How do EU Foreign Policy-Makers Decide? Institutional Orientations within the European External Action Service

Abstract

Four years after its formal establishment, the European External Action Service (EEAS) remains in a state of complex and overlapping areas of competence. There are interlocking layers of political and administrative governance, where the service has to interact with, and answer to, different national and intergovernmental political masters as well as supranational actors, notably the European Commission and the European Parliament. The formal political decision-making power with regard to the EU’s common foreign and security policy lies with the Council, whilst substantial competences, notably in the field of the European Neighbourhood (ENP) and trade policies, as well as development and cooperation, remain under the control of the European Commission. The EEAS’s autonomy and institutional orientation are both much debated and empirically unexplored. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, this article undertakes a behavioural analysis of EEAS decision-making. Empirical findings suggest that there are competing institutional logics at work among different groups of staff which affect their respective administrative decisional behaviour. Supranational recruits tend to be more community-minded, whereas officials with an intergovernmental background have a propensity to be more member state oriented.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

Earlier drafts of this article have been presented at an EEAS workshop hosted at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge in June 2014, and the 44th Annual Conference of the University Association of Contemporary European Studies (UACES) in Cork (IR), 3–5 September 2014. The author wishes to thank the panel participants, two anonymous reviewers, as well as his colleagues at the University of Agder, notably Jarle Trondal and Jan Thorsvik, for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. The mission letter issued by Juncker reads ‘To liaise more effectively with the other members of the college, following your suggestion, you will have your headquarters in the Berlaymont, and the commission will put a cabinet of an appropriate size at your disposal, about half of which will be commission officials’ (Juncker 2014: 4).

2. While I cannot rule out any omissions on my part, I found one recent exception in an article by Nicola Chelotti (2013). However, his analysis, based on quantitative data from 138 diplomats, only includes national representatives in Council CFSP/CSDP working groups, examining their mandates from MS governments, and does not help the purpose of elucidating the orientations of EEAS officials.

3. The Economist, 6–12 September, p. 30.

4. Other variables and data, not reported in detail in this article, include: perception of institutional cooperation/competition, conflicts and cleavages, communication patterns, and personal views/attitudes regarding EU institutional and foreign policy issues.

5. The HRVP on recruitment and staffing of the EEAS in a press communiqué after the vote on the EEAS Decision in the EP, available at: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/EN/foraff/115736.pdf.

6. The format of this article does not allow for more exhaustive quotations, but to illustrate the different views and opinions with regard to the newcomers it should be mentioned that in some instances they were seen as an ‘enriching and invaluable resource for the EEAS’ (#9) whereas the other extreme was to perceive them as ‘Trojan horses of the member states’ (#39).

7. This is also corroborated by collected survey data on conflicts and cleavages in the EEAS, which due to the article format cannot be reported here in full.