The institutions of the European Union are now engaged in an all-out turf war over who is to control the new diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service (EEAS).

The warfare has entered a critical phase, with the outcome supposed to be determined within two months.

The EEAS is to be answerable to Catherine Ashton, who is both a member of the European Commission and the high representative of the Council of Ministers, formed by the national governments. But the EEAS is eventually supposed to be a free-standing EU body, separate from the Commission, the Council secretariat and the diplomatic corps of the national governments. Yet it is being fashioned from those three institutions, each of which is competing to impose on the EEAS its own vision – and its own people.

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Last week, José Manuel Barroso, the Commission’s president, made a tactical retreat. In nominating João Vale de Almeida, who is currently the director-general for external relations, to be the head of the EU’s delegation in Washington DC, Barroso was tacitly admitting that the Commission would not be providing the future secretary-general of the EEAS. Vale de Almeida was the best-placed official to compete for that job. But Barroso has taken on board the message that the member states will simply not countenance an ex-Commission official taking charge of the EEAS. So Vale de Almeida, who from 2004 until last November was head of Barroso’s private office, was given the plum job of Washington, DC.

That appointment, endorsed by the Commission last Wednesday, has upset several national governments because it looks like a pre-emptive strike by Barroso to decide one element of the EEAS.

The Lisbon treaty that came into force on 1 December transformed the status of the Commission’s delegations, making them delegations not just of the Commission but of the EU. The heads of delegations are the EU’s ambassadors. They are to be at the core of the EEAS.

‘Pre-Lisbon decision’

Yet the Commission’s decision to appoint Vale de Almeida was made as if the world had not changed. Ashton said that the Washington position had fallen vacant before the Lisbon treaty came into effect (John Bruton, the previous incumbent, stepped down at the end of October) so the appointment could thus be made under the rules in force at that time. She said that she – rather than Barroso – had put forward Vale de Almeida for the ambassadorship and insisted, “the procedure that I followed is exactly the right procedure”.

The national governments seemed unconvinced. Many of them fear that the Commission wants its officials to run the Union’s embassies, rather than senior diplomats from the member states.

Fact File

THE EEAS

The decision to set up the European External Action Service (EEAS) is to be taken by the member states by April, based on a proposal by Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief. The new service is to become operational within months of that decision, perhaps by 1 July or, failing that, by 31 August. The start-up phase is not, however, expected to be completed until July 2013.
Ashton is currently drafting her proposal in consultation with a steering group made up of representatives of the member states, the Council of Ministers’ secretariat and the European Commission. An official from the secretariat of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee has recently been given the right to attend the group’s meetings to ensure that MEPs are aware of the debates there (see Page 7).
Before the EEAS is established, member states and the Parliament will have to endorse revisions to three legislative acts – drafted by the Commission – required to ensure it can function: on staff regulations, on financial regulations and on re-allocating funds from the Commission’s external relations activities to the service. Commission officials are currently studying draft amendments to the EU’s staff regulations. These are expected to be endorsed by the college of commissioners shortly.

A meeting of member states’ ambassadors last week was almost completely devoted to a debate on how to appoint the heads of delegations.

“The member states are wholly focused on who gets which delegation,” a diplomat said.

On 19 February, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, sent a letter to Ashton in which he complained that the appointment was made “without applying the very principles now under discussion” by EU ambassadors in their deliberations on the service.

He said that selection processes for the EEAS should be transparent and involve member states, with Ashton making the final appointment.

Pierre Lellouche, France’s Europe minister, also wrote on 23 February to Ashton to express his concern at the process of appointing EEAS staff.

That the French should feel it necessary to fire so public a warning-shot is intriguing, particularly because the French government harbours ambitions to place French nationals at the heart of the EEAS.

Other big players

Christine Roger, formerly France’s ambassador to the Council’s political and security committee (PSC) and now a director in the Council secretariat, is well placed for a senior role. The expectation is that she will be appointed as a representative of Ashton to chair meetings of the PSC. So will France also secure the position of secretary-general of the EEAS? That depends on the attitude of Germany, the other big player in the foreign policy field after France (the UK is already out of the running because Ashton has the top job). If Angela Merkel were prepared to put up her foreign policy adviser, Christoph Heusgen, whose previous job was in Brussels as head of the policy unit of Javier Solana, Ashton’s predecessor, he would be a formidable candidate.

There are more battles for jobs and turf to come as the EEAS takes shape. This past week’s recriminations over the Washington appointment are only the opening exchanges.