To Fix Europe's Foreign Policy, Bring the Politicians to Brussels - Opinion Piece

The EU has long been criticized for failing at foreign and defence policy. Amid seismic shifts in the global order, Europe hasn’t stepped up to the challenge; it has merely stumbled from one crisis to the next.

Clearly, heightened cooperation and the pooling of sovereignty are necessary prerequisites to empowering Europe to compete with other world powers. Thus far, in the crucial field of foreign and defence policy, the EU has failed to do so, a failure underscored by the recent Franco-German push to reform the EU’s external action service (EEAS). But reforming the EEAS will get Europe only so far. The rot is not technocratic; it is political.

The textbook solution is to move from unanimity to the EU-standard qualified majority voting (QMV). Reducing the number of vetoes at the table would improve efficiency and responsiveness in EU foreign and defence policy decision-making. However, introducing QMV to areas so essential to the core of state sovereignty is both an incredibly bitter pill for governments to swallow and a process that requires reforming the EU treaties. It is not without reason that since 2007 there has been no treaty reform.

Other solutions must therefore be sought. Reforming the EEAS will certainly have its merits, but any reform to it will inherently be too limited in scope. I argue that solutions must also be sought on higher political levels. To do so, it warrants looking closely at how the EU successfully negotiates difficult issues elsewhere.

In the lower, technocratic gears of the EU, such as Coreper or Council working parties, dossiers are resolved through so-called iterative negotiation. Policy officers never negotiate only one policy at one moment with one goal. Instead, they work daily, for years, with the same colleagues. This repetition transforms very distributive, zero-sum conflicts into integrative negotiations. Because negotiators know they will meet again tomorrow, they can trade a concession today on Policy X for a favour the next day on Policy Y. It is the repetition, i.e. the iteration, that builds the trust.

The higher up the political ladder you go, the less this principle applies. Negotiators become ministers; they meet monthly, not daily. Naturally, ministers feel far more accountable to their domestic electorates than to their Brussels colleagues. This is a good thing, done by design and normally does not form a big obstacle to more technical policies. These are often fully negotiated by the lower committees and require only a rubber stamp at the Council of Ministers. 

But in an area as divisive as foreign affairs, almost everything is dragged into this ministerial,  politicised and distributive environment. This is what paralyses EU foreign policy.

Again, it is not a bad thing that such important decisions remain political; leaving unelected technocrats to decide whom to sanction or where to deploy military missions would not particularly benefit the prosperity of this continent. However, there is no reason for these negotiations to be so distributive and zero-sum.

Learning from the EU itself, iterative negotiating at the political level could be the solution. While foreign ministers cannot live in Brussels, governments can create a permanent hybrid: a Resident Minister for EU Foreign Affairs, with one leg in Brussels and the other in their capital. These cabinet-level officials would engage in high-frequency, face-to-face negotiations, building the trust needed to trade concessions across dossiers. Crucially, because they retain a seat in their national cabinets, they would ideally also possess the political authority to adjust red lines in real time, bypassing the delays currently experienced in the Foreign Affairs Council.

This formula has already been adopted successfully by several member states, such as Austria, France and Italy in the form of a Minister for European Affairs who sits on the General Affairs Council to resolve internal disputes. Copying this format to external EU-matters will not magically fix every geopolitical rift. But Europe is in crisis. Relying on slow, monthly decision-making will only cement Europe as a bystander in the international arena. The continent needs to innovate and address real problems with practical solutions. Moving political authority closer to Brussels need not be a surrender of sovereignty. Done correctly, it can empower member states to act on the global stage - better, faster, and together. Like a Union.