[lg policy] EU: Can a European diplomatic service really work?

[Harold Schiffman]

Can a European diplomatic service really work?



As experiments in political unity go, Europe’s External Action Service
takes some beating. The budding diplomatic corps of the European
Union, with a name that sounds like an off-shoot of Britain’s SAS, is
supposed to represent the unified interests of the EU’s 27 member
states to the rest of the world. With a staff expected to number
6,000, including 3,000 diplomats in more than 120 missions, setting up
the EAS is akin to creating a high-powered, multi-lingual, global PR,
trade and aid organisation almost overnight. It doesn’t happen very
often. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not very easy to do.

The person responsible for overseeing it is Britain’s Catherine
Ashton, a former hospital administrator and EU trade commissioner who
is now the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security
policy. Ashton laid out some of her vision for the EAS to the European
Parliament on Wednesday, calling it a “once-in-a-generation”
opportunity to build an organisation that brings the EU’s political
strategy together in one place. But she also acknowledged some of the
difficulties she faces.

“Any time you create something new, there will be resistance,” she
said. “This is a huge chance for Europe. We should not lower our
ambitions but rather give ourselves the means to realise them. This is
a moment to see the big picture, be creative and take collective
responsibility.” She was referring, almost inevitably, to the
infighting that has already engulfed the service, with EU member
states, the European Parliament and the European Commission, the body
that drafts and enforces EU rules, scrapping over who should have the
most say in how the EAS is structured and run.

One area of tension is whether the Commission can let go of some of
its core areas of competence, such as trade and overseas aid, and
leave policy setting and implementation up to the new foreign service.
Another is how much input smaller countries in the EU, such as
Lithuania and Estonia, are going to have in the leadership of major EU
missions abroad. Do their national foreign policies suddenly get
subsumed into EU foreign policy? And what’s the official language of
the EAS going to be? French or English?

All those issues — and plenty more that are too nitty-gritty to
mention — need to be resolved by the end of April, the deadline Ashton
originally set for getting the ’structure and scope’ of the EAS
finalised, and one that already looks likely to be missed. It may take
many years before the EAS is up and running smoothly, delivering a
cohesive EU foreign policy to the world and being dealt with in return
as the representative body of 27 European countries. And even then big
EU states with long foreign policy histories such as Britain, France,
Germany, Italy and Spain are going to be running their own diplomatic
networks in parallel with the EAS, and will more than likely be giving
them far more importance.

Will the EAS succeed? As Ashton herself told the parliament on
Wednesday: “If we get it right, as we must, then we will be able to
shape a European foreign policy for the 21st century… one where we
mobilise all our levers of influence — political, economic,
development and crisis management tools — in a coordinated way.”  She
didn’t say what would happen if she got it wrong.


http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2010/03/10/can-a-european-diplomatic-service-really-work/

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