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A small meeting room in the European External Action Service is an unlikely place to get goosebumps. Yet, this happened time and time again as I spoke to European Union (EU) officials about the ground-breaking decision to deploy the European Peace Facility (EPF) to support Ukraine’s military response against Russia’s full-scale invasion during a cold February weekend in 2022. They all recall the gravitas of the moment: High Representative Borrell’s famous “Just add a zero” line that allowed the EPF budget to be multiplied by ten, the ground-breaking decision to deploy it to provide lethal equipment, and the momentous feeling of unity between Member States – a Union that, for once, rose up to the stakes of the moment.

Yet, the goosebumps are a momentary experience, and quickly go away as the conversation shifts to the months and years that followed. The tone gets more sour and frustrated. From a powerful innovation signifying European resolve, since 2024, the EPF has been completely blocked by the assertiveness of Hungarian vetoes. The officials I interview often use this as an example to show me that, although we tend to see the EU’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an ideal case of unity, consensus is not part of the equation at all.

How and why, then, has internal disagreement not impeded a common response in support of Ukraine? The conventional wisdom – that EU foreign policy action requires unanimity – cannot explain this.

My PhD starts from a different premise. Full agreement is a lot to ask of a group of twenty-seven Member States bound together by a sprawling institutional architecture and a multiplicity of tools, but torn apart by diverging interests and strategic cultures. In a decision-making machinery still dominated by unanimity, collective action does not require the elimination of disagreement by channelling twenty-seven voices into one. It requires organising twenty-seven voices into patterns of complementarity rather than contradiction.

These are the theoretical propositions I carried with me back and forth in my Eurostar journeys from London to Brussels since January 2026, when I began my fieldwork, generously supported by the UACES PhD Fieldwork Scholarship.

What I Am Finding: Complementarity, Not Unity 

The central conceptual move emerging from my research is a shift away from thinking about EU unity as the enabling factor of common external action to thinking about complementarity.

The dominant framing treats EU unity and consensus as necessary conditions for EU presence on the global stage: either it ‘speaks with one voice’ or it fragments into competing national positions. A holistic analysis of those cases that are considered closest to ideal types in this binary – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Gaza conflict – reveals something this dichotomy cannot capture.

By taking into account the multiplicity of actions across the Union’s multi-actor, multi-method, multi-level system of foreign policy, one starts seeing a different picture. It is the management of conflict and disagreement – not consensus – that enables EU external action, which can exist in multiple forms short of unity. What matters is not whether agreement can be found in the Council, but whether EU institutions and Member States act, in practice, to fill the gaps left by one another.

The EU’s multi-centred architecture – its multiple voices – does not merely constrain action, but provides avenues through which action can be routed around blockages at any given level. The European Peace Facility is a particularly successful and evident example of this: where disagreement existed, and common competencies lacked to support the provision of lethal equipment to Ukraine, the Commission provided EU financing through off-budget mechanisms, Member States delivered weapons bilaterally, and the EEAS coordinated. Each maintained its distinctive organisational approach, but these were structured to complement each other. No preference convergence or further integration occurred, but institutional innovations and procedural flexibility organised these differences productively.

I propose complementarity as the concept to capture this: the degree to which EU institutions and Member States reinforce rather than contradict each other at political, strategic, and operational levels. Complementarity is not coherence or uniformity: it allows for differentiated contributions, sequenced actions, and division of labour across a spectrum. What matters is not the institutional design of decision-making, but its outcome in practice, and whether actors reinforce, supplement, or contradict one another.

What Complementarity Reveals

 This concept helps to start theorising three more and more explicit developments in EU foreign policy into a single framework. These are typically analysed in isolation or misread as signs of dysfunction. Rather, I argue that they are all part of the same phenomenon whereby the EU assumes different patterns of complementarity as the outcome of internal conflict management.

The first concerns the simultaneous rise of Commission assertiveness and Member State coalitions. The European Commission increasingly deploys its own instruments – SAFE, Readiness 2030 – to provide frameworks for action in areas where unanimity in CFSP/CSDP cannot be reached. At the same time, Member States form informal ‘coalitions of the willing’ to tackle urgent problems outside the constraints of unanimity. These are usually analysed as two distinct trends, and the latter is often read as a sign of fragmentation. Yet, I argue that they are symptoms of complementarity in action: efforts of separate actors to enable or strengthen the collective effort.

The second development concerns the increasing visibility of Commission instruments in the making and shaping of EU external action. The existing debate has long equated EU foreign policy with its most visible intergovernmental surface – Council conclusions, statements, declarations. These are either voted on by unanimity or fail to come into existence. But a more holistic view that understands Community and Member State instruments and external competencies as part of the same system of foreign policy, a different picture emerges. Political, strategic, and operational coordination do not always move in tandem: Community tools can be effectively deployed at the operational level even when political consensus is absent. What appears as “disunity” at one level does not necessarily mean the EU is failing to act, or vice versa. It is precisely in these intermediate configurations – visible through a complementary view – that some of the most undertheorised dynamics of EU foreign policy reside.

Third, these configurations are not static. Complementarity is better understood as a process than a state – something that is constructed, sustained, and that can erode. The EU’s response to Ukraine illustrates this vividly: the rapid construction of a coherent response in the weeks following February 2022 gradually became more pluralistic over time – regardless of the sustained existential threat to European security. Changes external configuration of the EU – whether it speaks with one voice or it is characterised by coalitions of the willing and Commission-led workarounds – are often read as predictive signs of the trajectory of EU foreign policy integration. My argument is that this is the wrong frame entirely. These are not steps forward, backwards, or sideways on an integration spectrum that can tell us whether the EU is advancing unevenly, retreating, or finding a differentiated middle path. They are pragmatic, adaptive responses to the specific configuration of external constraints and internal costs the EU faces at a given moment. The EU is not on a linear trajectory; rather, a kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting polity in which coalitions form and reform around specific issues, and where the relevant question is not the degree of integration but the pattern of alignment.

Bridging Theory and Practice: Fieldwork in the Brussels Bubble

The core of my fieldwork consists of elite interviews with practitioners across the EU’s foreign policy ecosystem: officials from the EEAS, the Commission, the Council Secretariat, and Member States. The interviews seek to unveil not the achievement of unanimity as described by the treaties, but the daily, often improvised work of finding éscamotages, creative solutions, and producing collective action under pressure.

Brussels is a bubble that rewards presence. Many of these conversations would not have happened over Zoom. The willingness to speak candidly about politically charged dynamics – particularly about why coordination breaks down and how dissent is absorbed rather than resolved – depends enormously on trust built face to face. The informal chats after the recorded interview, the run-ins around Schuman or To Meli, the introductions passed along by a colleague: these are the understated elements that make research beyond the diplomatic narrative possible. I still have much to do: the human component of interviews requires time – digging into the EUWhoIsWho to identify interlocutors, waiting for answers (which often never come), and finding an appropriate time in the interviewees’ busy schedules. This means: I am still deeply in the process – widening my reach to Member State officials in Permanent Representations and select national capitals.

The UACES PhD Fieldwork Scholarship is essential to sustaining this presence. The scholarship supported my travel and living costs, allowing me to conduct a far richer set of interviews than would otherwise have been feasible. I am deeply grateful to UACES for this support, and for the broader role the association plays in enabling early-career researchers to undertake empirically grounded work.

Looking Ahead

The broader ambition is to equip scholars and practitioners with a framework that makes sense of recent developments in EU foreign policy while relieving them of the unrealistic expectation of consistent unity and the frustration of apparent weakness. The EU is not a unitary state. It cannot always ‘speak with one voice’. But it can and does act – sometimes with remarkable coordination, sometimes in productive pluralism, and sometimes in disarray. Understanding why it takes these different forms can offer insights into how this adaptive quality could become a strength rather than a source of anxiety in an increasingly volatile international order.

The post Conflict Is Underrated: From Unity to Complementarity in EU Foreign Policy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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