While some scholars generally acknowledge the role of legal instruments in CFSP, there is little research on the more encompassing trend of legalization of CFSP. Addressing this research gap, this contributions highlights the EU’s self-understanding as a ‘legal community’ which implies the adherence to the inner logic of law as a self-reproducing system of meaning and reasoning. While this insight holds true for heavily legalised/supranationalised fields, we argue that law increasingly spills over into CFSP. Institutionally, the growing legalization of EU foreign policy is not only reflected by the establishment of bureaucratic actors within CFSP (e.g. EEAS), but also further strengthens the role of supranational actors such as the Commission or the Court which both are familiar with the intricacies of the legal system. We demonstrate the importance of the law and of legal reasoning for the case of EU-Israeli relations. While EU-Israeli relations where initially dominated by a political logic, the events leading up to the 2012 Council Conclusions and follow-up action on issues such as research funding, settlement products, and several other areas of EU-Israeli relations are primarily driven by legal dynamics that testify of the growing legalization of EU-Israeli relations.
