La politica estera e di sicurezza comune dell'Unione europea: una possibile congiunzione tra "unità ideale" e "frammentazione sostanziale"

Abstract [En]: The explicit recognition of the legal personality of the European Union in the Treaty of Lisbon provides an opportunity to explore the challenges related to its international status. This issue has been widely debated but it has not yet found a univocally accepted solution. The internationalist doctrine analyses the international legal personality of the entities other than States on the basis of their actual capacity to act on the international stage. Nevertheless, this doctrine fails to fully explain the discrepancy between how the EU Treaty establishes the competence of the European Union in the field of foreign policy and how this competence is actually expressed in the area of international relations. The paper traces the debate on the international status of the EU and explores the limits of the current institutional framework in the light of traditional methods of analysis. The proposal is therefore to place the debate on the legal status of the European Union in a broader perspective that takes the constitutional scope of the Treaty of Lisbon and the importance of a common definition of values and interests into account.