MEPs struggle to influence creation of diplomatic corps

MEPs complain about the lack of influence on the formation of the EEAS.

MEPs have complained about a lack of access to the group that is advising Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, on the formation of the European External Action Service. The group include representatives of the European Commission and of the Council of Ministers, but not of the Parliament. However, since 16 February Eva Palatová, an official from the secretariat of the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, has been allowed to attend the group’s deliberations and inform MEPs.

This is an early success for the Friends of the EEAS, a pressure group formed because of concerns that the advisory group was not paying sufficient attention to the Parliament and was sharing too little information. Members of the Friends of the EEAS stress, however, that they are not offering a competing vision of the EEAS. “We want to support Ashton,” says Alexander Lambsdorff, a German Liberal MEP.

Small and unofficial group

The ‘friends’ group is small, unofficial and independent of the Parliament, but it contains a cross-party selection of MEPs, including two former chairmen of the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, German Elmar Brok and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski of Poland, both of them from the Parliament’s centre-right (EPP) group. Brok has acted as an unofficial point of contact with Ashton.

The other MEPs on the group are Reimer Böge, a German Christian Democrat who follows the EEAS on the budgets committee; Franziska Brantner, a German Green; Arnaud Danjean, the French chair of the sub-committee on security and defence (EPP); Richard Howitt, a UK Labour MEP; Andrey Kovatchev, a Bulgarian MEP from the centre-right GERB party; Eduard Kukan of Slovakia (EPP), who chairs the delegation for relations with the Western Balkans; and Hannes Swoboda, an Austrian Socialist.

Of the ten MEPs, four are German and three from the new member states, while there is only one Briton and only one French. By contrast, Ashton’s advisory group includes only one German and one Hungarian.

The Friends of the EEAS also includes non-politicians. Wilhelm Schönfelder is a former ambassador of Germany to the EU. John Richardson was head of the Commission’s delegation to the United Nations and is now with the German Marshall Fund. Karen Fogg headed the Commission’s delegations in Romania and Turkey. There are also representatives from think-tanks, of which the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Open Society Institute have been most involved in the group’s creation.

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