The European external action service: an opportunity to reconcile development and security policies or a new battleground for inter-institutional turf wars?
“There cannot be sustainable development without peace and security, and without development and poverty eradication there will be no sustainable peace”. The commitment to intertwine development and security policies of both the European Union and the Member States has increasingly been put forward in policy documents since the early 2000s. While the security-development nexus seems at first sight obvious and rather unremarkable, it has nonetheless become one of the main trouble spots of inter-institutional coherence in EU external action. The fuzzy boundaries between both policy domains and their impact on the distribution of competences turned the implementation of the nexus into a particularly complex and tense exercise. The rationale behind many of the Lisbon Treaty innovations is to address coherence issues by reducing the potential for conflict to a minimum. This paper focuses on the European External Action Service (EEAS) and analyses to what extent it could contribute to reconciling the distinct policies, strategies and institutional cultures of development cooperation and Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The new diplomatic service constitutes a functionally autonomous body with considerable policy discretion regarding both CFSP and development cooperation. Moreover, it assembles staff and resources from the Council, the Commission and the Member States that previously stood in sharp competition. Yet, the author argues that this integration has only been partial and without the necessary political will, the EEAS might become a new battleground for continued inter-institutional turf wars and thus undermine the EU’s international credibility
