The stakes have never been higher for the European Union. Its very distinctiveness – twenty-eight separate national units morphed into an inelegant but powerful overarching supranational institutional framework – now appear to have less, rather than more in common. Taken together, Member States’ own quarrelsome attitudes, as well as external perceptions of EU actorness as materially diminished are in danger of eroding its overall foreign policy presence. EU crises have radiated geopolitically and deepened in severity, neither containable within Europe nor regarded as a ‘domestic’ issue of the EU.