Like the daily newspaper Le Monde recently, European media are regularly highlighting the significant difficulties faced by former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas in carrying out her duties as High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. She has struggled to promote a policy that would enable Europe to exert influence on the global geopolitical stage commensurate with its demographic and economic weight. Beyond whatever mistakes Kallas may have made during her first year in office, she is above all a victim of a seriously dysfunctional institutional set-up.
According to the treaties, foreign and security policy remains the exclusive prerogative of the member states, with the Union called upon only to play a coordinating role between them. This is why the Council theoretically holds pre-eminence within the European institutions in this area, while the European Commission has no particular competence. It is also why the Treaty of Lisbon created the post of High Representative with a very special status. Appointed at the same time as the President of the Commission, the High Representative is a member of the Council of the Union and, as such, permanently chairs the Councils of Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Development Aid Ministers. According to the treaty, the High Representative should also chair the Foreign Trade Council, but this presidency was withdrawn a few years ago to preserve the turf of the Commission and its Directorate-General for Trade. In the other areas of EU action, the ministers of whichever member state holds the rotating presidency take turns chairing the Councils of Ministers.
The High Representative is also a Commissioner and Vice-President of the Commission. This dual role was designed to ensure the necessary coordination between the foreign and security policy defined by the member states within the Council and the actions of the Commissioners and Directorates-General that have a direct impact on these issues, such as DG Trade or those dealing with enlargement, the Mediterranean, or development aid. To mark this special status within the European institutions, the High Representative also heads a separate administration, the European External Action Service (EEAS), which belongs neither to the Council nor to the Commission.
However, this institutional architecture, established in 2010 following the Treaty of Lisbon, has proved dysfunctional on several levels—precisely at a moment when, due to mounting geopolitical threats, Europe should urgently become able to respond in real time.
The first and most well-known level of dysfunction concerns the unanimity rule: common foreign and security policy is one of the few areas where this requirement continues to apply within the Union. This allows a country such as Hungary, for example, to single-handedly block for weeks or even months the most urgent decisions needed to address existential threats to the Union, such as those related to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
When it comes to issues that are central to the sovereignty of member states, it is not obvious that aligning this area with the qualified majority voting that now applies to most other domains of European action would be politically achievable. However, a more restrictive super-qualified majority mechanism—or even simply unanimity minus one or two members—could be envisaged for these issues. This alone would resolve a significant number of difficulties.
Furthermore, while unanimity is currently required under the treaties in the European Council, which brings together heads of state and government, Article 31 of the Treaty on European Union already opens up significant possibilities for using qualified majority voting in the Council of the European Union when foreign affairs or defence ministers are implementing decisions taken by the European Council. These possibilities have never been used. Under the current treaty, doing so would already significantly change the Union’s practice in this area.
Centralisation breeds dysfunction
The other difficulty—and in practice often the most debilitating—concerns coordination between the High Representative, the Presidency of the Commission, and the various Commission sectors involved in the Union’s external policy. Although the High Representative has a specialised administration, this administration, consisting mainly of staff from the Union’s embassies around the world, has in practice only a very limited budget at its disposal. Its actual capacity for action depends heavily on the various Commission Directorates-General in most areas.
In order to guide the Commission’s action in this domain, the treaty provides that the High Representative shall automatically be Vice-President of the Commission. At least, that was how the drafters of the treaties intended it to work. But Kallas is now clearly facing the same difficulty as Josep Borrell before her: the centralisation of all decisions at the level of President Ursula von der Leyen and her cabinet effectively deprives Vice-Presidents of the coordination functions provided for in the treaties, even though such coordination is clearly needed in a Commission of 27 members—and soon 30 or more.
During the previous term of office, the Gaza issue, which is central to the Union’s foreign policy, provided a caricatural illustration of this dysfunction. The Commissioner responsible for the region within the Commission was the Hungarian Oliver Várhelyi, a staunch supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, who held the neighbourhood portfolio. Far from agreeing to coordinate with High Representative Borrell, he systematically took initiatives aimed at depriving the Palestinians of European support, thus countering the policy of the High Representative/Vice President, who was trying to get the Israeli government to respect international law. In doing so, Várhelyi enjoyed the constant support of the Commission Presidency. This major dysfunction had a severely negative effect on the Union’s image in the world.
This centralisation effectively gives the Commission a central role in foreign policy, even though the treaties do not provide for this. From a distance, it may certainly give the impression of a certain efficiency: the European Union finally has a single face and phone number. But in reality, it rather slows down the Union’s action and leads it to make mistakes with serious consequences for Europeans. Examples include the Commission President’s visit to Jerusalem in October 2023, the highly questionable agreements forced through with Tunisia in 2023 and Egypt in 2024, and certain ill-prepared initiatives in the field of defence. European foreign and security policy requires both intensive coordination with member states and constant monitoring of relations with key global players—which are not limited to the President of the United States and his administration. It is a real full-time job.
The path forward
If the European Union is to be equipped with a foreign and security policy worthy of the name, it must remove the requirement for unanimity among member states and give the High Representative a clear hierarchical role—particularly in terms of budget—vis-à-vis the Commissioners and Directorates-General principally involved in the EU’s external action and security policy. This may also involve reintegrating the EEAS into the Commission’s services, as its current hybrid status isolates it and rather limits its capacity for action.
Guillaume Duval is adviser to the Jacques Delors Institute, former editor-in-chief of Alternatives Economiques and former speechwriter of HRVP Josep Borell.
