The European External Action service (EAS) will not dramatically change the EU’s role abroad, but it will make it much more effective, High Representative Catherine Ashton’s Special Advisor on the European Union’s new diplomatic service, Poul Christoffersen toldEuropolitics.

What are the main challenges for the new EU delegations on the ground?

First is organisation, with the whole EAS, not just in the delegations. The EAS is a service, which is much broader than you would normally have in a national foreign ministry. We are covering a much larger area of activity, handling, at least at certain stages, a large economic external aid portfolio, bilateral diplomatic work, crisis management and military operations. So there are operational structures that you will never have in a foreign ministry. When we are running police missions, for instance, you have the whole operational chain inside the EAS. That you would never see in a national foreign ministry. So I think when people would tend to say “well, why don’t you look at the organigram of a typical large foreign service and copy it,” the answer is that a national foreign service is much more limited in scope than what has to be included in the EAS.

With the delegations specifically, most of what we are doing now is taking over the Commission’s delegations. But it is worth noting that the Commission’s delegations today are to a very large extent concentrating on development aid and trade. There have been very specific areas and you have had until now very few people dealing with what you could call general diplomatic work, in the old sense of the word.

The Commission had around 130 delegations around the world, which are now being transformed into EU delegations. These 130 delegations had an overall staff, including locally employed persons, of between 5,000 and 6,000 people. But they are mainly in these very specialised fields. So if you look at the general affairs diplomats for those 130 delegations, today there are only about 400 people, including heads of delegations, which is only two to 2.5 people in each delegation dealing with general issues outside trade and development cooperation. So now there’s an enormous task in making these delegations capable of doing the new job.

One of the tasks which they have to take over is the EU representation in third countries, a role which until now was conducted by member states through the Council Presidency. You need many staff to do that and staff that are capable of doing all the coordination work that the Presidency did before. If you take something like the UN delegation in New York during a normal Presidency, you had about 1,000 coordination meetings, drafting the papers to present the EU position at these meetings. So we need a heavy increase in our staffing in these places.

Is it going to be easier now to convince member states to act as a union on foreign affairs, rather than bilaterally?

It is essential that we create a service in which member states are confident. When we are talking about foreign and security policy, we are talking about a policy area where it is basically still intergovernmental and that means you have to fight for a place every day. Just to take the example of Mrs Ashton, who moved from trade policy, which is an exclusive Community competence. This means that unless you have a Community position, there is no position. Member states cannot act independently of the Community. In foreign policy, though, if you don’t have a common position, then 27 member states will act independently and there is no ratchet effect in the sense that once you acquire a common position on, say, the Middle East, it can’t go back. You have to earn the confidence of member states every day on very sensitive issues.

And are the delegations ready for these changes?

I think there is a psychological aspect to this because the Commission delegations often had, in the case of trade representatives, an exclusive competence. They had their own area where member states could not interfere. And from time to time you also saw these Commission delegations not very open to cooperation and collaboration with member states in the same foreign capital. I’m exaggerating perhaps, but there were elements of this. For the new system to work, you need a close and confident cooperation between the member states’ representations in the same country and the EU representation.

What is the EU delegation’s role going to be in places where there are other big players on the ground, like a member state with a special relationship, another powerful country or an international organisation. For example, in Pakistan where the UK, US and UN have such established roles and write such big cheques?

We will have to find our role, but it is really about a comparative advantage. First of all, Europe can often have comparative advantage to the Americans in the sense that we can operate in areas where the Americans cannot. We can to some extent still operate in Iran, for example, but the Americans cannot.

To take the example of Pakistan, of course aid is important but trade is even more important. The EU has the trade instrument. What we do with regard to textile exports from Pakistan is much more important than the amount that the UK or the Americans may be able to offer in bilateral aid. We also have instruments that basically nobody else has, like our civil and military crisis capability. There is nowhere else in the world you have anything like our crisis operational capability, the police missions or rule of law missions. So these are areas where we can do something, which others simply cannot do.

And, finally, there are areas where we cannot simply rely on others, where others expect us to do more ourselves: the Balkans and our neighbourhood in general. In Georgia, for instance, you could not have an American observer mission but you can have a European observer mission that can operate.

So would you say the EU’s delegations are moving away from trade and aid towards being a more mainstream diplomatic mission?

I don’t like the world ‘diplomatic’ because it gives you the impression that what we need is a kind of classic diplomatic work. But the main task of our delegations should be to promote our policies. This is not simply about expanding their work either. There has been a certain jealousy with the Commission, because one of Cathy Ashton’s functions is to ensure coherence in our external policies across the board, which created fears in some quarters that it will be the EAS that will take over climate policy, energy security policy and all of these things. This is nonsense. I mean, Cathy Ashton has enough to do without having to manage climate policy. But what our delegations should be used for is to promote our policies, to promote greater understanding of our policies, including on climate or energy. There was a lack of understanding in what we were aiming for and what we wanted to achieve. I see very much our delegations as outposts, which will spread the message about the things that we want to achieve and explain our policies. It’s not about changing our policies. It’s about making them better understood and making sure that we have more solid partners when we go into international negotiations.

What will it take to get the EAS up and running at full capacity, what are the final steps?

We are talking about three years. Getting our staff in place and making sure a third of the service is people coming from national diplomatic services would take us up to 2013. In some areas, probably there will not be much difficulty integrating the Council Secretariat and the Commission and national diplomats. In other areas there are new functions that have to be developed.

First of all, the service is built on the principle that there should be single geographical desks so that you should not have desks in the Commission covering the same area. You have them in one place and that is the EAS. If you look today at the areas covered by the Council Secretariat and the Commission, you have very few people dealing with Africa and the people who are dealing with Africa are sitting in DG Development. Now, when we are creating the service we will be moving from DG Development in the EAS, but if we just do that, and don’t have a broader aim of having an Africa desk, then we would fail in the objective. We must make strategies that are much broader than the narrower perspective that we have had until now.

Unfortunately, we will in some cases also be talking about areas where you have political instability and where the whole crisis management instrument area will be put in place too. So, say, converting the Africa desks from purely development cooperation desks to those that are dealing with the global relationship with particular countries is a task that is important. I have taken Africa as an example, but I could have cited many other examples.

Is this the concrete reality behind the buzzwords ‘coherence and coordination’?

Yes, and we also need to develop a unit where we take seriously this task of being responsible for coordination of external EU policy across the board. If you look at the Council Secretariat or the Commission now, there is no such unit today.

We also want to foster more strategic thinking and policy development so we need another unit, which can do some more conceptual and strategic thinking on external policy. Again, that would need to be created because it doesn’t exist. And in general I hope that we, together with Van Rompuy for instance, will be able to have a much more organised, coherent policy in terms of some of our big strategic partners, and maybe through that process also make more sense out of the many summits or bilateral meetings that have now become routine.

How confident are you that the EAS will start to function by the target date of 1 December?

We have succeeded up to now in providing a proposal before the end of March and we had a common Council position by the end of April. We have now achieved an agreement with the European Parliament. It is, however, true that there is not much we can do just on the basis of the Council decision setting out the EAS because it is to some extent an empty shell until we get the change in the staff regulation, the change in the financial regulation and a supplementary budget for 2010. But we will work it out.

We hope to get the supplementary budget around 1 October and then we recruit the senior staff. Our intention is to start with the recruitment for the top jobs: the secretary-general, the deputy secretaries-general and a number of the directors-general. In the beginning it would be a virtual service because it would just have a new top structure coming in.

What was the point when you knew you had cracked the negotiations with Parliament?

Even in the first quadrilateral [meeting between the EAS, Parliament, the Commission and Council Presidency], we felt that it was moving towards an agreement. I have had contacts with Parliament from the beginning of this process so I have been somewhat more optimistic that we would get to a result than others. I think objectively it is a decision that is better than our original proposal. In some areas you have precisions, which are useful, you now have a much clearer understanding that it will probably not be a major problem to get the one third of national diplomats into the service. You now have to have at least 60% personnel who are permanent officials. And you have now set out, at least indirectly, that national diplomats can also aspire to become permanent officials by passing a competition. You have a lot of provisions on financial controls and accountability and discharge procedures, which are more precise than in the first text. So I don’t think we lost anything of our initial vision of how this service should function.

Poul Christoffersen

Poul Skytte Christoffersen is an experienced Danish diplomat with a masters in economics, who has spent much of his career in Brussels. Between 1977 and 1980 he was first secretary at the Danish Permanent Representation to the then European Community. In 1980, he started work as head of cabinet to the secretary-general of the Council, a post he was to hold for 14 years. From 1995 to 2003, he served as the Danish ambassador to the EC before becoming head of cabinet to EU Commissioner for Agriculture Mariann Fischer Boel in 2006. He was appointed as ambassador to Italy, from 2006 to 2009, when he returned to Brussels as ambassador to the EU once again. In 2010, Christoffersen became Catherine Ashton’s special advisor on the EAS.