The EU’s foreign policy problem is not its diplomatic service. It is the struggle over who conducts it

Europe is discovering, once again, that the hardest battles in Brussels are not necessarily fought over policy. They are fought over who gets to make it.

That old institutional knife-fight is back. This time the protagonists are the European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR), Kaja Kallas, who also serves as a Commission Vice-President (VP) and heads the European External Action Service (EEAS). The quarrel is not merely personal. It goes to the heart of a question member states have postponed since the 2009 Lisbon Treaty created the legal basis for the EEAS: how much foreign policy autonomy are they prepared to entrust to EU institutions?

The EEAS Was Born Compromised

The EEAS was never a conventional foreign ministry. The Lisbon Treaty deliberately created a hybrid. Acting under the authority of the double-hatted HRVP, the Service needed to bridge two worlds: the intergovernmental foreign policy of the member states and the supranational machinery of the Commission. The problem was that the bridge was never given enough authority to control the traffic.

The quarrel goes to the heart of a question member states have postponed since the 2009 Lisbon Treaty created the legal basis for the EEAS: how much foreign policy autonomy are they prepared to entrust to EU institutions?

Trade, development, energy, climate, migration, neighbourhood, and other policies with enormous geopolitical consequences largely remained in the Commission. Member states retained decisive political authority in foreign and security policy. The EEAS was left somewhere in between: responsible for coherence, but dependent on others for many of the instruments with which synergies could actually be achieved.

That ambiguity has been costly, but it has also produced something valuable: a genuinely European diplomatic capability, with a global network of 145 delegations, diplomatic expertise drawn from both EU institutions and national foreign ministries, integrated political and intelligence analysis, and an institutional vantage point that no individual member state can replicate.

The current fight over the future of the EEAS is therefore about much more than organisational design. It is a struggle over who gets to initiate policy, who controls the machinery that prepares it, and ultimately who speaks for the EU.

These questions could hardly be more consequential. The EU faces Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine and shadow war inside its own borders, violent conflict in several parts of the Middle East, strategic competition between the US and China, economic coercion, technological competition, and an increasingly fragmented and transactional international order. Yet, just when the EU most needs to behave like a geopolitical actor, its institutions are again arguing over the wiring.

The irony is almost too perfect. The EU is preparing a new European Security Strategy (ESS), a document intended to give the Union a long-term strategic framework for an environment that has changed radically since the 2016 EU Global Strategy. This should have been Kaja Kallas’s moment. Instead, it has become another arena in the institutional contest.

The Making of a Strategy

There was a straightforward way to approach the ESS 2026. Kallas could have done what Federica Mogherini did at the beginning of her own term: persuade the European Council to give the HRVP a political mandate to produce a comprehensive update of the EU’s strategic vision.

It would have demonstrated what the HRVP can do when the office uses its institutional duality to its full potential: bringing together the member states, the Council, the Commission, and the EEAS around a common strategic project.

The 2016 Global Strategy was not simply another Brussels communication. It was a political exercise that gave member states an opportunity to shape a common diagnosis of the world and, crucially, to see themselves as stakeholders in the resulting strategy. The process involved extensive consultations across the member states, EU institutions, and civil society.

The 2026 ESS could have repeated that feat. Instead, the political ownership of the process was claimed by the Commission. The initial penholders were close to von der Leyen, and the consultation process with member states and other stakeholders has been conspicuously limited — certainly when compared with the broad, year-long process that preceded the 2016 Global Strategy. That distinction matters. A security strategy is not merely another policy paper. It is an exercise in political authorship.

The political ownership of the process was claimed by the Commission.

The confrontation over Greenland gave von der Leyen an opportunity to demonstrate that the Commission could itself seize the geopolitical initiative, mobilising the EU’s economic and political instruments in response to an external challenge. The Commission’s subsequent push to deepen EU engagement with Greenland showed how naturally it can project itself into strategic foreign policy terrain when economic, regulatory, and geopolitical instruments converge.

The problem is not that the Commission acted but that the political dividend of acting accrued to the Commission presidency rather than to a coordinated European foreign policy machinery led by the HRVP. Even if team Kallas and member states were subsequently brought into the drafting and consultation processes, the ESS should — from the get-go — have been the vehicle through which Kallas connected the member states’ strategic concerns, the EEAS’s diplomatic and intelligence capacity, and the Commission’s formidable economic instruments.

Instead, the institutional message risks becoming the opposite: when geopolitics arrives, the Commission President takes the initiative and the HRVP coordinates. That is hardly the balance enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty.

Franco-German Food for Thought

A German non-paper that emerged in August envisaged a radical downgrading of the EEAS, effectively bringing the Service under the Commission’s administrative and political umbrella. Despite the declared intention to “end the sidelining of the HRVP and the EEAS,” it was, in effect, a blueprint for doing exactly that. It would have tightened Ursula von der Leyen’s grip on EU foreign policy.

Paris, which had led objections to the Commission’s expansive interpretations of its foreign policy mandate, distanced itself from Berlin’s proposal.

A subsequent Franco-German ‘food for thought’ paper represented an attempt to find common ground. It put the stress on a French desire to see the HRVP become an “executive vice-president” with “de facto, and not just de jure, the role and authority for coordinating ‘other aspects of the Union’s external action’ (Article 18 TEU).” This is entirely in line with the spirit of the Lisbon Treaty.

At the same time, the joint non-paper doubles down on the German proposal of “embedding the services of the EEAS to a large extent in the Commission’s structures.” Parts of the Commission’s inner sanctum, notably the foreign policy units in its Secretariat-General, should be subject to the same 1/3 national staffing principle that already applies to the EEAS. Extending that principle into the Commission’s own machinery would do more than improve personnel mobility. It would open part of the Commission’s engine room to national diplomats, and consequently give governments another channel through which to influence the formulation of EU foreign policy.

The EU does not need more centres of expertise. It needs one political system capable of making them work together.

The reception in other capitals, not to mention the EEAS, has been far from uniformly enthusiastic. The arguments are straightforward: the HRVP is supposed to be the link between member states and the Commission, and the Commission should not solve fragmentation by duplicating the EEAS’s work, including in intelligence and strategic analysis. The EU does not need more centres of expertise. It needs one political system capable of making them work together. At the informal Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Ireland, a large majority of member states expressed their wish not to tinker with the institutional setup but see it better implemented.

Make the Hybrid Work

This gives the HRVP more room for manoeuvre in strengthening the role and functioning of her office and service. Kallas solicited the support of a new Secretary-General, Kajsa Ollongren, a former Dutch defence minister and deputy prime minister, who brings political clout to the job. The wider senior-management team includes career diplomat Matti Maasikas as deputy secretary-general for geoeconomics and interinstitutional issues, and France’s former permanent representative to NATO David Cvach for peace, security, and defence. This is not the profile of an EEAS leadership preparing quietly for absorption into the Commission. It looks more like a leadership team preparing to fight for the Service’s relevance.

The opportunity is therefore to turn the reform debate around: not how the EEAS can be dismantled, but how the whole EU external action system can work better, while preserving the political bridge between the member states and the EU institutions.

The uncomfortable truth at the heart of the debate is trust.

A report prepared by a high-level task force chaired by Pierre Vimont, the first-ever ‘executive’ secretary general of the EEAS, contains a long list of recommendations to move the Service from self-doubt to self-assurance. Although it was drawn up five years ago, much of the prescription still holds. The bottom line of the report is that while the EEAS’s institutional design is not perfect, it is not the fundamental reason why forging EU foreign policy is difficult. The uncomfortable truth at the heart of the debate is trust.

The Veto Is the Elephant on the Schuman Roundabout

The EU’s foreign and security policy remains a system in which 27 governments have to agree on politically important decisions. Unanimity still governs the core of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, leaving each member state with the capacity to block collective action.

This creates a peculiar political economy of European foreign policy. Every government is invited to participate in consensus-building. But every government also knows that, at the end of the process, it can potentially block the result.

Consensus-building works when governments trust one another enough to compromise. But when the veto becomes a bargaining instrument, consensus can mutate into hostage-taking. A member state may use an issue of vital concern to the other 26 to extract concessions on an entirely different matter. The result is a foreign policy that can be simultaneously very powerful and remarkably fragile. No institutional rearrangement between the Commission and the EEAS will resolve this issue.

The irony of the present debate is that the member states may finally be rediscovering why they created the hybrid structures of the HRVP and EEAS in the first place.

Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).