Europe’s foreign policy: what is wrong and what needs to be changed

On 18 November, the daily newspaper Le Monde published an article highlighting the significant difficulties faced by former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas in carrying out her duties as High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and in promoting a policy that would enable Europe to exert influence on the global geopolitical stage commensurate with its demographic and economic size. Beyond the mistakes Kaja Kallas may have made during her first year in office, she is above all a victim of a seriously dysfunctional institutional context.

No role for the European Commission in foreign policy in the Treaties

According to the Treaties, foreign and security policy remains the exclusive prerogative of the Member States, with the Union only called upon to play a coordinating role between them. This is why it is an area in which the Council theoretically has pre-eminence within the European institutions and the European Commission has no particular competence in this area.

This is also why the Treaty of Lisbon created the post of High Representative with a very special status. Appointed at the same time as the President of the Commission, he or she is a member of the Council of the Union and, as such, permanently chairs the Councils of Foreign Affairs, Defence and Development Aid Ministers. According to the Treaty, he or she should also chair the Foreign Trade Council, but this presidency was withdrawn a few years ago to preserve the turf of the Commission and its DG Trade. In the other areas of EU action, the ministers of the Member States who hold the rotating presidency of the EU take turns chairing the Councils of Ministers.

The High Representative is also a Commissioner and Vice-President of the Commission, in order, in theory, to ensure the necessary coordination between the foreign and security policy defined by the Member States within the Council and the actions of the Commissioners and Directorates-General that have a direct impact on these issues, such as DG Trade or those dealing with enlargement, the Mediterranean or development aid. To mark this special status within the European institutions, he also heads a separate administration, the European External Action Service (EEAS), which belongs neither to the Council nor to the Commission.

A dysfonctional setup

However, this institutional architecture, established in 2010 following the Treaty of Lisbon, has proved dysfunctional on several levels in a context where, due to mounting geopolitical threats, foreign and security policy, Europe should urgently become able to respond to these threats in real time.

The first and most well-known level of dysfunction concerns the unanimity rule: common foreign and security policy is one of the few areas where this rule continues to apply within the Union. This allows a country such as Hungary, for example, to single-handedly block for weeks or even months the most urgent decisions that need to be taken to address existential threats to the Union, such as those related to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

However, when it comes to issues that are central to the sovereignty of Member States, it is not obvious that it would be possible to align this area with the qualified majority voting that now applies to most other areas of action at European level. However, a more restrictive super-qualified majority mechanism, or even simply unanimity minus one or two members, could be envisaged for these issues. This would already resolve a significant number of difficulties.

The unanimity issue

Furthermore, while unanimity is currently required for these issues under the treaties in the European Council, which brings together heads of state and government, Article 31 of the Treaty on European Union already opens up significant possibilities for using qualified majority voting in the Council of the European Union, bringing together foreign affairs or defence ministers, in the implementation of decisions taken by the European Council. However, these possibilities have never been used so far. Under the current Treaty, this would already significantly change the Union’s practice in this area.

The other difficulty, and in practice often the most debilitating, concerns coordination between the High Representative, the Presidency of the Commission and the various sectors of the Commission involved in the Union’s external policy. Although the High Representative has a specialised administration at his or her disposal, this administration, which consists mainly of staff from the Union’s embassies around the world, has in practice only a very limited budget at its disposal and its actual capacity for action depends heavily on the various Commission DGs in most areas.

In order to be able to guide the Commission’s action in this area, the Treaty provides that the High Representative shall automatically be Vice-President of the Commission. At least, that was how the drafters of the Treaties intended it to be. But Kaja Kallas is now clearly facing the same difficulty as Josep Borrell before her in this regard: the centralisation of all decisions at the level of President Ursula von der Leyen and her cabinet effectively deprives her Vice-Presidents of the coordination functions provided for in the Treaties, although they are clearly needed in a Commission of 27 members, and soon 30 or more.

Concentration of power by EC president leads to foreign policy mistakes

During the previous term of office, the Gaza issue, which is central to the Union’s foreign policy, was a caricatural illustration of this kind of dysfunction. The Commissioner responsible for the region within the Commission was the Hungarian Oliver Varhelyi, a staunch supporter of Netanyahu, who held the neighbourhood portfolio. Far from agreeing to coordinate with High Representative Borrell, he systematically took initiatives aimed at depriving the Palestinians of European support, thus countering the policy of the HRVP, who was trying to get the Israeli government to respect international law. And in doing so, he enjoyed the constant support of the Commission Presidency. This major dysfunction had a very negative effect on the Union’s image in the world.

This centralisation effectively gives the Commission a central role in foreign policy, even though the Treaties do not provide for this. From a distance, it may certainly give the impression of a certain efficiency : the European Union finally has a single face and phone number. But in reality, it rather slows down the Union’s action and leads it to make mistakes with serious consequences for Europeans, such as during the EC President’s visit to Jerusalem in October 2023, with the highly questionable agreements forced through with Tunisia in 2023 or Egypt in 2024, or with certain ill-prepared initiatives in the field of defence. European foreign and security policy requires both intensive coordination with Member States and constant monitoring of relations with key global players, which are not limited to the President of the United States and his administration. It is a real full-time job.

Remove unanimity and reinforce the HR/VP role

If we want that the European Union is equipped with a foreign and security policy worthy of the name, we must, on the one hand, remove the requirement for unanimity among Member States and, on the other hand, give the High Representative a clear hierarchical role, particularly in terms of the budget, vis-à-vis the Commissioners and Directorates-General mainly involved in the Union’s external action and security policy. This may also involve reintegrating the EEAS into the Commission’s services, as its current hybrid status isolates it and rather limits its capacity for action.