal consistency. Whereas inter-institutional horizontal consistency has focused on achieving synchronisation among the European institutions, inter-policy horizontal consistency is interested in coherent policy-making between the different external action areas, namely the Common Commercial Policy, the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the Common Security and Defence Policy, the development cooperation and the technical assistance with third countries.