For a long time, policy-makers have articulated the objective to enhance the EU’s ‘actorness’ in foreign affairs. For this purpose EU documents, politicians and academics have emphasized the need for a ‘coherent’ EU Foreign Policy. While the meaning of ‘coherence’ was not specified, the academic debate mostly focused on a vertical dimension that stresses coherence between the EU’s and its Member States’ foreign policies. However, too often this literature neglects the importance of the horizontal dimension of coherence: to streamline the approaches of different EU policy fields into one foreign policy approach. This project argues that the key to more EU actorness lies in intra-EU Foreign Policy-coordination as a way to increase horizontal coherence of policy areas. The Treaty of Lisbon and accompanying documents entail a plethora of provisions to increase the coherence of EU Foreign Policy. One underlying assumption is that institutional reconfiguration, formalization of procedures and policy integration directly affect policy outcomes and thus ‘intelligent design’ can increase policy coherence. The focus is placed on the institutional context of the Council as the center of EU Foreign Policy-making where the competences of the Committee of Permanent Representatives and the Political and Security Committee have been altered significantly. It is expected that these changes will potentially lead to an increase in horizontal cross-coordination between the committees and respective policy areas. The case study investigates EU energy security and human rights policy towards Russia, which prior to the Treaty of Lisbon have repeatedly produced incoherent policy outcomes. In addition, the two areas often appeared to be mutually exclusive by their very content, with energy security following possession goals and human rights policy targeted towards achieving milieu goals. This opens an interesting research agenda on the implications of policy context and policy content on coordination mechanisms and hence foreign policy coherence.
