Foreign policy-making in EU Member States is, by now, unthinkable without a European dimension, and foreign policy is often said to become ‘Europeanised’ through different mechanisms of interaction. This paper contributes to the debate by discussing Member States’ interaction with the EU level in making policy towards a third region: Latin America. I focus on three important Member States that display interesting variation in their interaction with the EU’s Latin America policy: Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. How do Member States'' national policies interact with the EU level? And why do they interact the way they do? In order to answer these questions, the paper considers three important EU Member States: Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. I first establish the variation across the three countries regarding their implication in the EU’s Latin America policy. Based on the triangulation of interview data from national, EU and Latin American sources, I then try to explain this variation and address the above questions. Using an extended liberal intergovernmentalist framework, the paper develops and tests several hypotheses regarding the mechanisms of interaction between the national and the European level. It seeks to incorporate explanations based on both a logic of expected consequences and a logic of appropriateness. Through the example of policy towards Latin America, it provides valuable insights into the way foreign policy-making transgresses national policy in EU Member States.
