Can Josep Borrell get EU foreign policy off the ground? by Ian Bond and Luigi Scazzieri
The EU’s new foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, may struggle to coordinate the Union’s external activities in the face of rival European commissioners and unruly member-states. The EU’s first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security and Vice President of the Commission (HRVP), Catherine Ashton, wrote in 2013 that her job consisted of “trying to fly a plane while still bolting the wings on”. Appropriately, the Spanish foreign minister, Josep Borrell, who will (subject to the European Parliament’s approval) succeed Federica Mogherini as the third HRVP on November 1st, is an aeronautical engineering graduate. He will need to be a skilled pilot to navigate through the institutional and substantive storm clouds facing him. Ashton and Mogherini can claim some successes. Ashton became the de facto lead negotiator for the so-called ‘E3 + 3’ (China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK and the US) in their talks with Iran on ending its nuclear weapons programme; and persuaded Kosovo and Serbia to discuss normalising relations. The Iran nuclear deal was finalised on Mogherini’s watch; and she worked with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to develop the EU’s closest ever partnership with NATO. But both HRVPs were peripheral actors in efforts to resolve conflicts in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen that had significant impacts on European security. Borrell has his work cut out to
make the EU one of the main players even in its own immediate neighbourhood. Intra-Commission co-ordination has been a long-term problem. Borrell, like Mogherini, will chair a team of Commissioners with portfolios touching on the EU’s external policy, including trade, defence industry, aid and energy. He will have to persuade them all to work coherently to the priorities set out in the EU’s 2016 global strategy. The Union has often failed to respond in a joined-up way to issues with internal and external implications, such as conflicts around the Mediterranean and the migration crisis. Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen’s instructions to Borrell recognise the need to do better. But Borrell is not one of the new ‘Executive Vice Presidents’ of her new “geopolitical Commission”: that suggests he will have reduced institutional clout. The stumbling block for all HRVPs, however, is member-states’ primacy in foreign policy. Individual member-states pursuing their own foreign policies may sideline the HRVP and the European External Action Service (EEAS). Moreover, when member-states disagree, as France and Italy have over how to deal with