A Responsible Europe?: Ethical Foundations of EU External Affairs

A Responsible Europe? opens a new avenue of research by reviewing the external affairs of the European Union from an explicitly normative perspective. The construction of the EU's global role should be morally and intellectually justified. We therefore need to ask: What ethical foundations, if any, might there be for developing the EU's role in the world? What should the EU do or not do in international arenas and, above all, why? The contributors to the book put forward a set of principles of responsibility towards other international actors and show how these principles can function as practical guidelines for the formulation of EU activities in selected international policy areas and regional cooperation frameworks. In addition to this new conceptual perspective, the book also shows how multidimensional and complex the EU's foreign policies have been and will continue to be.