The frustrated service

The European External Action Service needs more strategy, less confrontation

The European External Action Service’s review of its first two and a half years, which was published at the end of July, is a frank exposé of dysfunctions in the European Union’s foreign-policymaking system. For observers of the EU’s diplomatic service, the focus on problems makes the paper an absorbing read. But it does too little to address a central challenge, identified by Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the grand old men of US foreign-policymaking, when he said that “Europe doesn’t have a foreign policy…Europe has a foreign-policy process”.

The focus of the review is the EEAS’s power in that process. It makes clear that the service and its members feel weak and marginalised. That sense starts at the top, with Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief who is also a vice-president of the European Commission. When the review states that meetings of commissioners whose portfolios have a strong foreign dimension “have not been held frequently enough”, this is a complaint targeted at the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.

The review repeatedly describes the EEAS’s co-operation with the Commission as “generally well”, while providing reasons to think that it is far from good, with the cause typically presented as the Commission being unwilling to share or relinquish much power. The EEAS’s difficulties with other institutions are exemplified in its complaint that it struggles to convince others to lend it their facilities for international meetings.

The review’s response to this sense of weakness is to demand more control and more resources, in the apparent hope that the EU’s member states and the European Commission will grant a few of its many wishes.

The EEAS has tried this before: most of the 35 recommendations in the review were raised in negotiations ahead of its launch, in 2011. But, two years later, the EEAS’s emerging record certainly should make it substantially easier to argue for more influence and resources.

Member states have demonstrated unexpectedly strong demand for its services, particularly through its delegations. EU leaders have requested a steady stream of policy papers from the EEAS. The strategic reasons for EU co-operation in foreign affairs are strengthening: Europe’s global status is being eroded, Europe’s southern neighbourhood is in a mess; and national governments are cutting back their diplomatic services. There is also demand internationally for the EEAS, as a would-be broker of deals in countries – such as Kosovo, Iran and Egypt – where other powers have too much historical baggage or too little interest.

Too often, however, the review puts its strategic cases too weakly, or cannot make a strategic case. The mere existence of a foreign service, a lack of operational clarity, and the need for ‘policy coherence’ are simply not strong enough reasons to convince the Commission and member states that they must cede long-held responsibilities.

Put another way, the EEAS has probably not done enough to address what everyone (national diplomats included) acknowledges as a foundational, and ongoing, problem that the EEAS faces: the lack of ‘buy-in’, primarily from member states. To win more power, it needs others’ support. It will also need their support if the EEAS is to help bridge the Brzezinski gap, between ‘a process’ and ‘a policy’.

The problem of the member states’ buy-in runs deep. Priorities for some countries are marginal concerns for others (terrorism in Mali is as remote to the Baltic states as Belarus is to French thoughts). Small countries routinely feel marginalised by the big member states on foreign-policy issues. Big states are wary about listening too much to small states with specific, often limited, interests. In the past, small member states were forced to become pan-European in their foreign-policy stances during their rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers. The Lisbon treaty largely stripped them of that responsibility. Javier Solana, Ashton’s predecessor as foreign policy chief, partly compensated for the lack of an EEAS through intensive and sustained personal diplomacy with member states’ representatives, both in national capitals and in Brussels. Ashton rarely visits member-state capitals or meets their ambassadors in Brussels.

The review should have done more to recognise the nature and depth of the need for buy-in, and to come up with proposals. The EEAS and member states may be working closely abroad, but the EEAS’s review contains no ideas for co-operation with national diplomats based in their national headquarters – and wants to weaken national diplomats stationed in Brussels, in part by stripping away the residual roles for the rotating presidency, as chairmen of some working groups.

There is an interesting exception to this relegation of member states – a proposal to allow foreign ministers to deputise for the EU’s foreign policy chief – but that is too little to address the problem that an EU foreign-policy culture will not develop if countries feel marginalised. Nor will they feel like entrusting more power to those who marginalise them. The review displays maximalist, exclusive tendencies; its case would be better served with a more strategic, less confrontational approach.

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