Close to the heart of enthusiasts for the 50-year-old European Union is its commitment to progressive internationalism and in particular to the developing world.

Starting life in 1957 as a customs union with common import tariffs against the rest of the world, the EU’s biggest external role is still international trade. And until EU foreign policy apparatus solidifies and binds the actions of its member states, it will remain the case that, as Razeen Sally, a “sceptical European” economist at the European Centre for International Political Economy think-tank puts it: “Trade and aid are the EU’s real foreign policy”.