The Treaty empowers this new European Union to act as a State vis-a-vis other States and its own citizens:

To understand the change introduced by the Lisbon Treaty one needs to understand that what we call the European Union today is not a State. It is not even a legal or corporate entity in its own right, for it does not have legal personality. The name "European Union" at present is a descriptive term for all the relations between its 27 Member States. At present these relations cover both the "European Community" area where supranational European law is operative, and the "intergovernmental" areas of foreign policy and justice and home affairs where Member States cooperate with one another on the basis of keeping their sovereignty and where European laws do not apply. The Lisbon Treaty changes this situation by creating a constitutionally and legally quite new EU, while retaining the same name, the "Union".

Unlike the present European Union, this legally new EU will be separate from and superior to its Member States, just as the USA is separate from and superior to California or New York, or Federal Germany to Bavaria or Brandenburg.

This new European Union can sign treaties with other States in all areas of its competence and conduct itself as a State in the international community of States. It can speak at the United Nations on agreed foreign policy positions of its Member States, just as in the days of the Soviet Union the USSR had a UN seat while Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia had UN seats also.

The Lisbon Treaty also gives the EU a political President, a Foreign Minister - to be called a High Representative - a diplomatic corps and a Public Prosecutor. The new EU will accede to the European Convention on Human Rights, as all other European States have already done, including those outside the EU.

The Treaty also sets out the principle of the primacy of the laws of the new Union over the laws of its Member States (Declaration 27). The new EU makes the majority of laws for its Member States each year and under the Lisbon Treaty the new Union, which will replace the European Community, gets further power to make laws or take decisions by qualified majority vote in relation to some 68 new policy areas or matters where Member States currently have a veto.