Europe's Foreign Policy Is Broken by Design--Here's How to Fix It

Kaja Kallas is not the problem; the EU's dysfunctional institutional architecture is crippling its global influence.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-foreign-policy-is-broken-by-design-heres-how-to-fix-it



Like the daily newspaper Le Monde recently, European media are regularly highlighting the significant difficulties faced by former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas in carrying out her duties as High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. She has struggled to promote a policy that would enable Europe to exert influence on the global geopolitical stage commensurate with its demographic and economic weight. Beyond whatever mistakes Kallas may have made during her first year in office, she is above all a victim of a seriously dysfunctional institutional set-up.

According to the treaties, foreign and security policy remains the exclusive prerogative of the member states, with the Union called upon only to play a coordinating role between them. This is why the Council theoretically holds pre-eminence within the European institutions in this area, while the European Commission has no particular competence. It is also why the Treaty of Lisbon created the post of High Representative with a very special status. Appointed at the same time as the President of the Commission, the High Representative is a member of the Council of the Union and, as such, permanently chairs the Councils of Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Development Aid Ministers. According to the treaty, the High Representative should also chair the Foreign Trade Council, but this presidency was withdrawn a few years ago to preserve the turf of the Commission and its Directorate-General for Trade. In the other areas of EU action, the ministers of whichever member state holds the rotating presidency take turns chairing the Councils of Ministers.

The High Representative is also a Commissioner and Vice-President of the Commission. This dual role was designed to ensure the necessary coordination between the foreign and security policy defined by the member states within the Council and the actions of the Commissioners and Directorates-General that have a direct impact on these issues, such as DG Trade or those dealing with enlargement, the Mediterranean, or development aid. To mark this special status within the European institutions, the High Representative also heads a separate administration, the European External Action Service (EEAS), which belongs neither to the Council nor to the Commission.

However, this institutional architecture, established in 2010 following the Treaty of Lisbon, has proved dysfunctional on several levels—precisely at a moment when, due to mounting geopolitical threats, Europe should urgently become able to respond in real time. The first and most well-known level of dysfunction concerns the unanimity rule: common foreign and security policy is one of the few areas where this requirement continues to apply within the Union. This allows a country such as Hungary, for example, to single-handedly block for weeks or even months the most urgent decisions needed to address existential threats to the Union, such as those related to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

snip