Introduction: Foreign policy-making in the European Union (EU) often deviates from the formal rules and is largely
characterized by processes of informal division of labour between member states and European
institutions. Such informal processes, which result is foreign policy-making driven by specialization,
have largely escaped the radar of EU foreign policy scholars, but are important for fully understanding
how the EU functions in many foreign policy dossiers. This paper presents a framework for mapping
the different manifestations of informal division of labour and for understanding its consequences for
EU foreign policy
