Brussels blog

Any day now the advertisements should go out for the top jobs in Brussels’ new diplomatic service – the European External Action Service, as it will be boringly known.

If the optimists are right, the service will be anything but boring. It’s the most important single invention to come out of the Lisbon treaty, say the true believers. It will give the European Union the eyes and ears to forge a genuine foreign policy, and the voice to put it into effect.

On the other hand, eurosceptics are convinced it will just be a vast and expensive new bureaucracy, merely duplicating the role of national embassies. So the battle to keep its wings clipped may also be anything but boring.

The 27 member states sit somewhere in the middle – not quite sure they believe in what they are creating, wanting to keep it under control, and no doubt trying to do it all on a shoe-string. In the end, their attitude will determine if it’s a success or a failure.

The legal basis of the EAS was finally approved by the foreign ministers on Monday, after tough negotiations with the European Parliament. All it needs now is a budget and the necessary staff regulations to hire about 100 top diplomats, on top of the 800 already employed in the Commission or Council services. It is supposed to be up and running by the end of the year.

That’ll be easier said than done. The arguments over money and jobs will be painful and public. Pierre Vimont, France’s popular ambassador to Washington and former permanent representative in Brussels, is the front-runner to be secretary-general under Catherine Ashton, the high representative. There will be two deputies (Germany’s Helga Schmid, former chef de cabinet to Joschka Fischer, now director of the policy unit in the Council Secretariat, is expected to be one) and some half-dozen “managing directors” of geographical areas.

Then there will be 136 embassies round the world – the same number as there were European Commission delegations, except they are branded with the EU name. They will take over the co-ordinating role for the common foreign policy that used to be done by the individual member states when they held the rotating presidency.

All sorts of alarming figures have been bandied about on the eventual size of the service. The reality is that there are already 1,600 officials being taken over, including diplomats and administrators, and that could be topped up to 2,000 by December.

Eventually, the whole service might total 6,000 to 7,000, including Brussels-based staff, and local cooks and bottle-washers around the world.

The member states have insisted that at least one-third of the diplomats should come from national capitals – not a bad idea, given the lack of diplomatic experience in the Brussels bureaucracy. They are going to have to be much more political in future.

But national capitals never like giving up their powers, and foreign ministries are no exception. The British have refused to allow the future EU delegations to take on a consular role. What chance is there that national embassies will be slimmed down as the EU delegations are built up?

Lady Ashton wants it all to be “budget neutral”: the future service should be lean and mean. It certainly should save on the costs of the rotating presidencies. Member states used to add anything from 30 to 60 staff to their delegations at the United Nations, for example, to perform that function. Now they won’t have to.

At a time when every member state is taking an axe to public expenditure, it certainly won’t be popular to spend a whole lot more on the EAS – unless cuts can be made on national diplomatic services. The danger is that the grand old foreign services, like the French and British, will fight a furious rearguard action to protect their patches, and keep funding of the EAS to a minimum. If they do, then the most important creation of the Lisbon treaty will be hamstrung from the start.