EUC Report: EU External Action Service

Lord Williamson of Horton Excerpts

Monday 3rd June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Williamson of Horton]

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I spent a good part of my career on European affairs in the United Kingdom Civil Service and in the European Commission. I join others in thanking the European Union Committee for this valuable report on the European Union’s External Action Service which I hope I shall continue to call the EEAS for the rest of this speech, unless I get confused with the initials. This is just the sort of report that we need to keep us informed about what is happening within the European Union following the Lisbon treaty. The analysis of evidence and the 49 conclusions and recommendations are very full indeed, although some of that is necessarily provisional and speculative because the EEAS, in its present form, is a new creation, having been formally launched in January 2011, and being due for review in mid-2013, which is critical timing.

I am a notoriously quick reader and often complete a book in an evening. However, this report took a little longer to digest and I therefore decided to select only a few points for comment. First, we need always to keep in mind that the EEAS is a genuinely new and significant initiative. It is quite different from the extensive network of external delegations—of which I had some experience—which, before the Lisbon treaty, were under the direct control of the Commission. The EEAS, on the contrary, is an information resource on external affairs for the member states and, of course, for the EU as a whole. The common foreign and security policy is now a core part of the work of the European Union, but its control and management is quite different from most aspects of the EU’s work, because the Commission does not have the sole right of initiative. Policy decisions are reached by consensus in the Council. They do not require the consent of the European Parliament, although it may try to achieve some influence on them, and are not, for the most part, within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Some very important consequences stem from this, most notably that the key basis for action is the capacity of the member states in the Council to reach agreement and, if there is no agreement, the diplomatic handling of the situation. We have seen this markedly recently in a number of crises, for example in Libya and Syria, to which we have already heard references.

There are some important areas for which the European Commission continues to have the major responsibility, notably international trade and the EU’s humanitarian assistance. Under the common foreign and security policy, the member states rule. It follows from that that I strongly endorse some conclusions in the report. First, there is conclusion 167:

“The EEAS should not … seek to project its own foreign policy. The Common and Foreign Security Policy should remain under the control of the Member States”.

In the same line of argument, I endorse conclusion 189, as referred to by another noble Lord, which says that the,

“annual report to the European Parliament on … staffing and budget”

for the high representative and vice-president should also be submitted “to national parliaments”, because of,

“the intergovernmental nature of the CFSP”.

I come now to the key element of our report, namely the judgment of the performance and value of the EEAS in the first two years. The committee’s view, although subject to conditions, is favourable. Conclusion 215 states that,

“we believe that the EEAS has made a good start in its first two years”.

In conclusion 193, the committee cites example areas such as,

“the relations between Serbia and Kosovo”,

where, in the committee’s opinion, there has been a “noticeable impact” and an enhancement of the European Union’s ability to speak with one voice.

We have set ourselves on this course for the EEAS and we need to maximise the value of this substantial resource. For me, that is the underlying point that we have to build on in the coming period. There are 3,400 staff, to which we have also committed national diplomats—I recall that national diplomats represent 40% of the delegations—with a view to providing extra advantages for the diplomacy and influence of the United Kingdom, the other member states and the EU. However, I might be a little more cautious than the committee in trying to draw conclusions before the review. I have some sympathy with the comment of Mr Mats Persson from Open Europe, summarised at paragraph 104 as saying that,

“he believed that the jury was out on the value which the EEAS added”.

I think we need to be a bit careful about that, but I believe that the potential of the EEAS is great. We need to be careful where we stand now.

The European Union Committee has also examined in detail a number of practical and administrative arrangements that may affect the operation of the EEAS. It is not surprising that there is still work to be done in bringing together the three staff components from the Council secretariat, the Commission and the member states’ diplomatic services, and the relationship between the EU special representatives and the heads of delegations should be clarified. The comments of the EU Select Committee on the organisation and co-ordination within the EEAS should be taken into account—they are useful for that—by the Council, the Commission and the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, in the imminent review.

In the Moses Room, far from the EEAS working environment, it is not too easy to take a definitive view on some of these recommendations. For example, in principle, I am in favour of a single set of budgets and accounts for delegations, as recommended in the report, but we need to be careful that there are no unintended consequences, which sometimes happen, that could affect the Commission’s excellent record on administrative expenditure, which has received a favourable opinion from the Court of Auditors year after year, most recently a few months ago when the court stated that revenue and payments were free from material error and that the examined supervisory and control systems were effective.

Finally, where the European Commission has prime responsibility for the European Union’s humanitarian aid and international trade, the EEAS may sometimes be able to bring a new perspective but in no way can it substitute for the Commission. In international trade, the Commission has made an outstanding contribution to the EU’s status as one of the largest consumer markets in the world and also one of the most open, including such initiatives as duty-and-quota-free access for all exports other than arms from least-developed countries, the almost complete reversal of the original common agricultural policy and the almost complete removal of EU export subsidies. This report will certainly contribute very useful material for the review. It is well timed and should be taken into account seriously in the review. I hope that it will be seriously studied and that a little later in the history of the EEAS we can claim that we have influenced the way in which it is going to develop.