A safe pair of hands at the heart of Union’s foreign policy

Date: 05/10/00

This week, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana celebrates one year in office. Simon Taylor assesses what impact the former secretary-general of NATO has made since taking the job of high Representative

AFTER 12 months in office as the EU's High Representative for foreign and security policy, the verdict on Javier Solana echoes the comments that the former physics professor himself must have written on many of his students' work: "Tremendous effort, but keep up the good work."

There can be no doubt that the Union has made leaps and bounds towards creating a foreign policy worthy of the name since the dynamic Spaniard was plucked from the secretary-general's post at NATO to become the EU's voice to the world.

The most remarkable advances have been in developing the means for the Union to use military force to deal with new humanitarian crises on its doorstep.

EU leaders only took the formal decision to enable the bloc to launch military missions without relying on NATO leadership and its US-dominated assets last December. But the structures the Union will need to run future military operations have already been set up and, as part of what Solana dubs a "genetic change" in the EU's culture, around 80 uniformed staff now stride the corridors of its headquarters to provide essential advice.

More importantly, the Union is on the verge of assembling its own rapid reaction force to intervene in crisis situations and relations with NATO have been put on a sound footing. Thanks to Solana travelling an estimated half a million kilometres around the world since last October, the EU now has a more easily identifiable figurehead in its dealings with governments and international organisations.

The ability to send Solana to represent the Union as a whole in difficult situations has made a crucial difference on a number of occasions. His night flight to Ankara last December flattered the Turks sufficiently to persuade them to accept the terms they were being offered for full status as a candidate for Union membership. His direct mediation between Morocco and Algeria in their dispute over the Western Sahara ensured that the first EU-Africa summit went ahead as scheduled in April.

Working in close co-operation with External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten, Solana has improved the effectiveness and coherence of the Union's policy in the Balkans - the biggest testing ground for its new foreign policy aspirations. "There has been a huge improvement in performance in the Balkans. You only have to look at the changes in Croatia and Albania and the success of the reconstruction agency in Kosovo," says one diplomat.

Solana's assiduous courting of Serbian opposition leaders should soon start to bear fruit, provided the presidential election results give the final shove needed to dislodge Slobodan Milosevic from power.

Even though the EU's achievements in developing its new defence and security policy are clear to see - Solana says progress has been at the "speed of light" - he admits that the momentum has been fuelled by events unforeseen when governments agreed to create the post of High Representative in Amsterdam back in 1997. Notably, the historic Anglo-French St Malo declaration of 1998 removed the barriers to setting up an independent European military force after 50 years. Then, last year, the Kosovo campaign showed the Union how reliant it was on US military assets and political will to intervene in a crisis situation which Europe should have been able to handle on its own.

There is little doubt that Solana's presence at the head of the Council of Ministers while the EU has been drawing up its military plans has been essential to its success. With his background at NATO, he has been able to reassure the US during its periodic bouts of paranoia that the Union is not trying to develop capabilities to rival the alliance's role as a guarantor of collective defence.

At the same time, he has acted as an invaluable bridgehead between the two organisations, allaying NATO's concerns about the EU's new role and ensuring that the Union will have enough military expertise to prevent its first operation ending in disaster.

"Solana has made a big difference in security policy by bringing much needed credibility and realism," says one diplomat. "He has an intimate understanding of how to run crisis management operations because he ran the Kosovo campaign," adds a NATO official.

Yet while everyone agrees that Solana has made a difference by giving the EU's common foreign and security policy (CFSP) a higher public profile and greater visibility, assessments of the impact he has had in terms of making the bloc's approach more coherent are noticeably cooler. "He has not really brought much to the CFSP party," argues one diplomat.

Many believe that Solana's appointment has not resolved the key problem which it was meant to overcome. In a nutshell, it has not provided an easy answer to Henry Kissinger's famous question: "Who do I call when I want to call Europe?"

Diplomats blame the EU's complex system of shared responsibilities for foreign policy for this. According to the job description for the High Representative contained in the Amsterdam Treaty, Solana's role is to "assist" whichever country holds the six-month rotating presidency of the Union. This means that he still has to work with the foreign minister of the country at the EU's helm to set policy priorities.

At best, this can lead to wasteful distrust and duplication. At worst, it can result in clashes such as the one which Solana had with Finnish Foreign Minister Tarja Halonen during Helsinki's presidency, partly because of poor personal chemistry and partly because Solana's NATO background jarred with Halonen's neutral politics.

Solana also has to deal with the European Commission, which has a significant role in foreign affairs. His personal relations with Patten have been extremely positive, and have not produced any of the major turf battles which a personality-obsessed media predicted - although Solana's insistence on being treated as a head of state at summits has annoyed both Patten and Commission President Romano Prodi.

However, the reality is that the Commissioner still has far more policy instruments at his disposal than Solana.

The High Representative's personal charm and media profile can undoubtedly help the EU project itself on the international stage. But it is Patten, as coordinator of the five Commissioners dealing with external relations, who has an arsenal of trade concessions, humanitarian and reconstruction aid and administrative support at his disposal. As one diplomat put it: "Patten still has the legions."

Solana has certainly played a role in improving the Union's performance in two main priority areas: boosting the visibility and effectiveness of its activities in the Balkans and efforts to ensure better coordination between the EU's actions in the external relations field and those of member states.

But it is Patten and his staff who have been responsible for most of the improvements, not least because they control most of the important policy levers. Solana also suffers from having a much smaller staff, which has left him overstretched in coping with the geographical sweep of his dossier.

Growing doubts about the wisdom of sharing the external relations dossier between two people - with the resulting inevitable duplication and uncertainty about who does what - has prompted some serious thinking about merging the two roles in the future.

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt made the most forthright call for this to happen in a speech in Brussels last month. "It would be better if the High Representative had a seat both on the Council and the Commission in order to avoid ambiguity. It is untenable that both the High Representative and the Commissioner are involved in the Union's joint foreign policy," he argued.

Patten himself has suggested he is open to the idea, saying in a keynote speech in June that the "CFSP is a work in progress which will be further streamlined in the years to come". He also warned that harking back to the purely intergovernmental model of the Amsterdam years was a "recipe for weakness and mediocrity" which would become more and more obvious as the Union enlarges to take in up to a dozen new members.

But given the political difficulties involved in making such a change, future Kissingers will need more than one number in their little black books for some years to come.

Major feature. As EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana celebrates one year in office, author assesses what impact the former secretary-general of NATO has made since taking the job of High Representative.