European Foreign Policy: A Collective Policy or a Policy of 'Converging Parallels'?

The article analyzes two opposite trends that are clearly identifiable in the process of European political integration and in European foreign policy such as the convergence of the Member States' policies and the concurrent persistence of profound differences between national policies. Author Helen Wallace noted that much of literature about European Union (EU) policy integration and much of the discourse of practitioners, and indeed the formal EU texts, talk about policy convergence.