Can the EU forge a foreign policy?

The year 2007 should have been a perfect year for the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP): from the big picture to the detail, change and above all progress can be seen.

Nothing gets bigger than the Lisbon treaty, which will effectively enable the EU to have a foreign service. What it will look like, how powerful it will be and how it will stand alongside member states’ foreign services remains to be seen. But that approval has finally been given for the ‘great divide’ between the Council of Ministers and the European Commission to be eroded and possibly eliminated must be cause for celebration, however cautious.

Those who work in the institutions appear to be part of the prudent brigade and quite justifiably so. Until structures are made clear and above all jobs secured, no one is about to say ‘Hallelujah’ - especially since the propensity of the EU to take the worse possible approach to bureaucratic reform is well known. But for the rest of the world - outside Brussels but also beyond capitals, governments and think-tanks - in the hotspots of the world where people need the EU, the change will be really tangible. No longer will there be competing EU missions, one from the Commission and one from the Council, both obsessed more with dealing with each other than with any concrete reality on the ground. In connecting the dots from the abstract document to the mundane reality of life, the Lisbon treaty will enable the EU to cease being a target of ridicule whenever it deploys into complex situations.

As for the detail, the confirmation of funding for Galileo, coupled with the latent affirmation of the satellite system as a public good rather than a mere bonanza of contracts to defence industries and their sub-contractors, was positive.

Defence industries finally started to work in greater symbiosis with the EU this year, as witnessed by the impressive surge in the fortunes of the European Defence Agency: in passing its initial three-year mark it has grown to a fully functioning agency with a clear vision as to the future of European defence industries in the service of a slowly emerging image of a European defence identity. The signing of the first three contracts under its R&T Joint Investment Programme just last week is very encouraging. Hopefully the first will not be the last. The greater the coherence in defence industries, the greater the chance of coherence in European defence - which is desperately needed.

Despite all these positive develop-ments, ultimately 2007 is a disappointing year for the ESDP - most especially on Kosovo and above all Darfur.

Kosovo is a mess. Worse still, it is a predictable mess. A year ago it was clear from the political runes in Washington that the administration would use its last operative, pre-election year to push for independence - largely as part of its own worsening relationship with Russia rather than purely because of Kosovar realities. The EU countered this with its usual ineptitude, combined with apparent disinterest about events in its own backyard, focusing on the options of a successor mission to the UN in the province rather than the hard core political realities. The end result is incoherence: a decision to go ahead with the mission, but no consensus on independence; an offer - already spurned - to speed up Serbian EU membership against acceptance of Kosovar independence, coupled with no proper vision as to the realities of either independence or the mission. Is this the best the ESDP machine can do? If so, it bodes ill for the future foreign service, not to mention the stability of the Balkans.

And then there is Darfur. It is sad and appalling that ultimately the EU has done nothing in the past 12 months to tackle the horror that is Darfur. In a spurt of energy led by Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, the Union announced a mission to Chad, to help deal with the refugees there - but even this meagre offering has dissipated when confronted with underwhelming political will and a lack of military resources. It must be a scar on the collective conscience of the institutions and member states that millions have been hounded from their homes, hundreds of thousands killed, wounded, raped and pillaged - and the EU has done nothing of any significance to deal with this reality. As such, can the EU really have any claim to instating a proper ESDP?

• Ilana Bet-El is an academic, author and policy adviser based in Brussels.

The year 2007 should have been a perfect year for the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP): from the big picture to the detail, change and above all progress can be seen.