The EEAS's woes are not a Kallas problem
The news that national governments may want to gut the EU's foreign service has been greeted with cheers from people who loathe the current high representative for foreign affairs.
Yesterday witnessed the very bizarre phenomenon of two news outlets reporting polar opposite headlines about the same document. In the morning, the Financial Times came out with a bombshell article entitled, “EU countries weigh ‘tearing apart’ bloc’s diplomatic service.” “France, Germany and other European nations are discussing proposals for a radical overhaul of the EU’s 15-year-old diplomatic service, including stripping powers from the bloc’s chief diplomat,” the paper previewed on social media.
Then, later in the day, Reuters came out with an article entitled, “France floats revamp of EU diplomacy with ‘reinforced’ role for Kallas.” “The paper reflects a view among EU officials and diplomats that the bloc was too slow and disjointed as it tried to react to the war in Gaza and other emergencies, amid divisions between its institutions, leaders and 27 member governments,” Reuters writes, saying that the French paper suggests “boosting the role for foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas in a bid to improve the bloc's response to crises.”
Believe it or not, both articles were about the same internal document. So, what could account for the difference? Four words: Ursula von der Leyen.
The European Commission president, who has been engaged in a high-profile turf war with the EU high representative for foreign affairs for a year now, has a direct line to the FT. It is the go-to paper when the Commission wants to leak something. It seems to me that what happened here, and I’m only guessing, is VDL’s team leaked the paper to the FT giving it the most anti-Kallas spin they could. What the FT has highlighted is just one of the options floated in the paper for fixing the EU External Action Service which Kallas heads. But another option is actually strengthening the high representative role in order to improve Europe’s weak position on the global stage. Reuters focused on the latter, the FT focused on the former.
Social media commentators who loath Kallas for her seemingly singular obsession with Russia and weak statements on Gaza were quick to cheer the FT report. “Best news of the year,” proclaimed French commentator Arnaud Bertrand. “Kaja Kallas' only diplomatic achievement may end up uniting Europe on the need to get rid of her, and dismantle her own office.”
But here’s the thing: this isn’t about Kaja Kallas. This is about a failed institutional setup that is the fault of the EU’s national governments. Three things have combined to expose the weakness of that setup: perilous geopolitical circumstances in which EU countries are being humiliated, the first high representative with the ambition to use the position as it was originally envisaged, and a power-hungry European Commission president who resents her.
“EU countries are great in finding scapegoats for their own failures in European foreign policy,” observed the author Ricardo Borges de Castro yesterday in response to the FT article. “Kallas is certainly not the problem. The Commission/EEAS articulation was always a hybrid and difficult. With a presidential and centralising von der Leyen this has become a bigger issue.”
The current high representative role was created by the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. It was meant to give the EU a stronger voice on the world stage by establishing an ‘EU foreign minister’ that could speak for the union. But almost immediately after they agreed to establish the position, understanding in theory the need for it, the worst instincts of national governments kicked in and they started to undermine it. First by refusing to call it an EU foreign minister and instead giving it an unwieldy and confusing title. And then by appointing an unknown Brussels bureaucrat with little policy experience to be the first holder of the position, rather than a former foreign minister.
As Julien Hoez expertly outlined on Substack yesterday: “The institutional design is deliberately ambiguous. Lisbon’s architects wanted a stronger EU foreign policy voice but could not agree on who would control it. So they built a service that answers to everyone, and to no one in particular.” The treaty not only created the position but put it in charge of a new institution, the EEAS, which is in the strange situation of straddling both the Commission and the Council. This was the result of a compromise between the drafters of the EU constitution (turned Lisbon Treaty) who wanted executive-level foreign policy competence and skittish national governments who insisted that the high representative should be accountable to all 27 foreign ministers and only be able to take positions when she’s gotten the permission of all of them. The result has been a mess. The job has been a poisoned chalice that none of the four office-holders have succeeded with (Julien does a nice job outlining the problems with all of them).
The fault lies not so much with the office-holders but with the impossible task they were given. As I write in Chapter 12 of my book The Owned Continent: “The job comes with the expectation of power but no authority to use it.”
“Foreign policy is defined in the EU treaties as being a completely national competence. The creation of a High Representative for Foreign Affairs was always in conflict with this. The next round of treaty change should redefine the EU’s relationship with foreign policy, saying it is a shared competence between member states and Brussels. The most obvious thing to do is to get rid of the unanimity requirement for foreign policy decisions. If Kallas can be allowed to adopt policies with a qualified majority (weighted by a country’s population) vote, it would give her more room for manoeuvre.”
The internal French paper (it is unclear whether this was also backed by Germany as the FT claimed) essentially acknowledges that mistakes were made when creating the EEAS. An internal email sent by Kallas to the 5,000 employees of the EEAS yesterday also acknowledges this. “The relationship between the EEAS, the Commission and Member States has been discussed since the Service was established,” she wrote. “Given the unprecedented geopolitical challenges we face, it is only natural that these discussions attract renewed attention and take on greater intensity.”
The paper, which the government says was not approved by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot (whom she will see later today in Paris for an awkwardly-timed meeting) and does not reflect an official French position, reportedly outlines three options for reforming the EEAS: bringing it entirely under the authority of the Commission, shifting its key functions to the Council, or keeping it as a separate institution but giving the high representative more authority. Funny how that last option, the one von der Leyen would hate the most, didn’t lead the FT article.
In his piece yesterday Julien noted that what has gotten Kallas into trouble is that she has dared to take strong positions, such as when she responded to the oval office attack on Zelensky by saying “the free world needs a new leader” (for which she was chastised by von der Leyen’s team, a story I tell in my book), or when she made harsh comments about China in May. It could also be about a new report claiming she compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s apartheid system during a private meeting in Mexico City in May - reflecting the sentiment of some but not all EU member states. “The current wave of criticism reflects something baked in from the start. Kallas speaking her own mind on EU-China relations is not a character flaw; it is what happens when the person in the role actually tries to use it,” Julien writes. “The overlap between the EEAS, the Commission’s external relations directorates, and national foreign ministries is not a management failure; it is structural.”
But the ideas to dismantle the EEAS outlined in this paper, essentially returning the functions back to the Council and Commission and throwing things back to how they were before 2009, does not fix the problem. It is not the fault of the EEAS or Kallas that the EU has had a humiliating response to Trump’s threats and a disjointed response to Russia. The fault for that lies with national capitals, and the European Commission president who is happy to rally behind their cowardly inaction. As Julien concludes:
“We Europeans have two options: We can continue patching up a system designed for a completely different era, reshuffling functions between institutions that were never built to run the geopolitical juggernaut that we should be and simply hope that the next crisis finds the right coalition willing to act. Or we can accept that genuine strategic autonomy requires genuine institutional courage: treaty change, democratic legitimacy, strong institutions, and a foreign policy entity with the mandate, resources, power and guts to match Europe’s actual weight in the world.
Blaming the High Representative for the current dysfunction is Brussels’ favourite sport, but it does nothing but embarrass us in front of our citizens and the wider world. Building the institution that would make that blame unnecessary is the harder work. It is also the only work that matters.”
The problem is that the EEAS was only set up halfway. Each time that EU national governments agree to make a leap forward in integration in order to make Europe stronger, they immediately handicap the institutions that they set up. The ideas laid out in this paper come from this same short-term, self-destructive impulse that we so often see from national capitals. It does not solve the problem of Europe’s geopolitical irrelevance, it only make it worse. If the EEAS isn’t working then it should be strengthened, not weakened or destroyed.
“Defunding the EEAS now is geopolitical self-sabotage,” warned European Parliament Vice President Javi Lopez, an ally of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, yesterday. “At a time when Europe needs a stronger voice in the world, weakening the very service that projects our interests and values abroad is an act of strategic negligence. Less global presence. Fewer diplomatic tools. Less influence. Less Europe. How exactly are we supposed to defend diplomacy over force by dismantling our own diplomats?”