The Lisbon Treaty stipulations on Development Cooperation and the Council Decision of 25 March 2010 (Draft) establishing the organisation and functioning of … (original) (raw)
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""“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. ""
The European External Action Service and the Nexus between CFSP/CSDP and Development Cooperation
European Foreign Affairs Review 17, no. 4 (2012): 625–652.
The EU’s commitment to integrate and fine-tune security and development policies has been considerably complicated by three main obstacles: (1) the legal distinction between development cooperation and CFSP/CSDP; (2) the diffused institutional responsibility over the EU’s toolbox in these policy areas; and (3) the discord between the elusive interpretation of the security-development linkage and the rather rhetorical call to enhance coordination.The creation of the European External Action Service significantly alters the EU’s architecture in this regard by pooling together the EU’s scattered instruments and policy actors. In this manner, it offers opportunities to overcome the obstacle of diffused responsibility and operationalize the rhetorical coordination commitment. However, the legal divide between development cooperation and CFSP/CSDP has survived the Lisbon Treaty changes and may considerably complicate the day-to-day operation of the EU’s foreign service. Moreover, the EEAS fulfils only a supporting role and the extent to which its potential is turned into practice depends to a large degree on the constant and constructive cooperation with the EU’s traditional external actors.