THE ADAPTATION PROCESS OF GERMANY’S FOREIGN POLICY TO EUROPEAN UNION FOREIGN POLICY: THE CASE OF THE UKRAINE CRISIS

This study aims to investigate the effects of foreign policy cooperation processes laid down at European Union (EU) level on German foreign policy. Vast majority of the current literature on European integration focus on the impacts of developments at EU level, supra-national institutionalization and policy-making processes on member states. However, as the domain of foreign policy, which has been included within the institutional framework of the EU with the Maastricht Treaty, is under the control of member states, it has been excluded from these investigations for a long time. Even though the foreign policy of EU has an intergovernmental character, the expansion of the foreign policy domain and the development of institutional structures after the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty have introduced considerable changes in the national foreign policies of member states. In this context, this study will discuss the assertion that the involvement of member states in the EU-level foreign policy-making processes and accordingly their interactions with each other are brought closer to the EU foreign policy in the framework of German foreign policy. In doing so, it will aslo discussed whether or not Germany's foreign policy has converged to EU foreign policy and, if so, how and under what circumstances it will be handled in the recent Ukrainian crisis, which is one of the biggest threats to European integration and security