Bureaucrats Cannot Be Entrusted with EU Foreign Policy

The renewed assertiveness of Putin's Russia has forced the European Union to contemplate once more its own inadequacy on the international scene. The post-Cold War vision of a pacified world, where European soft power would use trade relations, economic weight, and cooperation for development as substitutes of the traditional Realpolitik principles and means of foreign policy, is clashing with reality.

The Union already exhibits many of the attributes that make an international player relevant. On the basis of its legal identity acquired with the Lisbon Treaty, today the EU is officially represented, in more than 120 states and international organizations, by a network of 139 diplomatic delegations and offices that act are veritable embassies. The network is part of the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU diplomatic corps that assists the High Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy (the EU minister for foreign affairs, in journalists' parlance).

The EEAS has a staff of 3,500 people, and its executives are drawn from the diplomatic services of member states, of the Commission, and the Secretariat of the Council of the European Union. Personnel is apportioned between the Brussels headquarters (1,400 people) and the various delegations, where they work side by side with over 3,000 European Commission employees. In fact, the Service co-manages external relations jointly with the so-called Relex group of the Commission, which maintains its powers in the areas of enlargement, foreign trade, and international cooperation. EEAS has a €500 million budget, a puny amount if compared to the €36 billion spent by the US government for its State Department each year, or the €7 billion total spent my member states to conduct their foreign policies. In spite of the paucity of financial resources, the EU is currently involved in 17 international operations (military, civil, and of a mixed nature) in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, either leading autonomously or in collaboration with NATO and other international organizations.

But the most binding constraint on EU external action is not financial, but institutional, since it has to do with the overarching complexity of EU foreign policy decision-making, which often delegates disproportionate amounts of power to bureaucrats and bureaucratic procedures. Ukraine is a case in a point. You just need to look at the effects of having the Directorate General for Trade of the Commission negotiate the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement from a purely technical point of view. In fact, many chapters were overwhelmingly political, including "cooperation and convergence in foreign policy and security", "political dialogue and reforms", "justice, freedom, and security", and had overwhelming political effects.

The EU will be able to deal effectively with emergent powers, only if it overcomes its present bureaucratic approach to Common Foreign Security Policy. This also means that, on foreign affairs, unanimity must yield to majority voting in the European Council, as already occurs for other areas of EU policy. Russia's reaction to the Ukrainian protest movement, which ultimately led to the projection of military power and the Blitzkrieg annexation of Crimea, shows that European diplomacy must change if it wants to cope with the strategic determination and unconventional approach in foreign policy being used by the Eurasian power to reassert its regional primacy.