title: Closing or Widening the Gap? The Foreign Policy of EU Member States
abstract: This working paper maps and analyses the foreign policy of thirteen selected European Union (EU) Member States (MS) with a focus on their present and long-term defence and security strategies. It considers high-level primary sources in order to evaluate possible incompatibilities in foreign policy amongst EU MS and to assess challenges and possibilities for the external action of the Union in the areas of security and defence. The mapping exercise reveals that EU MS tend to hold a common assessm