Two thoughts spring to mind when you consider the appointment of João Vale de Almeida, a Portuguese Eurocrat, as the European Union’s next ambassador to the US. The first is that the EU seems to be retreating from its experiment of placing a political heavyweight in Washington to speak up for Europe. John Bruton, the EU’s outgoing envoy, is a former Irish prime minister whose face was well-known in the White House and on Capitol Hill when he got the job in 2004.
Vale de Almeida is familiar to certain US officials – he has been the European Commission’s top liaison man for G8 and G20 meetings. But as a civil servant who started his career with the Commission in Lisbon back in 1982, he has never been elected to office, has never served as a government minister and altogether lacks the profile of someone like Bruton. Americans are already struggling to recall which two figures were chosen last year as the EU’s first full-time president and new head of foreign policy. Now they have a third obscure European name to remember.
The second thought is that Almeida’s main qualification for the US post appears to be that he spent five years from 2004 to 2009 as chief of staff for José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, who is also Portuguese. This has profound implications for the way the EU’s new foreign policy structures, as established under the Lisbon treaty, will be seen in Washington.
The treaty foresees that all EU missions abroad will form part of a diplomatic service answerable to Baroness Catherine Ashton, the newly appointed foreign policy high representative for the 27-nation bloc. Given Vale de Almeida’s close ties with Barroso, however, it will be entirely understandable if US policymakers see him as a channel for communicating with the Commission president as much as a servant of Ashton.
This perception is reinforced by the fact that Barroso has engineered Vale de Almeida’s appointment by exploiting his powers as Commission president in the interval before the EU’s diplomatic service is up and running. EU national governments didn’t get much of a say in the matter, either. Once the diplomatic service is operating in earnest, it will be Ashton’s job to choose ambassadors.
True, it can be argued that it was important to put a new envoy in Washington as soon as possible and Vale de Almeida had the right profile as the Commission’s director-general for external relations. But he has only held that job for a couple of months. Vale de Almeida’s appointment sends a signal that institutional rivalries and personal power plays will continue to hinder the formation of a united, more forceful, more coherent EU foreign policy.
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