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The development of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has been both a natural consequence of European integration and a result of a changing world scene. As Member States developed strong economic ties between themselves and with the rest of the world, they increasingly came to realize not only their common economic and trade interests but also the common principles and values that are the cornerstones of their
societies. Consequently, pressure from European public opinion on their governments grew to fight off the well-known cliché of Europe being an economic giant but a political dwarf. The entry of new Member States has contributed to widening the range of the Union’s relations with other parts of the world, including the Commonwealth countries, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and Latin America.
Furthermore, considerable changes in the international landscape resulting from the end of the Cold War have altered not only the shape of Europe itself but also the world’s and Europe’s own strategic interests. The Union suddenly found itself with a major responsibility to strengthen security and stability in Central and Eastern Europe and to manage a brutal war in the Balkans. Results were satisfactory in the first case, and we are now on the eve of a new wave of enlargement, with the majority of the future Member States belonging, only a few years ago, to the Soviet bloc.
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