The EU’s foreign policy and the search for effect

Introduction

‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’. ¹

International Relations as a discipline has tended to steer clear of looking too closely at the European Union (EU). It does not easily fit prevailing approaches even in the case of more liberal, pluralist theorising, which takes account of non-state actors in the international system. The tendency then has been to focus either on other intergovernmental organisations or non-governmental organisations. Separately, and largely independent of developments within the International Relations discipline, a sub-field devoted to the foreign, security and defence policy of the EU has flourished. Its focus has largely been on the specificities of the EU’s international roles and modalities and the relationship between the EU’s Member States and processes of decision-making and implementation of collective foreign and security policy.

This article explores one aspect of the EU’s external policies, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), a policy that remains essentially dependent on unanimity or at least consensus among the European Member States. While EU policy on trade and a whole range of external polices have increasingly been decided on the basis on Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) and with the growing participation of the European Parliament, Member States have been determined to retain control over foreign policy and, indeed, Europe’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). And yet, through successive Treaty reforms from Maastricht in 1993 to Lisbon in 2009, the same Member States have consistently called for a more effective common foreign policy and have been gradually strengthening the role of the EU’s central institutions and blurring some of the distinctions between external economic and foreign policies. As a result, EU foreign policy demonstrates characteristics of authority and autonomy as raised in the Introduction of this Special Issue, even while that authority continues to be contested and its autonomy is highly circumscribed.

Hence, what is developed here are the arguments that lie behind the key characteristic of EU foreign policymaking, the collective and persistent problem of reconciling the continuing, sometimes jealously guarded, capacity for national foreign policymaking with the declared aspiration, and an evolving infrastructure, for a common, effective European foreign and security policy. Greater coherence has been constantly evoked and, progressively, continuity – though not necessarily consistency – has been developed in collective foreign policymaking through institutionalisation.

Europe as an actor?

Continuous incremental Treaty reform has had to be set against differences over the relevance, nature and effectiveness of the EU as an international actor that have been expressed by both practitioners and academics. The US National Intelligence Council in 2008, for example, appeared to write the EU and its Member States out of significance in the twenty-first century, predicting that in 2050, Europe would be ‘a hobbled giant distracted by internal bickering and competing national agendas and (even) less able to translate its economic clout into global influence’. ² The so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), and especially perhaps China, were held up in marked contrast. And that was before the economic crisis, and especially Euro-zone crisis, which, as the Head of the EU delegation in Washington suggested, ‘has not helped portray a vibrant, dynamic image of Europe’. ³ On the contrary, there have been others, such as Andrew Moravcsik, long a student of European integration, who have been more positive, describing the EU as ‘The Quiet Superpower’ and arguing that:

Europe today is more effective at projecting civilian power than any other state or non-state actor. Some of these instruments are wielded by a unified Europe, some by European governments acting in loose coordination, some by European governments acting unilaterally. ⁴

Significantly, not all EU Foreign Ministers have been so sanguine. As the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé put it:

We are acutely aware of the rapidly changing balance of powers in the world; emerging powers want a place at the table and if we in turn really want to continue to have a say in world affairs we must join forces with one another, acquiring with that the ability to act at the European level. The European Union, which is the foremost economic power in the world and is home to half a billion people, should be in a position to play a consequential role on the international stage. ⁵

The aim of the Lisbon Treaty, which entered into force in 2009, was, therefore, to enable the EU ‘to increase the consistency of all the EU’s external policies, including in the economic, energy, monetary and development-assistance spheres, so that this Europe of 500 million inhabitants becomes both a player on the world stage and a force multiplier for every Member State’. ⁶ The German State Secretary echoed the sentiment, looking to Europe as:

being able to compete with other global actors … [and] to be in a strong position to play a role in shaping the world of the 21st century. This is vital to defend our European values. Enlightenment and political liberalism have led to our core principles: the respect of universal human rights, democracy and the rule of law. ⁷

Importantly, he added, ‘One prerequisite is – of course – that we speak with one voice and have a coherent approach on the global challenges’. If it was almost taken for granted by the European political elite that working together enhances Europe’s effectiveness, that effectiveness also depends on having an institutional capacity for taking decisions, having appropriate policy instruments available, the will to use them and a belief that the policy was not only appropriate but ‘right’ in the sense of being acceptable to parliaments and people. It also depends on policy being implemented in a timely fashion. If Der Derian has talked of ‘pace displacing space’ in contemporary diplomacy, ⁸ Hocking has argued that ‘the ability to respond speedily to the ever quickening flow of events is deemed a key measure of actor capacity’. ⁹ It is not perhaps surprising that Lady Ashton, appointed HR in 2009, sought to respond, saying:

… The European Union’s critics are sometimes right. The EU can be too slow, too cumbersome and too bureaucratic. I want to help to put that right in the way the EU works with the rest of the world. So, to respond to challenges that are global and complex, only integrated strategies will do. The value of the European External Action Service will lie in its being able to bring together the many levers of influence that the European Union has – economic and political, plus civil and military crisis management tools – in support of a single political strategy. More than any other actor in the world today, the EU will be able to mobilize such a wide a range of instruments, with the weight and legitimacy of 27 democratic countries behind it. ¹⁰

As Ashton infers, the Lisbon Treaty included two amendments of particular importance to the EU’s effectiveness: the enhancement of the role and authority of the HR, an office first introduced under the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, and the creation of a new diplomatic service, responsible to the HR, the European External Action Service (EEAS). In terms of the HR, an office previously held by Javier Solana between 1999 and 2009, the Treaty sought to improve coherence in the policy-making process between external economic and foreign policies by ‘double-hatting’ the post and making its occupant, simultaneously, a member of the European Commission and chair of the EU Foreign Ministers’ Council. And it provided the HR with the traditional instrument of a Foreign Minister, a diplomatic service, the EEAS. This replaces the largely trade and aid-focused delegations of the European Commission. ¹¹ How important a step it is in providing the EU with more than simply a consistent global presence remains to be seen: it could be simply a re-branding of the EU’s external representation, or it could be a revolution in the diplomatic and foreign policy practices of the EU and its Member States, in providing an authoritative European source of information as well as representation. Together, these reforms are of direct relevance to this Special Edition as they were explicitly intended to generate greater coherence in EU foreign policy and to facilitate continuity through greater capacity building.

But even as it was being put together, the EEAS came in for criticism from several Member State governments, who were keen to point out its subordinate nature. As the then French Europe Minister, Pierre Lellouche, put it, ‘For France, there’s no question of the EEAS becoming a 28th diplomatic service’. For him (and others), the point was to ‘give greater weight to Europe’s action, in cooperation with the States. Baroness Ashton receives mandates from the States’. ¹² Ashton, herself suffering not insignificant criticism (see below), responded by describing the new service ‘not, as some critics say, a grab for power; but it is, unashamedly, a grab for effectiveness. The E[E]AS can make a positive difference – and I am determined that it will’. ¹³

But it is precisely here where the tension continues to lie. The EU qua EC has long been recognised as an economic actor – indeed, as an economic giant even if, in the old characterisation of Europe, also as a political dwarf and a military worm. Its economic and commercial impact is assessed elsewhere in this Special Edition, but the EU as a customs union with a number of other common policies provides a critical contextual factor in the EU’s political and strategic ‘actorness’ – even if the logic of a single market is sometimes ignored by Member States, or at least minimised. Even the Eurosceptic British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, declared that the EU could play:

… a crucial role in enabling the countries of Europe to work together to face the vast challenges of this century: the maintenance of our global competitiveness, the problem of climate change, the grim facts of global poverty and the need for the nations of Europe to use their collective weight in the world to deal with foreign policy issues. ¹⁴

But, as he was later to argue:

It is right that it [the EU] can be an extension of our influence in the world, but it is not a substitute for it … The External Action Service does not mean that we do not need British diplomatic posts or a British diplomatic presence, which are the only way to be sure of advancing the interests of the United Kingdom. ¹⁵

This boundary issue between the responsibilities or competences of the EU and the Member State governments has long been a critical factor in what has often been referred to as vertical coherence. ¹⁶ This has been matched, however, by a ‘horizontal’ problem, in that there has also been inter-institutional ‘turf-fighting’ in Brussels – with its own impact on effectiveness. Trade, for example, remains outside the responsibility of the HR and stays with the Commission, and the HR cooperates on, rather than determines, aid policy and enlargement issues. Other issues that have broken down traditional internal/external divisions such as terrorism, migration or climate change have meant other Commissioners as well as national Ministers are involved in policymaking. However ‘slippery’ the concept of coherence, the EU would appear to be subject to a whole array of problems in terms of policy responsibility and its implementation at different levels and in different policy areas.

Actorness and recognition

The ambiguous and even contested nature of the EU as neither a state nor simply a collection of states has, as the Editors have pointed out, created numerous problems. The EU/EC has long been recognised by others as either an observer or participant, as in the United Nations (UN) (since 1974) and its agencies, ¹⁷ by many other regional bodies with which it has agreements (including trade and other economic treaties and political dialogues) and by individual states.

Nonetheless, this recognition has sometimes been accompanied by a degree of ambiguity and ambivalence. Even when allies and partners have welcomed steps towards closer cooperation and greater unity of purpose, and have sought the EU’s collective support, often they have remained content also to maintain particular relationships with individual Member States, lobbying at both levels with varying degrees of success. If actorness in part can be assessed by the extent to which it is lobbied, the EU is clearly a significant actor, even if it is only on the part of those ‘who have mastered the intricacies of the European machinery, [and who are] … able to work the system to their advantage, making use of disputes over competence or bureaucratic rivalries to further their interests’. ¹⁸ But any relatively open policy-making process – the EU along with the Member States themselves – is subject to such pressures, though few actors (other than perhaps the United States) offer such multilevel opportunities. As François Godement remarked, this gives more authoritarian regimes an advantage – as he remarked apropos China: ‘China is a very unified actor and Europe is not … They don’t need to play divide and rule. The divisions are already there’. ¹⁹

Despite this, the Member States have continuously sought reforms designed to improve the EU’s capacity for effectiveness. These might be broken down into four interrelated elements: building capacity for decision-making; ensuring that the EU possesses appropriate policy instruments; creating the political framework that facilitates common action; and seeking to establish the EU’s legitimacy to act – it is less a question of whether the EU can be effective than whether it should be acting at all, effectively or not.

Building capacity

The Treaty of Lisbon was intended to strengthen the policy-making process by establishing something akin to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels, with its own diplomatic service. The inevitable compromise after the defeat of the Constitutional Treaty meant the loss of the title of Foreign Minister, but the HR remained a key appointment both in chairing the Foreign Ministers’ Council and as a Vice President of the Commission. And yet, as Missiroli has pointed out, while the HR might be the cornerstone of the reforms, she is only one face of the EU, with potential tension in her interaction with the others. These include the President of the European Council, who has a foreign policy role at the level of heads of government but who, even when there is a common EU position, still has to compete with the leaders of the Member States, who seem rarely to forego the demands of the international media to appear proactive. Foreign Ministers are also national politicians, normally keen to maintain their position in national party politics. This applies particularly to the Foreign Minister of the rotating EU Presidency, who has some residual responsibilities and, perhaps, some particular interests to promote or protect. And the President of the Commission, as well as several of the other members of the College of Commissioners, has proved determined to retain a key role in their particular areas. Moreover:

double-hatting the High Representative as Commission Vice President does not answer this last challenge given the obsolescence of traditional notions of ‘foreign policy’ and the foreign policy impact of, inter alia, financial regulation, border controls and migration, enlargement and climate change. ²⁰

Nonetheless, Ashton, as HR for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has been able to build on the infrastructure largely created under her predecessor, Javier Solana. At the outset, Solana was heavily reliant on Member States, ‘their diplomatic networks, their logistic capabilities, and their expertise in specific areas’. ²¹ However, he proceeded to institutionalise that expertise at the European level in ways that provided him not only with an autonomous source of information and intelligence but also a strong Brussels-based structure that allowed for continuous agitation for greater coherence and effectiveness in terms of policy. From the outset, he had what one of those involved termed:

… a nucleus of support … of policy-oriented officials with links to their national diplomatic services who could supply him with information, with advice – both inputs from those countries but also independent advice as they developed their own contacts working on his behalf largely at his disposal rather than at that of the Presidency. ²²

From this developed the so-called Situation Centre (SitCen), with coverage not only of external but also of internal security matters based on a growing exchange of more sensitive information ‘from our external intelligence services and the internal security services to jointly assess the terrorist threat as it develops both inside Europe and outside’. ²³ Since 2001, there has also been a permanent EU Military Staff, providing in-house expertise directed by the EU Military Committee made up of Chiefs of Defence from each Member State with early warning, situation assessment and strategic planning as its primary functions. Despite the furore surrounding the so-called Chocolate summit of April 2003 when the Belgians, French and Germans met in Brussels at the height of the acrimony over Iraq and called for a separate EU military headquarters, an ‘Operations Centre’ has been in existence since 2007.

In addition to these bodies, others were also officially attached to the HR’s office: while it has been the responsibility of the Council to appoint Special Representatives, they report to the Council via the HR. Their numbers have varied, covering the Middle East, the Great Lakes, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, the South Caucasus, Moldova, Central Asia and Sudan, and with some more active than others, some even based in Brussels. The HR also has responsibility as head of the board of the three agencies created by the Council: the European Defence Agency (EDA), the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris and the EU Satellite Centre at Torrejon. The EDA’s mission – to support Member States in their efforts to improve European defence capabilities in the field of crisis management and strengthen the European defence industrial base – was refined by its first Executive Director, Nick Witney, to meet two imperatives: ‘to spend money on the right stuff. To spend more money together, to pool resources increasingly within Europe’. In effect, however, all that the EDA has been able to do has been to ‘agitate, we can present awkward truths, we can act as a conscience, a gadfly and a catalyst’. ²⁴

While presenting awkward truths might not be the primary purpose of the EEAS, the organisation of a dedicated diplomatic service providing authoritative information from posts increasingly deserted by shrinking national diplomatic services offers the prospect of a European conceptualisation of European interests. So far, however, the turf-fights with the other European institutions, as well as resistance from Member States, have meant that Ashton has perforce had to deal with a number of centrifugal forces while trying to construct a diplomatic service, chair Council meetings and represent the EU abroad.

Given such preoccupations, it has not been easy to build on a particularly significant dimension of Solana’s legacy in terms of the EU’s presence and credibility, his personal diplomacy. After a year in office, Solana had travelled to 40 countries and maintained a fairly punishing schedule thereafter, determined as he said, to ensure:

that the European Union is sufficiently present and active in international organisations, particularly the United Nations and the OSCE … Travelling is of course not an end in itself. But I will continue to accumulate air miles for as long as I believe I can make a contribution to promoting the interests of the European Union in the world. We should be present and actively involved whenever and wherever issues of international order and security are on the agenda. ²⁵

But, he added, ‘visibility by itself is not enough. We have to ensure that we have sustainable and coherent policies’. And there of course lay the rub. Despite his frequent visits and having built up familiarity and trust with authorities in the Middle East, even he was largely silent and powerless when the Member States failed to agree on any substantive response to the Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza in 2006 and 2008.

Ashton, too, as the Libyan crisis showed in 2011, had to wait for the 27 Member States to agree before she could act. While she has the right to initiate action, she still depends on bringing at least the great majority to a consensus. Ashton perhaps suffered unduly from the outset from the varying demands of her office, being criticised for not travelling enough – Lellouche, the French European Minister, criticised her for not visiting Haiti immediately after the earthquake in order to wave the European flag, adding somewhat disingenuously ‘I guess that not everyone is a Nicolas Sarkozy’ ²⁶ – or for travelling too much – in February 2010, Lellouche’s colleague, the French defence Minister Hervé Morin, was critical when Ashton opted to go to Ukraine rather than attending her first meeting of EU Defence Ministers, adding: ‘Isn’t it rich that this morning, to display the ties between NATO and the EU, we have the NATO secretary general (Anders Fogh Rasmussen) here but not the high representative for the first meeting since the Lisbon treaty came into effect’. ²⁷ These problems are perhaps indicative both of Ashton’s inexperience (or poor advice) and the impossibility of maintaining the personal diplomacy demanded of the post, chairing Foreign (and Defence) Minister Councils and various Association Councils at Foreign Minister level, constructing the EEAS and attending meetings of the Commission – all without a formal Deputy.

Policy instruments

The HR’s lack of control over key EU policy instruments such as trade and aid/sanctions has necessarily meant time and effort in liaising with the Commission, while the use of civilian or military missions in support of the so-called Petersberg tasks necessitates the close cooperation of the Member States. ²⁸

Kouchner, then French Foreign Minister, may have urged that Ashton be given the tools necessary to fully carry out her tasks and thereby live up to the expectations placed in her. ²⁹ But, while the HR was given a seat in the Commission as a Vice President, it has not meant that she determines Commission policy. She simply has not had the authority to coordinate the use of the policy instruments within the framework of the EC Treaty. That authority remains with the Commission President. ³⁰ Given the foreign policy impact of many of the EU’s internal policies, ³¹ as well as its responsibility for many external economic policies, the Commission has unsurprisingly sought to protect its position. On issues that relate to the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, for example, Ashton has had to act with the Commissioner responsible for Enlargement and the Neighbourhood, Štefan Füle – as, for example, in the case of the Joint Declaration on a Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean of March 2011, that sought to frame a new EU relationship with the Maghreb countries in the light of the Arab Spring. ³²

In responding to crises, the EU’s access to a wide range of policy instruments, from aid and assistance to the use of military forces, has been seen as a potential strength – not least in comparison to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As the Head of the EU’s Military Staff suggested in September 2011, ‘Diplomatic power is based on the instruments you have behind you’. ³³ Certainly having a comprehensive range of policy instruments that could be used to prevent crisis descending into conflict, or respond to a humanitarian disaster, is potentially invaluable – if used in timely fashion. But while there have been many instances of the EU extending emergency relief, and assisting with the repatriation of EU citizens as well as other refugees, there has been visible reluctance to interpret the Petersberg tasks with any consistency or speed, whether in response to a UN mandate or not. ³⁴

In those crises management situations that demand action within the framework of CFSP or CSDP, the HR, of necessity, has to ensure a consensus among the Member States. Insofar as there have been some 24 missions since 2003, it suggests that the EU and the Member States have taken seriously the aim of responding comprehensively to crises using state-like policy instruments. It has to be admitted, however, that only seven of these missions have involved the use of military forces. Most have been of very short duration and for limited purposes. Others have involved police forces (especially for training), monitors and lawyers. The Member States might call for preparatory work to be done by the HR, the EU Military Staff (EUMS) or the Civil-Military cell, but their scale and impact have inevitably been limited.

The reforms following the introduction of the EEAS have led to the possibility of better coordination between the civil and military dimensions of crisis management, through working to Ashton and with a senior official responsible for Crisis Response and Operational Coordination. During the Arab Spring, the EUMS was involved in planning and coordination activities as part of the EU’s overall response, and was given the task of preparing an EU Force for Libya if requested by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In the event, the invitation was not forthcoming and NATO undertook the implementation of the no-fly zone. Significantly, the proposed Operational Headquarters of European Union Force (EUFOR) Libya was to be located in Rome. It was not until February 2012 that the EU’s Operations Centre established in 2007 was actually used – when it was set the task of ‘coordinating and strengthening civil-military synergies between the three CSDP missions in the Horn of Africa’. ³⁵ Some Member States, usually led by the United Kingdom, had hitherto been insistent that national headquarters be used – as in Potsdam for the EUFOR Democratic Republic of Congo or Northwood for EU Naval Force (NAVFOR) Atlanta. NATO headquarters have been used for the ‘Berlin Plus’ operation in Bosnia Herzegovina. ³⁶

Coordinating policy instruments and the capacity to employ them may be vital for effectiveness, but the depth of the economic recession since the financial crisis of 2008 has led to ever deeper austerity and cutbacks in government expenditure. The Director General of the EUMS (Ton van Osch) reported in September 2011 that some 80 per cent of his time was spent talking about capabilities, less on the basis of building capabilities to meet military or civilian Headline Goals – agreed in 1999 – than seeking to ensure some degree of coordination in keeping with Member State commitments both to the EU and their domestic economic needs. ³⁷

Faced with the demands to cut expenditure, Member States have still not coordinated their actions. In fact, they have made little reference to commitments undertaken either towards NATO or the EU. As the US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, declared in June 2011 in the light of NATO’s Libyan operation, in which less than half the NATO members participated: ‘Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they can’t. The military capabilities simply aren’t there …’ ³⁸ And, in an echo of the Kagan debate of 2002, when Kagan claimed Americans were from Mars and Europeans from Venus, ³⁹ Gates added:

In the past, I’ve worried openly about NATO turning into a two-tiered alliance: Between members who specialize in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping, and talking tasks, and those conducting the ‘hard’ combat missions. Between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership – be they security guarantees or headquarters billets – but don’t want to share the risks and the costs. This is no longer a hypothetical worry. We are there today. And it is unacceptable. ⁴⁰

Political will

Even while Gates posed the possibility of NATO becoming a ‘collective military irrelevance’, EU Member States have faced additional problems, in a period of austerity, of finding the political will to halt the continued decline in expenditure on defence – a key factor for the United Kingdom in initiating European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in 1998–1999. ⁴¹ And, as Javier Solana pointed out in 2009:

The key to the future success of ESDP missions is to continue to develop a culture of planning and conducting combined civilian and military operations together. All this is entirely within our reach. All we need is the political will. ⁴²

Lisbon was one of a series of Treaties designed to bolster that willingness to act and to play ‘a consequential role’. ⁴³ Their implementation, however, left several Member States unimpressed, with some in May 2011, for example, emphasising the need for better ‘information exchange’, including the better distribution of sensitive documents, especially by the bigger Member States. The logic for Austria was the need for greater trust between EU and Member State embassies: ‘EU delegations sometimes seem to “clean” their own reports submitted to the EEAS headquarters before sharing them with member states, which has led to certain irritations’. ⁴⁴ For their part, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg saw it in terms of the need to create a common diplomatic culture. Such commitment might have reflected support for further European integration or, as one Swede suggested when reporting on why Sweden had taken a lead on several foreign policy issues, simply that there was little alternative:

beggars can’t be choosers: the EU is really the only foreign policy arena we have access to. We are not in NATO, not in the G20 and not on the UN Security Council. Having this in mind, Sweden’s high score on leadership could be seen as a questionable investment explained largely by the lack of alternatives. ⁴⁵

Moreover, austerity budgets have not only led to cuts in defence expenditure but Ministries of Foreign Affairs have found themselves subject to further cutbacks on staff and resources. Many may perforce then find added value in a ‘European’ perspective supported by a European diplomatic service. However, the British Conservative–led government has regarded the EEAS with suspicion insofar as it appears to have been assumed that it, and the HR, would inevitably seek to expand their role. Indeed, the Conservative Minister for Europe, David Lidington, not only pointed out that if the EEAS ‘tries to do too much it will achieve little’, but went on to report that his Foreign Secretary, William Hague, had ‘sent out instructions all round the world to be aware of competence creep’. ⁴⁶

Legitimacy

Such suspicions may be particularly British, but there are other tensions such as, on the part of smaller states, an ‘innate mistrust in the big states’ intentions’. ⁴⁷ Nor, necessarily, does the EU’s commitment to ‘effective multilateralism’ win trust and support. There have been a host of examples where individual Member States have pursued their own bilateral policies, even at the UN – Germany’s abstention on UN Security Council Resolution 1703 on a ‘no-fly-zone’ over Libya being a case in point. While Germany’s abstention meant that it did not take part in implementing the Resolution, it, together with Ireland, has laid stress on the importance of a UN mandate to legitimise EU action. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland now has a ‘triple lock’ (with any military action having to have UN, Government and Dáil approval) though this was not seen to undermine the effective participation of Ireland in the so-called Nordic EU battlegroup that had been agreed in 2006.

While there have been many critics of Ireland’s triple lock mechanism – not least for seemingly placing Irish policy in the hands of the permanent members of the UN Security Council ⁴⁸ – it raises an important issue relating to support for an effective EU actor.

Clearly there are Eurosceptic parties in many Member States that have remained unconvinced of the need for closer political cooperation within the EU. Their role within their national political systems inevitably varies, but it remains the case that few national parliaments have much control over the executives on issues of European foreign and security policy, even though EU policymaking remains intergovernmental. ⁴⁹ Nor, for the reason of intergovernmentality, does the European Parliament. It may be that the European Parliament (EP) played an important conditioning role in the shaping of the EEAS, through its control of the EU’s budget and responsibility for staffing regulations, but otherwise its role is limited. Ashton has agreed to consult the EP before EU missions are employed – which is often rather more than national parliaments can achieve unless, as in the German case, German troops are actually deployed.

This lack of oversight of the EU raises the question of wider acceptance of the EU’s foreign policy role: the generally high level of ignorance on the part of the public. Even Eurosceptic tabloids do not often find much that is newsworthy. ⁵⁰ It is arguable, given the usual low level of interest in foreign policy at the national level, that lack of public awareness of European foreign policy is of particular importance. And yet there is no easy recourse to that sense of legitimacy that national governments have in pursuing a foreign policy. ⁵¹ The policy may sometimes be challenged, but there is popular acceptance that foreign policy is something governments should undertake. Despite the Treaties, that sense of legitimacy does not accrue to the HR and the EU. It may be won with continuous effectiveness, but that still presupposes a public awareness of success at a time when Foreign Ministers and heads of Government remain determined to play their own role.

Conclusion

Even with the moves to extend EU action in and off the Horn of Africa, to develop further security sector reform and training missions elsewhere, many have seen the limited and incoherent EU response to the Arab Spring, and especially Libya, as indicative of the ineffectiveness of the EU as an international actor. One unnamed diplomat was reported as declaring the ‘EU’s security and defence policy is closed until further notice’ and another ‘the CFSP died in Libya – we just have to pick a sand dune under which we can bury it’. ⁵² Menon also cites an editorial in Le Monde:

The European Union, for its part, has failed miserably. ‘Institutional’ Europe has not faced up to the challenge. In the North African saga it does not exist. It is incapable of agreeing on how to act, on whether to recognise the Libyan opposition and most, of all, on the legitimacy of the use of force. The disunity is total and particularly striking when it is a question of deciding on war – that is to say when history becomes tragedy and it is necessary to move from frothy rhetoric about the rights of man. ⁵³

Such a view might at least coincide with President Sarkozy’s disappointment with Ashton for not following – or being unable to follow, given German and others’ reluctance – his policy towards Libya. But it fits, too, with the wider problem of the EU acting effectively in times of crisis when speed places a premium on policy-making capacity and the rapid exploitation of appropriate policy instruments. Too often, critics have pointed to the significance of consultation rather than action. Chris Bickerton, for example, has suggested that:

… what lies at the heart of EU foreign policy are a series of internal concerns, namely the need to broker agreement among the member states (damage limitation) and legitimize the inactivity of member states in foreign affairs, the balance in political power among the institutions and the search for a European identity able to respond to some of the existential problems faced by an EU that lacks popular legitimacy and a convincing post-Cold War narrative. ⁵⁴

Juncos and Reynolds have also concluded that ‘the journey is as important as the destination: the process of Brussels-level information gathering, consultation, cooperation and consensual decision-making is essentially what the CSFP/ESDP is all about’. ⁵⁵ Tonra, from a rather different perspective, sees policymakers ‘not just acting to contribute to the resolution of a problem but to see themselves acting collectively – that is what is expected of them’. ⁵⁶

And yet there remains an expectation – from others even if not member states preoccupied with the Eurocrisis and its consequences – of something more than simply consultation. Thus, on the one hand, even against the practicalities of tightened belts on the part of most EU Members – and what Sharp neatly summed up as the consequent ‘disjuncture between champagne tastes and beer budgets’ ⁵⁷ – there remains a political determination to retain a prerogative of autonomous action in the field of foreign and security policy. But, on the other hand, the pressures that led to the creation of the EEAS and the enhanced role of the HR continue, possibly heightened by the need to offset the perceived weaknesses created by the Eurocrisis. European leaders, therefore, continue to reiterate their belief that acting collectively holds out the better prospect of resolving a crisis, bringing both individual as well as collective benefits.

How long these contradictions can be maintained given these conflicting pressures is an obvious unknown. Only to appear to act collectively, given the changes in the international system, would appear politically naive if not short-sighted, and contrary to the constantly reiterated need for collective multilateral action. ‘Rhetorical entrapment’, ⁵⁸ of course, has its limits if few are actually listening to the rhetoric. But, whether as a result of ‘mission creep’ or simply carrying out the core tasks of diplomacy, there is undoubtedly a determination on the part of many within the EEAS to undertake that public diplomacy needed to persuade third parties of the EU’s relevance, while the office of HR is likely to retain support among at least some of the Member States creating a constant pressure for collective action.