The European External Action Service

European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia

David Spence, Jozef Bátora, David Spence, Jozef Bátora

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137383020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137383037
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book questions whether the institutions and practices of the emerging EU diplomatic system conform to established standards of the state-centric diplomatic order; or whether practice is paving the way for innovative, even revolutionary, forms of diplomatic organisation.

1

Theorising the EU’s Diplomatic Service: Rational Player or Social Body?

Rebecca Adler-Nissen

Introduction

‘It’s a plane. It’s a bird. It’s ... the EEAS!’ Like Superman, the European External Action Service (EEAS) appears to be a strange visitor from another planet. It is not an EU agency, it is not a Commission Directorate-General and it is not an independent institution like the European Central Bank. Most observers agree on the basics: It is the EU’s first common diplomatic body, formally established in the summer of 2010. It supports the EU foreign affairs chief (High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) in conducting the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). It has delegations around the world working on behalf of the people of Europe and representing the EU as a whole. However, as the editors note in their introduction to this book, there is far from agreement on what the EEAS really is. Some scholars call it ‘a quasi-diplomatic corps’ (Duke, 2002), others ‘an interstitial organisation’ (Bátora, 2013) or an ‘embryonic version of a European diplomatic service’ (Spence, 2004). There is little doubt that the EEAS is one of the EU’s most important inventions since the introduction of the single currency with the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999, but how are we to theorise the EEAS as a social, legal and political phenomenon?

From the outset, scholars, commentators and think tanks have struggled to give their particular take on the EEAS. Their efforts have resulted in empirically rich and insightful analyses, as the chapters of this book clearly demonstrate. Yet, with some exceptions, these analyses have not generally been oriented towards theory. In fact, for the majority of contributors to EEAS scholarship, the most important aim has been to identify the challenges facing the EEAS in terms of realising particular policy objectives rather than conceptualising its basic nature. They have tended to focus more on institutional turf wars, than theoretical innovation. This policy orientation is striking given how much theoretical focus there has previously been on EU foreign policy. In the 1990s, the prospect of a European foreign and security policy was a driver of considerable theoretical innovation within international relations (IR) and EU studies, as concepts such as ‘normative power’ (Manners, 2002) and ‘rhetorical entrapment’ (Schimmelfennig, 2001) illustrate. Both concepts are now widely used beyond discussions of the EU’s foreign and enlargement policies. For instance, Schimmelfennig’s notion of rhetorical entrapment is used in analyses of WTO negotiations (Morin and Gold, 2010) and humanitarian intervention (Merle, 2005). However, conceptual developments have hitherto not been the main priorities of scholars interested in the EEAS. Nonetheless, the existing literature is replete with more or less implicit theoretical assumptions and pre-conceptualisations of the EEAS, and these tell different stories not only about the EEAS, but also about broader issues such as the transformations of European sovereignty, diplomacy and national identities.

This chapter teases out the different theorisations – or conceptual frameworks – of the EEAS in order to show how they – whether implicitly or not – make a difference to our understanding of the nature of the EEAS. The chapter first provides an overview of the existing approaches to the EU’s diplomatic service, examining specifically two main approaches to the EEAS: the rationalist approach (including intergovernmentalism, rational choice institutionalism and rationalist organisation theory) and the constructivist approach (including sociological institutionalism and sociological organisation theory). The chapter then demonstrates how these approaches paint contrasting portraits of the EEAS: as a rational political player seeking autonomy from its principals (the member states) or as a social body or organisational arena with norm-abiding civil servants trying to make sense of the new diplomatic world. These theoretically informed portraits of the EEAS build on different assumptions about the nature of European integration, diplomacy and social science. The chapter points to possible blank spots on the map and the potential contribution of approaches currently not widely adopted in the study of the EEAS, including legal-constitutional frameworks, diplomatic theory, network theory, practice theory, anthropology and democratic theory.

From theorising EU foreign policy to conceptualising the EEAS

Social scientific theories help us make sense of the world. They are analytical frameworks that help us interpret the meaning of social life and determine how and why the world works the way it does. Theories give us a systematic way to create a story using data and research to explain the social world around us. Theories have played an important role as lenses for our understanding of what happened to Europe and its position in the world after the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the 1990s led to a renewed focus on European security and foreign policy – and theories were important in assessing Europe’s position. The spectrum was wide. Structural realists (e.g., Waltz, 2000) argued that NATO would dissolve because the Soviet enemy had disappeared, while other realists (e.g., Wohlforth, 1994) began to reinvent classical realism and rediscover the importance of perceptions and decision-making processes. Post-structuralists claimed that Europe’s ‘other’ was its past, and that identity-politics drove integration forward and shaped Europe’s relations with the rest of the world (Wæver, 1997).¹

In the 1990s and 2000s, IR realists used considerable energy to explain why they found it improbable that the EU would ever develop a common foreign policy (Rosato, 2011; Posen, 2006). Neorealists such as Waltz predicted that the only way in which the EU could achieve a foreign policy worthy of the name would be if it became a state, that is, if the federal project were completed (Waltz, 2000). Hyde-Price (2008) concluded that the polarity structure and lack of military resources meant that the EU was turning into a ‘tragic power’ with its attempt to build a common foreign policy that was doomed to fail. Liberals, from intergovernmentalists such as Moravcsik labelling the EU the ‘quiet superpower’ (Moravcsik, 2010) to institutionalists such as Koenig-Archibugi (2004), argued that there was potential for developing a common European foreign policy, but that it would (and should) remain intergovernmental (Wagner, 2003). Against this, constructivists and reflectivists claimed that the EU would indeed be – or already was – a power in the world (Manners, 2002; Ruggie, 1998; Sjursen, 2006). Indeed, constructivists and post-structuralists have generally been more optimistic when it comes to the EU’s ability to shape the world around it. For instance, the literature on security communities drew heavily on the European experience to explain how a group of states may come to cooperate so closely that they regard war as impossible (Deutsch, 1968; Adler and Barnett, 1998). More sociologically informed literature, building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, demonstrated that domestic security and defence officials gradually came to see the EU as ‘the natural solution to their concerns’ (Mérand, 2008, p. 5). Others argued that it was not so much the relationship between member states and their war-ridden history as much as Europe’s relationship to others, such as Turkey or Russia (Neumann, 1999; Diez, 2004, 2005), that helped shape the EU’s foreign-policy identity. Thus, a field of study devoted to the study of the EU’s foreign and security policy developed and consolidated, leading even to the establishment of new journals such as the European Foreign Affairs Review (2006), and a range of graduate and post-graduate courses around the world. The EU’s foreign policy had clearly become a subject worthy of scholarly interest.

The establishment of the EU’s diplomatic service in 2010 thus appeared the ideal laboratory for testing or exploring the comparative advantages of different theories of European security, foreign policy and diplomacy. Yet, while the EEAS generated heated political discussion, it did not engender much theoretical debate. Most scholarly focus, as this chapter shows, has been on its establishment and position in the EU’s institutional landscape and its staff composition, reflecting to a large degree the media and public debate surrounding the Treaty of Lisbon. It is outside the scope of this chapter to examine why we have not seen a continuation of theoretical debates from the 1990s and 2000s with the establishment of the EEAS. It may be still too early to assess the literature on the EEAS so few years after its establishment. Another possibility is that limited interest in theory is linked to developments in EU studies more generally, becoming increasingly disengaged from IR debates and moving closer to fields such as public administration (Adler-Nissen and Kropp, 2015). Sociology of knowledge and science scholars have argued that EU studies is a ‘weak field’, in the sense that it is so tightly entangled with practitioners (EU lawyers, political leaders and bureaucrats) that it has difficulties distancing itself from its research object (Mudge and Vauchez, 2012).

Nonetheless, the contours of an emerging debate about the nature of the EEAS are identifiable. There are two major approaches: a rationalist (the latter with at least three sub-branches: intergovernmentalism, rational choice institutionalism and rationalist organisation theory) and a constructivist approach (the latter with at least two sub-branches: sociological organisation theory and sociological institutionalism). In addition to these broad approaches, legal-constitutional and democratic approaches also exist. The chapter now examines these approaches in more detail, showing how they each portray the EEAS differently.

Searching the literature and identifying approaches to the EEAS

To provide an overview of existing approaches to the EEAS, English-language publications from 1 January 2005 to 1 March 2014 were searched, a period covering the entire time the EEAS could have been discussed. The Constitutional Treaty was signed in December 2004 when the EEAS was still called a ‘foreign ministry’, though this changed to ‘external action service’ with the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009. The most commonly used databases in political science scholarship were searched: Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, Web of Science, World Wide Science and Google Scholar.

The following search terms were used, so as to capture as many publications as possible:

•EEAS

•European External Action Service

•EU foreign service

•EU diplomatic service

•European foreign service

•EU diplomacy

•EU external actor

•High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

The literature was limited to searches on the EEAS, not EU foreign policy or diplomacy more broadly. The search resulted in a total of 67 academic articles and book chapters (see Appendix). Of course, these 67 publications do not include all academic production on the EEAS. Most importantly, think tank reports and working papers were excluded, so that only peer reviewed academic publications formed part of the search. Moreover, although all academic publications explicitly mentioning the EEAS were searched, there remained some that slipped through the search net, notably book chapters and books. This results from the way search engines work. Nonetheless, the 67 articles give enough of a general view to make possible some broader statements about the state of the art in the study of the EEAS.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The EEAS as a Catalyst of Diplomatic Innovation
• 1  Theorising the EUs Diplomatic Service: Rational Player or Social Body?
• Part I  The New Setting of EU Diplomacy: Problems and Prospects for the European External Action Service
• Part II  The EEAS and International Law
• Part III  Effective Multilateralism: EU Delegations to International Organisations
• Part IV  Bilateralism and European Diplomatic Capacity
• Part V  Organising for a Comprehensive Diplomatic Approach
• Part VI  Human Resources and Diplomatic Training
• Annex
• Index