The European union's common foreign policy: the role of the commission in an “intergovernmental” process

ABSTRACT

The importance of South Africa's relations with the European Union (EU) is well established. What is perhaps less well understood is the complexity that underlays the foreign policy‐making process within the EU. South Africa's own form of consultation and consensus style of decision‐making, albeit extensive by nation‐state standards, pails when confronted by the multi‐layered process of foreign policy‐making in the EU. The current negotiations between South Africa and the European Union over the “free trade” versus “development and trade” options makes this study of Europe's foreign policy making process both timely and important. To understand the present negotiations it is useful to examine the more recent past, in particular the 1993–4 EU joint action that has been instrumental in shaping contemporary policy.

It is more than twenty five years since Henry Kissinger drew attention to what remains an unresolved problem by asking the question – who speaks for Europe in foreign affairs? The establishment of a spokesperson to perform this function in the 1997 Amsterdam treaty revisions has done little to clarify this central issue. The future spokesperson will be a bureaucrat drawn from the Council Secretariat, not an international statesperson and, as such, can hardly been seen as speaking “for Europe”. The actors in the EU's decision‐making process are diverse. They include the individual fifteen member state governments; the collective EU institution the Council of Ministers; the diplomatic representatives of COREPER (Committee of Permanent Representatives); the Commission; the European Parliament and national parliaments; and, arguably, even the Court of Justice if the legal basis for action requires a treaty competence. Add to this the non‐institutional factors such as domestic and European interest groups and the more general world system or realpolitik factors and the difficulty of Europe “speaking with one voice” becomes all too apparent.