The EU and the rest of the world

After the Lisbon Treaty was signed in 2007, President Barroso hoped that the institutional impasse was at an end: the way would be open for the EU to tackle what ‘the people of Europe really care about’: such matters as climate change, migration, globalisation, economic growth, and protection against terrorism. These issues include several areas of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CSFP). One key instru­ment of the CSFP will be the new EEAS. Ironically, though perhaps inevitably, the Service’s establishment has itself been bogged down in institutional disputes. One power-struggle concerns the balance between EU institutions. According to the Treaty, the organisation and functioning of the EEAS will be proposed by the High Representative and determined by the European Council, ‘after consulting the European Parliament and after obtaining the consent of the Commission’. The Parliament has budgetary authority, but also wishes the right to cross-examine senior appointees of EEAS, just as it examines would-be Commissioners. The Commission is unhappy that appointments rest with the High Representative not with the College of Commissioners. A second issue concerns the scope of the EEAS. The CFSP extends to matters such as Human Rights (and so to religious freedom). But the Commission challenges Mrs Ashton’s plan to include Development within the EEAS’s competence. Development falls within the ‘external action of the EU’ (so also would Trade), but does not fall strictly within the CFSP. Others bodies oppose this same expansion. Concord , the umbrella group of European development agencies (which includes the Catholic group CIDSE and its Protestant counterpart Aprodev) has presented legal advice that such broadening exceeds the provisions of the Treaty. The agencies fear that the Commission’s relative freedom from politicised agendas will be compromised if the EU’s development policy, administered by the EEAS, is unduly subject to the ‘private’ objectives of the member states. That fear hints at the underlying problem facing the EEAS – the continuing dichotomy between the EU itself and its member states. The new service will complement, not replace national diplomacy. The question is, How? The journal El País has calculated that the USA maintains 170 embassies worldwide, plus 60 consulates. The 27 member states of the EU maintain 2172 embassies and 933 consulates: an immense cost for a limited diplomatic effect. Since one third of the EEAS’ staff are to be drawn from member states, it is evidently hoped that some member states will delegate functions to the new body to minimise duplication and waste. For that to happen, says Mrs Ashton, the EU’s external instruments should be brought together ‘in support of a single political strategy’. The obvious obstacle: foreign policies of the member states often diverge and sometimes conflict.These institutional disputes may seem energy-sapping. They are worth struggling with, since the inherent tensions they express lie at the heart of the EU’s complex identity – it is both singular and plural.