European External Action Service
The European External Action Service ( EEAS ; English E uropean E xternal A ction S ervice , EEAS ) is an institution in support of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy , which it is assumed. The exact organization is regulated by a resolution of the Council of the EU of July 26, 2010. In terms of personnel, the service is made up of at least 60 percent EU civil servants (after its establishment in 2010 initially former civil servants and employees of the European Commission and the Council Secretariat ) and of at least one third of the temporary staff who are seconded by the national diplomatic services of the member states.
The headquarters of the EEAS are in Brussels and it has 142 delegations in third countries and with international organizations. In the headquarters there are five regional departments (Asia, Africa, Russia / Eastern Neighborhood / Western Balkans, Middle East / Southern Neighborhood , America) as well as a department for global and multilateral affairs. It also includes the structures for crisis management as well as the Political and Security Committee and a Directorate General for administrative issues .
The EEAS currently has 3,645 employees, 1611 of whom work at headquarters and 2034 in delegations. In addition, there are around 4,000 employees in the EU missions for civil and military crisis management.
The headquarters of the EEAS is the so-called Triangle Building on the Schuman roundabout in the center of Brussels' European Quarter. Several hundred employees have their offices in the Kortenberg building and in the Ecole Royale Militaire.
Position in the political system of the EU
As a sui generis construct, the EEAS occupies a special position in the EU's political system . He reports directly to the High Representative, who is also the Vice-President of the European Commission , Chairwoman of the Council for Foreign Affairs and External Representative of the European Council . The competences for European Neighborhood Policy , enlargement and development aid remain with the Commission, so the EEAS does not cover all foreign policy areas of the EU. The European Parliament also has certain control and information rights and can also influence the EEAS through its budgetary rights. The EEAS must therefore reconcile supranational and intergovernmental instruments in order to guarantee the coherence of the EU's external action.
The EEAS is neither a European Union agency nor an independent EU body, but its staff are treated as EU officials under the Staff Regulations. In terms of the financial statute, the EEAS is on an equal footing with an EU body: it has its own budget, the tenth section of the EU budget . This comprised a budget of 602 million euros for 2015 .
Structure and organization
history
High Representative Catherine Ashton made a proposal on the structure of the EEAS, which was agreed in April 2010 by the General Affairs Council . The Brok report on this proposal was adopted by the European Parliament on July 8, 2010 with a large majority.
On September 15, 2010, the High Representative announced the names of the first 28 EU ambassadors, with the German diplomat Markus Ederer selected to head the EU delegation in Beijing .
On October 25, Ashton appointed the French Pierre Vimont as Executive Secretary General and the Irish David O'Sullivan as Head of Administration to the historically first management team of the EAD administration. On October 29, Ashton appointed Helga Schmid from Germany and Maciej Popowski from Poland as Deputy General Secretaries .
Current occupation
- Secretary General: Helga Schmid
- Deputy Secretary General for Political Affairs (Political Director): Jean-Christophe Belliard
- Deputy Secretary General for Economic and Global Issues: Christian Leffler
- Deputy Secretary General for CSDP and Crisis Response: Pedro Serrano
Executive Directors
- Executive Director for Asia and the Pacific: Gunnar Wiegand
- Executive Director for Africa: Koen Vervaeke
- Executive Director for Europe and Central Asia: Thomas Mayr-Harting
- Middle East and North Africa Executive Director: Nicholas Westcott
- Executive Director for North and South America: Edita Hrda
- Executive Director for Human Rights, Global and Multilateral Issues: Lotte Knudsen
Other senior executives
- Head of the crisis management and planning department: Gabor Iklody
- Executive Director EU Military Staff (EUMS): GenLt Esa Pulkkinen
- Head of the Civil Planning and Implementation Staff (CPCC): Kenneth Deane
- Director of INTCEN (EU Situation Center): Gerhard Conrad
- Chairman of the Political and Security Committee : Walter Stevens
history
Reasons for setting up the EEAS
The political system of the European Union had since the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 by the so-called "pillar model three" marked. The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is one of the two intergovernmental pillars on which decisions had to be made unanimously by the governments of the member states in the Council of the European Union , the European Commission only had a subordinate role and the external representation to the High Representative the CFSP (longest incumbent Javier Solana ) was responsible.
In matters for which the European Communities were responsible (e.g. foreign trade policy , neighborhood policy or development aid ), the European Commission was responsible for external representation . This set up so-called EU delegations abroad, which were subordinate to the Foreign Commissioner , but were usually worse equipped in terms of personnel and finances than the embassies of the nation states . This meant that the implementation of the common foreign and security policy was left primarily to the diplomatic services of the individual member states, which in turn followed the guidelines of their national governments - not the jointly decided measures of the CFSP. This fragmentation of competencies meant that the EU as a diplomatic actor in international relations was underrepresented in comparison with its economic importance in the world.
This problem of coherence should be gradually resolved with the Lisbon Treaty of 2007, which created the post of EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (currently Josep Borrell ), who is responsible for the European External Action Service. When it was founded, it built on the existing EU delegations , but was supplemented with additional staff from the national diplomatic services .
The aim of setting up the EEAS was therefore to increase the coherence of the common foreign and security policy : it was intended to help ensure that the positions of the member states are better coordinated, coordinated and communicated in a uniform manner. It should also enable the High Representative to implement foreign and security policy measures more efficiently , as the EEAS gives him greater recourse to his own officials and no longer has to leave the implementation of the measures decided to the diplomatic services of the individual Member States.
Conflict over the organizational structure of the EEAS
What the organizational structure and personnel composition of this service should look like was not definitely clear for a long time; 1,100 Commission officials and 700 officials from national foreign ministries were planned. Ashton presented a first draft at the end of March 2010 and a revised version at the end of April 2010. However, there was disagreement between the EU Council , which called for the national diplomatic services to be more closely involved in the EEAS, and the European Parliament , which, conversely, advocated more independence and a more supranational role for the EEAS. The decision-making power in the common foreign and security policy lies formally only with the Council of the EU, but the parliament has to approve the budget of the EEAS and thus has influence on its organization.
The European Parliament, the European Council and the Commission reached a concrete consensus on the organization and functioning of the EEAS on June 21, 2010. After the summer break, the European Parliament decided on the necessary changes to the European Union's personnel and financial statutes. Together with the changes to the budget, this was adopted and passed on October 20, 2010. The EU External Action Service began its work on December 1, 2010. On January 1, 2011, the first transfer of staff from the European Commission from the Secretariat of the Council of the EU to the EEAS took place.
See also
literature
- Markus Gruber: "Giving Europe a telephone number." A cybernetic approach to the coherence management of European foreign policy. Diploma thesis University of Vienna, 2008.
- Hartmann Simon: Synthesizing European external functions: reflections on a multilayer merger and its likely impact on European Development Policy , ÖFSE Briefing Paper 4 (2010) accessed November 29, 2019 ,
- Gisela Müller-Brandeck-Bocquet / Carolin Rüger: The Legacy of Javier Solana, the High Representative 2.0 and the European External Action Service: Strong Foundations for the EU's International Role ?, In: Dies. (Ed.): The High Representative for the EU Foreign and Security Policy - Review and Prospects. Baden-Baden 2011. pp. 259-302.
Web links
- Official website
- Information on the European Diplomatic Service from the German Foreign Office
- Presidency report to the European Council on the European External Action Service (europa.eu, 30 October 2009; PDF; 160 kB)
- GASP, ESVP and their instruments - An overview from the Scientific Service of the German Bundestag, Department WD 11, No. 44/06 (September 18, 2006). (PDF file; 177 kB)
- The Common Foreign and Security Policy after the Treaty of Lisbon by the Scientific Service of the German Bundestag (PDF file; 119 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Article 27, Paragraph 3 of the EU Treaty as amended by the Lisbon Treaty
- ↑ Decision of the Council of 26 July 2010 on the organization and functioning of the European External Action Service (2010/427 / EU) (PDF)
- ↑ High Representative / Vice-President Federica Mogherini visited Ashgabat to sign the Establishment Agreement of an EU Delegation to Turkmenistan. Retrieved October 8, 2019 .
- ↑ EU foreign service moves into new home (English). EUobserver , accessed February 27, 2012 .
- ^ About the European External Action Service (EEAS). Retrieved November 29, 2019 .
- ^ Before the summit in Brussels: The EU in search of meaning . In: tagesschau.de , September 16, 2010. Accessed December 30, 2010.
- ↑ New Deputy General Secretaries in the EEAS in the Network EBD Newsletter 06/10 ( Memento of 10 November 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Organization chart of the EEAS (as of June 2017). Retrieved August 29, 2017 .
- ↑ a b EP takes Ashton to EAD in a headlock . In: EurActiv , June 11, 2010. Archived from the original on June 13, 2010. Retrieved on December 30, 2010.
- ↑ Ashton prepares vague EAD proposal . In: EurActiv , March 24, 2010. Archived from the original on December 18, 2010. Retrieved on December 30, 2010.
- ↑ Ashton presents new design for EU diplomatic service . In: EurActiv , 23 April 2010. Archived from the original on 1 May 2010. Retrieved on 30 December 2010.
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