The setup of the European External Action Service Inexplicable by grand theories of European integration?
Abstract
It has now been more than one year since the Treaty of Lisbon took effect. The last year was characterized by an intensive and controversial discussion between the European Union (EU) institutions and member states on the setup of arguably the most important institutional innovation besides the new post of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR): the European External Action Service (EEAS).
The EEAS has the purpose of serving its head, HR Ashton, in fulfilling her tasks of, inter alia, conducting the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and increasing the efficiency of EU external relations. Regarding hitherto the execution of EU foreign policy, the HR admitted in the run-up to the establishment of the EEAS that “the EU can be too slow, too cumbersome and too bureaucratic”.
With the setup of the new diplomatic service the EU wishes to overcome occurring difficulties that result out of the complex net of responsibilities that characterise the external relations of the EU and thus ‘give the EU a stronger voice around the world, and greater impact on the ground’. Given the fact that the EEAS constitutes a whole new EU institution without predecessor and is therefore built from scratch, it is very interesting from a political scientist point of view to see where and how the new service is positioned in the institutional architecture of the EU system.
Since the EEAS is ought to bring together rather intergovernmental (e.g. CFSP) and supranational (e.g. development cooperation) policy spheres of EU external action, a discussion on how it can be scrutinized by grand theories of European integration seems to offer valuable insights.