Hidden values

First appeared on Global Europe

By Fabrizio Tassinari and Julie Herschend Christoffersen

Much has been said of the choice of the EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy; probably too much has been said about her initial performance. Yet, analysis on the institutional tools at Catherine Ashton’s disposal has been scant — or at least as ungenerous as the coverage of her first months in office. The EU’s External Action Service (EAS) is the case in point par excellence. In recent weeks, the mentions of the EAS in the international media have often been conflated to the ongoing bickering over the establishment of the service. But the substance, let alone the potential, of this fundamental, post-Lisbon innovation remains understudied.

With 136 delegations and some 6000 diplomats and employees spread across the globe, the EU will be represented by a foreign service roughly of the size of Germany’s. The newly obtained mandate to represent the CFSP grants EU delegations power to handle EU policies jointly — including trade, development, environment and foreign and security policies.

To be sure, the ongoing power struggle on the service underpins issues of real substance. The Commission’s desire to maintain its influence over the delegations applies to policy-areas traditionally managed from Brussels. Development, trade and EU enlargement are still included in the administration of the Commission, but the EAS will have desks covering these areas. Beneath the turf war between the Council and the Commission over staffing is a genuine anxiety about the clash of culture between national and EU diplomats. Ashton has asked the experienced Danish diplomat Poul Skytte Christoffersen to help her solve some of these problems — a move that underlines the need for the High Representative to appoint powerful deputies.

As it often happens, however, the brouhaha over institutions overshadows the hidden value of EU initiatives. Once fully in operation, the EAS will represent EU foreign policies around the world and around the clock. As an old Commission hand told one of the authors of this article, the EAS: ”will think about Europe, and it will do it all the time”.

The EAS may give smaller member states a say and a face in corners of the globe where they could never afford to be represented. Big European countries which still project geopolitical clout and strive to retain it could see this presence as a nuisance. For them, the EAS will rather have to carve a niche out of member states’ policy and representation gaps, especially at a time when a number of national ministries face budget constraints.

Above all, there is the issue of how the EAS will represent the EU, and more generally of Europe’s ability to project power globally. Severe blows to the Union’s alleged ”soft power” — most recently the marginal role played by the EU at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — will require the EU to implement and communicate more effectively the great deal of things that it already does in the world. This includes the not-negligible “hard power” that the EU already musters in the field of civilian and military crisis management. Strategically, the ability to deliver in this sphere constitutes a most formidable task for the forthcoming service.

In the best of scenarios, the EAS will equip EU foreign policy with the degree of coordination, responsiveness, and — yes — unity, that Lady Ashton’s chimerical “red phone” was never quite meant to provide. It will take time, and the intra-institutional battles in Brussels are far from over. But if one is in search of improvements in post-Lisbon EU foreign policy, it eventually might be that getting a line to one of the delegations’ switchboards will do the trick.