Ashton in bid to gain more powers
Ashton in bid to gain more powers
Mid-term review of diplomatic service is foreign policy chief’s attempt to build legacy.
It has been a good week for Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief.
On Monday (29 July), she became the first foreign envoy to be allowed to visit Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s president, since he was deposed and detained by the military in a coup on 3 July. The two-hour visit signalled Ashton’s arrival on the scene as a mediator who is taken seriously by both Morsi’s Islamist supporters and the military that is clamping down on them.
In a sign that the ‘quiet diplomacy’ that Ashton pledged to pursue after her appointment late in 2009 may be working in Egypt, she has now dispatched Bernardino León (click here to read our profile), one of the most respected diplomats in the European External Action Service, to continue the shuttle diplomacy between the parties.
But the visit also highlighted another feature of Ashton’s tenure: her tendency not to take positions, not to offend, and not to demand.
“I am not here to ask people to do things, I am here to find out where the common ground might be,” she told a news conference. “I do not come here to say somebody should do this, somebody should do that. This is your country.” Ashton made her comments just two days after security forces had shot dead some 80 protesters.
Being low-key may well be the right approach in Egypt, a country notoriously testy – even paranoid – about foreign influence. (The US administration is now being vilified by both the pro- and anti-Morsi camps for supporting the other side. No such danger for the EU: as long as Ashton is its spokesperson, nobody will know what its policy is.) But in Ashton’s case, not saying anything of interest is not a diplomatic strategy but a character trait.
This leads to the second good event for Ashton this week: the mid-term review of the European External Action Service, whose publication coincided with her visit to Egypt and was surrounded by a similar level of secrecy.
Published in the dead of summer, the review – planned before the service was launched at the beginning of 2011 – provides the clearest articulation yet of where Ashton would like to take the Union’s diplomatic service.
Fact File
A leaner and more efficient EEAS
The mid-term review of the European External Action Service makes a number of recommendations on how to slim down the service to make it less expensive and less cumbersome.
Instead of two top managers – an executive secretary-general and a chief operating officer – the service should have a single secretary-general, the report recommends. The report says that the recommendation is backed by the incumbents, Pierre Vimont and David O’Sullivan. The two deputy secretary-general posts (currently held by Helga Schmid and Maciei Popowksi) should remain in place, the report says.
The report also says that the number of policy departments, currently eight, should be reduced. It attributes the current set-up to the need to provide senior posts for officials transferred from the member states during the start-up phase. Director-level officials – one level below the managing directors – should be given more responsibilities.
The report recommends the full integration of EU special representatives, of whom there are currently 12, into the EEAS. The transfer of their staff (around 200 posts) into the EEAS structure would make savings possible, the report says.
The report says that the service will require additional embassies in places where the EU is not currently represented, and that this will make the re-allocation of resources necessary. It also suggests that some embassies could be downgraded by being led by a chargé d’affaires rather than a full ambassador, and that “innovative approaches to burden-sharing and resource allocation” with national embassies should be sought.
The report suggests that the role of the high representative for foreign and security policy also needs a re-think, for example by creating one or several posts of deputy high representative and by allowing senior officials to represent the high representative in European Parliament plenary debates. The report suggests that this change should take place when a new European Commission takes office next year.
But the review may also be read as Ashton’s bid to build her legacy: after years of criticism of her handling of the EEAS and of European foreign policy more broadly, Ashton announced in March that she would not be seeking a second term in office when her current term ends in the autumn of next year. The review is Ashton’s hand-over memo to her successor.
The launch of the EEAS, which has 3,400 staff and 139 embassies around the world, sparked an intense turf war between the member states, the secretariat of the Council of Ministers and the European Commission.
Ashton is surprisingly open in acknowledging this. “I have likened [launching the EEAS] to trying to fly a plane while still bolting the wings on,” she writes in her preface to the 18-page report. “The institutional challenges, and sometimes battles, were many. Different ideas on how the service should work and what impact it would have on existing institutions led to difficult decisions and sometimes lost opportunities.”
The mid-term review represents, among other things, another episode in this turf war – an episode in which Ashton is now seeking to change the outcome of some of the battles she initially lost, and to recreate the lost opportunities.
Perhaps emboldened by recent successes, above all a breakthrough in relations between Serbia and Kosovo in April, Ashton is now seeking greater power over policies – primarily development aid and the neighbourhood policy – whose financing still comes from the Commission.
Ever since the EEAS started its work, Ashton’s aides have been denying reports of friction between the service and the Commission’s departments for development and for neighbourhood programmes. But the review is fairly blunt on this point. “The current arrangements in terms of lead responsibility work mainly because of the good and close working relationships between the HR/VP [Ashton] and her Commissioner colleagues,” it says. “But the division of responsibilities is potentially unclear and should be clarified.”
This is a clear acknowledgment of an institutional set-up that is insufficiently streamlined, and hence potentially dysfunctional, and the conclusion that Ashton draws from this is that the foreign policy chief, who is also a vice-president of the European Commission, needs more authority. Specifically, Ashton wants a greater say in managing EU observers of elections abroad; in funding EU missions and crisis-prevention activities; in foreign-aid spending; and in implementing sanctions.
Ashton’s review says comparatively little about the division of labour between her and the foreign policies of the member states. She has learned, during three-and-a-half years of near constant criticism, to know which battles she cannot win.
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