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Benchmarking the EU’s new diplomatic service

Autumn 2010

by David Hannay

The EU’s new “External Action Service” has been the focus of a fiercely fought turf war between rival officials in Brussels. David Hannay looks at the background to its difficult birth and sets out criteria for its future success

Commentary:

by Elmar Brok

by Carne Ross

by David Howell

No one should have been the slightest bit surprised that the Lisbon treaty’s entry into force at the end of 2009 was followed by a widespread sense of anti-climax and disappointment. There were, of course, no immediate and dramatic improvements in the functioning of the European Union. The long march to Lisbon had been too beset by alarms and excursions, and the treaty itself represented no grand project in the way that the Single European Act underpinned the Internal Market Project and the Maastricht Treaty opened the way to the euro.

So the low-key and necessarily bureaucratic work being put into the establishment of the Union's EAS has been gaining little attention and few plaudits. Meanwhile, the turf fighting that has accompanied the whole process should have surprised no one who has had any working experience of the Brussels decision-making machine. If the clouds of the sovereign debt crisis that has absorbed so much attention could be said to have a silver lining it is perhaps that it has directed criticism away from the slow process of setting up the EU’s new “diplomatic service”, the European External Action Service (EEAS).

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The time factor is crucial to any attempt to judge how well the EEAS is doing when still in its early stages. Setting up an entirely new structure for managing the European Union's external policies, both their formulation and their execution, was never going to be the work of a few days, weeks or months but rather of years if not decades. And it is as well to remember that the preparatory work which should have been accomplished in 2008-9 ahead of the Lisbon treaty’s entry into force was stalled by the political need to avoid taking that outcome for granted until the tortuous process of ratification was over.

But these caveats do not mean that it will be impossible to judge the effect of the EEAS any time soon. There are a few benchmarks by which it can be tested:

Turf fighting is endemic in any large organisation, governmental or otherwise. It absorbs huge amounts of bureaucratic time and energy, and diverts attention away from coherent policy formulation and execution. You only have to look at Washington, Moscow or Beijing, although in the latter two the phenomenon is rather better concealed by the lack of transparency and a genuinely free Press. International organisations have their own organisational rigidities – usually the need to ensure a representative geographical spread in their staffing – and so are particularly prone to the disease.

The United Nations and its galaxy of overlapping and often warring agencies exemplify this, but by comparison the European Union has over the years made turf fighting into an art form. In no sector has this been more damaging than in the formulation and implementation of the Union's external policies. EU turf fighting also comes in various shapes and sizes; there is turf fighting between the different institutions, between the Council, the Commission and the Parliament. Then there is turf fighting within each of these institutions, and most extensively and most damagingly within the Commission. In the external field there is turf fighting around the world between the embassies of the EU member states and the Commission’s delegations, which in the new post-Lisbon era are now being turned into European Union missions. As if all that was not bad enough, the Lisbon treaty’s structures create even more grey areas for turf fighting – between the office of the full-time President of the European Council, whose powers in the external field are so ill-defined that they are a recipe for confusion and dispute, and that of the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy and between both of them and the President of the Commission.

It will take a major and sustained effort at every level to cut back on this turf fighting. Essentially, it requires a strong lead from the top; the way in which Javier Solana and Chris Patten worked in tandem, respectively as EU High Representative and External Affairs Commissioner, shows that it can be done, and also how temporary any improvement can be. Much will also depend on the effectiveness of the High Representative's co-ordinating role within the Commission. Both EU insiders and the Union's main international partners will know relatively soon whether the turf fighting is more or less, or much the same. If matters fail to improve, the judgement of the outside world will be severe.

Every national government struggles to achieve coherence between the external dimensions of its various policies. At the same time, the range of policies with some sort of external impact has vastly increased in recent years, with issues like climate change, terrorism, nuclear non-proliferation, cyber attacks and crime added to the more traditional mix of trade and economic policy, international development and security and defence. An entity like the European Union, with its idiosyncratic mixture of fully integrated policies alongside still inter-governmental ones is bound to have even greater difficulty in achieving coherence.

And so far it has certainly been struggling to do so. The contradictions between its trade policies, particularly on agricultural trade, and its international development objectives are of long standing. The lack of any proper policies for energy and energy security has hobbled attempts to develop policy towards Russia. The inevitable tensions between the Union's human rights aims and its other policies have proved hard to balance effectively. Trickiest of all has proved the development of policy when the use of coercion (sanctions) or even of force looms on the horizon. This is not just a matter of resources and of force projection, although those problems are real enough for a Union which has so far failed to achieve its own rather unambitious targets. It is also a matter of deciding on the circumstances in which coercion or force might be justified, and indeed necessary, for these are questions which have tended to produce sharp political and cultural divisions between the EU's member states. All these elements of incoherence will not disappear overnight, and the EEAS will certainly play only a subsidiary role in eliminating them. But its capacity to operate effectively will be crucially affected, for better or for worse, by how successful the Union is in achieving a greater degree of policy coherence.

There are plenty of individual exceptions to this judgement, but in any case the Commission's external delegations are not yet anywhere close to achieving the degree of professionalism that can be found in the diplomatic missions of many EU member states. Some of the handicaps are self-imposed; none of the member states still distinguishes between the career paths of those who staff their external policy ministries at home and those who work in overseas missions – but the Brussels institutions still do. Some European countries abolished this distinction as long ago as World War I.

Nor are the requirements for language skills or knowledge of the culture of the countries in which the EU will have its diplomatic missions anything like as well developed or as well rewarded as is the case with most EU countries' national embassies. And there must be a real risk of cronyism and of “Buggin's turn” considerations creeping into the system for making senior EEAS appointments, for such weaknesses have occurred frequently over the years in the existing Community institutions. It is good that the High Representative intends to be assisted by a professionally-qualified consultative body in making these appointments, but this will need to be more than a token effort if these risks are to be avoided.

The whole issue of professionalism is going to be fundamental to the success of the EEAS. Either diplomats in EU member states' missions around the world will come to respect the skills of their EEAS colleagues and be willing to work together with them as a team – in which case the prospects will be for a marked improvement on the present situation – or they will be dismayed by a lack of professionalism, in which case whatever dispositions are made on paper to counteract it, there will be much dissatisfaction and backbiting, and for Europe a sub-optimal diplomatic performance on the world stage.

The sheer amount of time spent in co-ordinating EU positions between the member states, both in Brussels and in the field, at the expense of time that could have been spent persuading and understanding third parties has so far been a great weakness of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The EEAS offers on opportunity to reverse that imbalance, but it is far from sure to do so. Similarly, the demands of public diplomacy are clearly overtaking those of the more classical diplomatic tasks, and will require an effective response from the EEAS if it is not to find itself playing second fiddle to national diplomats who have increasingly been getting to grips with this new dimension.

Measuring the EEAS against these various benchmarks will not be a litmus test of success or failure. No diplomatic service can compensate for weak or contradictory policies, or for the absence of policy. But far better surely to use pragmatic benchmarks like these than to judge the EEAS against foolish and exaggerated ambitions for Europe to become a superpower, or equally foolish dismissals of it as being no more than a global wimp.

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Re:Benchmarking the EU’s new diplomatic service

What change in EU foreign policy after Lisbon?

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