EU foreign service starts to take shape

THE shape of the European Union’s foreign service became clearer after two days of discussions between its chief, Catherine Ashton, and the foreign ministers of the 27 member states.

The EU’s huge development budget will come under the new foreign service and Ashton will have a number of deputies to help her who most likely will be professional civil servants.

The ministers desperately tried to end the power struggles over the service being waged between the Union’s institutions: the Council representing the member states, the Commission and the European Parliament.

Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said bureaucrats might love wrangling, “but we are foreign ministers and we want to get on with foreign policy and not formalities and logistics”.

But several countries continued to insist that each member state has a fair number of their citizens employed in the service, that will include the approximately 3,000 staff of the currently Commission-controlled service worldwide.

Foreign Minister Micheál Martin said he agreed with Ashton that the priority was to have good quality people. She has also stressed that, as well as regional and political balance, there needs to be gender balance as the foreign service is currently top-heavy with males.

The next major job is to get a legal framework in place to allow Ashton to appoint her team and develop the service. The top jobs, not just in the EU embassies around the world but the secretary general, her deputies and other positions need to be filled.

However member states, having taken control of this aspect, need to get the European Parliament onside. They control the budget but they also want a say in some of the senior appointments including putting her deputies through public hearings.

They also discussed the role of foreign ministers from the member states and supported the idea that countries with expertise or good relations with a particular country or region could be employed to get support for EU positions.

There was complete agreement that development aid should be a core part of the External Action Service (EAS) and an extension of its policy approach while the Commission would do the programming.

Trade remains a sole competence of the Commission, but here too the EAS would have an input in relation to the overall policy towards third countries.