The European Union’s
(EU’s) portfolio of external activities is expanding in important ways to
include a diverse range of policy areas, which has given rise to the notion of
‘external action plus’. In practical terms, this assortment of policy areas may
be linked and interact in ways that open opportunities for more coherent EU
foreign policy. Given the importance of these changes, this paper develops an
exploratory research framework based on the concept of horizontal coherence
that helps to identify the role of internal and external factors in
facilitating or challenging issue linkages among external action plus policies.
The empirical analysis of three policy areas with varying legal competence –
trade, development and health – reveals important factors that matter for issue
linkages and suggests that coordination across policies and across EU
Institutions and Member States becomes crucial to coherence and overcoming
challenges in external action.