The break-down of the incumbent political order in North Africa and the Middle East in the wake of the Arab spring has not only presented external actors with the dilemmas of foreign policy-making. For the EU, these events take place right on its door steps and present it with the first major foreign policy crisis since the Lisbon Treaty. This paper asks what the EU’s responses toward the crises in its southern neighborhood tell us about the EU as an international actor. The paper departs from a notion of foreign policy practice as knowledge-constituted actions embedded in communities. Assuming that a crisis is an event in which ingrained understandings are no longer considered to be valid, the paper seeks to explore in what ways EU representatives make sense of the crisis in an attempt to reconstruct the emerging practical understandings that serve to guide Union’s responses to the Arab spring.
