Inside the External Action Service: Institutional Change and Its Impact on the European Political Order
Thomas Henökl, University of Agder
The creation of the post of the High Representative (HR/VP) together with the establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS) have a significant impact not only on European foreign policy-making, but also, more widely, on the transformation of the European political order, and represent a further step towards the evolution of a European administrative space. What makes the EEAS a special case is that this new organisation, created out of Commission and Council departments and systematically also incorporating diplomats from the member states, has some of the characteristics of both parental institutions, and, at the same time, introduces new elements of governance, contributing substantially to the dynamics of European executive centre formation. After a rather rocky first year for the new service in a turbulent international environment, this paper will try and assess the status quo of the organisational change process and analyse its effects for the European foreign policy system. The compound nature of the EEAS and its hybrid role within the inter-institutional setting between the intergovernmental and supranational necessitate new approaches quot; for practitioners as well as for researchers. Based on document analysis and expert interviews with EEAS officials of different institutional provenience, presenting a first overview of the outcomes of this institution-building exercise, we argue that the institutional design and format matter for both the future of the EU's external action as well as for the European institutional architecture as a whole.