Crisis Windows and Reversible Delegation in the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Gaza war, and the prospect of a second Trump administration have each been framed as moments of “geopolitical awakening” for the European Union. Yet the pattern that follows is strikingly cyclical: rapid coordination and visible collective action are soon replaced by re-fragmentation and renewed national control. This paper conceptualizes this pattern as reversible delegation within the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Drawing on the competence–control framework, it argues that external shocks temporarily raise the marginal value of EU-level competence, prompting member states to relax control constraints and empower supranational actors such as the High Representative, the EEAS, and the Commission. Once immediate pressure subsides or distributional conflicts re-emerge, those same actors are re-domesticated, and authority reverts to intergovernmental control. Empirically, the paper employs comparative process tracing the crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine to map delegation spikes and reversals across agenda-setting, mandate design, and representation authority. The findings show that CFSP’s institutional machinery is not simply “overwhelmed by practice” but structurally configured for punctuated delegation – competence expands in emergencies and contracts in normal times. The analysis explains both the EU’s episodic geopolitical effectiveness and its enduring inability to consolidate a stable foreign-policy capacity.