foreign policy and defence
Building a European External Action Service: a Difficult Birth? Hugo Brady Senior Research Fellow, CER Natividad Fernández Sola Research Associate, Real Instituto Elcano
“I
n fulfiling his mandate, the High Representative (HR) shall be assisted by a European External Action Service (EEAS). This service shall work in cooperation with the diplomatic services of the member states and shall comprise officials from relevant departments of the General Secretariat of the Council and of the Commission as well as staff seconded from national diplomatic services of the member states. The organisation and functioning of the EEAS shall be established by a decision of the Council. The Council shall act on a proposal from the HR after consulting the European Parliament and after obtaining the consent of the Commission” (Article 27.3, Treaty of Lisbon).
In foreign policy terms, the EU’s global partners often have to deal with the competing external relations bureaucracies of the European Commission, the EU’s Council Secretariat (itself acting separately for both the HR and the six-month EU Presidency) as well as the different diplomatic services of the member states. That situation reflects the uneven development of the Union’s foreign policy machinery since the development of ‘European political coordination’ in 1970 and the EU’s beginnings as a purely economic entity. Nevertheless the Union has managed – through the creation of a HR for Foreign Policy and almost 20 years of adopting common positions on all but the most controversial external issues – to create the expectation that it ‘should’ have a serious foreign policy that can mobilise diplomatic, military and civilian resources and deploy them worldwide. The foreign policy provisions of the Lisbon Treaty are a clear effort to satisfy that expectation. The clauses sketch out how the EU should over-come the mess of bureaucratic (and the resulting legal and political) obstacles to more coherent decision-making and delivery on external policy. On the delivery side, a major priority is the need to overcome the artificial separation between the political wishes of the EU’s foreign ministers and the Commission’s technical and financial resources. Hence the Treaty’s negotiators agreed to the establishment of a foreign policy council and quasi-diplomatic service to link the political legitimacy of the member states to the EU’s amalgamated foreign policy machinery.
158 | PART IV – EU IN THE WORLD