Global Europe

Any expectation that Europe’s foreign policy can morph from dwarf to giant within twelve months would be wholly unrealistic. Even with Lisbon’s improved machinery, it will take years of clever consensus-building and crisis-management to make the European foreign policy glass half full, let alone fill it up.

This of course is not to say that Lisbon won’t make a difference. Catherine Ashton, if she proves her mettle in this job as she has in previous ones, will be able to use the High Representative's strengthened position under the Treaty to accelerate the speed of integration. Lisbon puts Ashton at the top of a bureaucratic machinery which can soon become an effective tool in devising and delivering a common policy -- but on one condition.  The new High Representative must succeed in at least two out of her three first big tests.

The first battle is already underway, and it is one Ashton can ill afford to lose. With the Treaty barely in force, some national governments have immediately launched attempts to ringfence the new High Representative's prerogatives and undermine the logic of the Treaty. It will be essential for Ashton to win and secure clear control over her cabinet and the EU’s External Action Service. If not, she will likely end up presiding over an unmanageable bureaucracy rife with national tensions and institutional rivalries. Losing this fight would be a huge setback, with long-term effects on Europe’s capacity to rise to its external challenges.

The timing of the other two tests is unpredictable, and friends of a stronger European foreign policy must pray they do not come to soon: In at least one of the next two major foreign policy crises, Catherine Ashton must be seen to be a game-changer, helping to goad even the most reluctant member states into a more coherent and more effective common position.

Succeeding in one of these two tests would go a long way to revive the political dynamic Europe now so desperately lacks. Conversely, a failure to make a difference in the next two big crises would drain the new foreign policy system of its authority and efficiency. We do not know when and whence these challenges will arise. They might appear suddenly or grow in menace over time. But we know the High Representative’s main internal policy tool in a major crisis: the right, now substantially reinforced, to table a proposal for a common European approach, significantly bolstered by the novel right to chair ministerial meetings.

Major crises are moments when policy becomes fluid. If she manoeuvres cleverly when one erupts and every day or every hour matters, Ashton will seize the initiative not a moment too soon and not a moment too late, with enough allies amongst national governments swiftly and discreetly aligned on her side to make it difficult even for a big EU member state to position itself against the consensus she forges. To win her bureaucratic battle against obstreperous EU governments, Ashton must know how to wield a sabre; to succeed in a crisis, she will need a lighter sword. This is when Ashton will have to display the qualities required of politicians and fencers alike: boldness, subtlety, and a sense of timing.