The European External Action Service: European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia. Editors: David Spence, Jozef Bátora. 2015, Palgrave Macmillan UK.
The European Union is a transformational polity challenging diplomacy as an institutionalized order. This book reviews the conceptual origins of the EU's diplomatic apparatus and explains its institutional history, whilst raising key questions about the new organization of foreign policy and diplomacy beyond individual European states. It reviews the nature of state-level adaptation to wider management and administrative trends and analyses the legal and practical evolution of the EU's 'European External Action Service'. The book addresses the far reaching implications of all these issues for the 'Westphalian' diplomatic order, and questions whether the institutions and practices of the emerging EU diplomatic system conform to established standards of the state-centric diplomatic order; or whether practice is paving the way for innovative, even revolutionary, forms of diplomatic organisation. Overall, the book provides the most comprehensive and most profound set of analyses to date of the change dynamics in the EU's diplomatic order towards post-Westphalian patterns.