Making the External Action Service more effective

Making the External Action Service more effective: "

By Thomas Renard

A team of experts from the Centre for European Policy Studies, the Egmont Institute, European Policy Centre and the University of Leuven joined forces to produce a timely book on European diplomacy, on the occasion of the launch of the European Union’s External Action Service.

This book investigates two crucial factors that will in part determine whether the innovations and ambitions of the Lisbon Treaty for the European Union as a foreign policy actor will fructify: first, its status in the multitude of multilateral organisations and international agreements that deal with matters of European competence; and secondly, the structure of European diplomacy (i.e. the personnel strengths and costs of the twenty-seven Member State diplomacies alongside the new European External Action Service).

The book is original as there has been no systematic account available on either of these subjects. Going beyond this information function, the report also formulates recommendations for where the European Union’s status in the international arena is inadequate, for example in the United Nations system, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; and forward-looking scenarios for the restructuring of European diplomacy, with a rationalisation of the foreign services of the European Union (to be expanded) and its Member States (to be slimmed down).

The small-minded book-keeper’s concept of budget neutrality for the External Action Service alone, which seems still to prevail among various Member States, is replaced by a sounder public finance objective, namely to make significant net economies in the combined diplomatic services of Member States, cutting duplicative waste in their own foreign services. The time horizon for these tasks is the next decade or two.

The premise is that the European Union should seek to build up a world-class diplomatic corps, capable of becoming a major actor in global affairs. There are interest groups in the Member States’ foreign ministries that prefer to stick to the status quo, and seek to minimise the restructuring of European diplomacy. However, in the view of the authors (as independent analysts), fundamental changes in the nature of global affairs mean that this conservatism is indefensible, and would only result in an increasingly obsolete, irrelevant and wasteful European diplomacy.

• Please click here to order the book or download it.

• Michael Emerson, Rosa Balfour, Tim Corthaut, Jan Wouters, Piotr Maciej Kaczyński, Thomas Renard (2011), Upgrading the European Union’s Role as Global Actor: Institutions, Law and the Restructuring of European Diplomacy (Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies).

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