The North Korean enigma: is there life after Kim Jong-il?

On a cold Saturday morning, while traveling on his personal train through an undisclosed region of North Korea, long-time dictator Kim Jong-il suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving the 24 million inhabitants of the impoverished nuclear power on the verge of an unprecedented second hereditary power transfer.

Since the news of this death were revealed by North Korean official media more than 48 hours later – the failure of South Korean, Japanese and U.S. secret services to pick up any clues of the events proving the sheer stealth and secrecy of the hermit kingdom, – news outlets around the world have been speculating about the future of the country, the prospects for successful succession and the risks of collapse and its probably fateful consequences.

Where is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) actually coming from? What does the death of the Dear Leader mean? What can we expect from them in the near future? We will try to briefly answer these questions to the best of our knowledge, based on information from different sources and logical assumptions, trying to overcome what Stanford University fellow and North Korea expert Robert Carlin calls the feeling of being “deaf, dumb, blind and with our arms tied behind our backs” regarding the actual policy moves of the North Korean government. 

A little political background 

Let us start with a key date: April 15, 1912. That’s the day in which the Eternal President of the DPRK, revolutionary leader Kim Il-sung, was born. This is also the day that marks the start of the North Korean calendar, a key symbolic element of the Juche (or self-reliance) ideology upon which the North Korean government justifies its policy decisions.

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the Great Leader's birth – and thus, according to official propaganda, also of modern North Korea's, – and the current leadership started an aggressive campaign to portray 2012 as the year in which North Korea would become a “prosperous and modern” nation.

This campaign of national renewal received extra significance after August 2008, when Kim Jong-il reportedly suffered a serious stroke. This almost deadly event, in combination with his already extensive list of health ailments, converted succession into an urgent matter. Reportedly, Kim chose his eventual successor within months: Kim Jong-un, his third son, approximately 26 at the time (intelligence sources give his date of birth as 8 January 1984), emerged from the dark to become the official candidate to succeed his ailing father, as reported by South Korean media already in January 2009. His eldest half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, now 40, had been the early favorite to the throne – and is surprisingly still being hailed by some South Korean experts as a feasible alternative in case the Kim Jong-un option does not pan out, – but fell out of favor after being caught attempting to enter Japan on a fake passport in 2001. Since then, he mostly lives in Macau, where he owns a casino – allegedly used to launder money coming from North Korean arms trade – and has even been recently quoted as suggesting that North Korea needed to move past a dynastic system of government.

The second step towards arranging succession, mostly overlooked by Western media, was the revamping of the Constitution, approved in April 2009. As detailed by top scholar Stephan Haggard, the new constitution has changed the power and structure of the National Defense Commission and revamped the Central Committee of the Party. The Supreme People’s Assembly, although still considered a rubber-stamp body, has now new, younger appointees, all of which are loyal and owe their posts to the current leadership. (Also of note, the new Constitution dropped the term 'Communism,’ which conveys the eventual creation of a classless society, for the more nuanced 'Socialism,’ that better reflects the current corrupt, black market-based North Korean economy.)

In other words, the new Constitutional text created a whole structure that could either support Kim Jong-un or provide the basis for collective leadership in case he was unable to have a wide enough power base for political or other reasons – including the sudden, unexpected death of his father. This complex institutional structure, while in theory reinforcing Kim Jong-il’s role and power, should also be seen as a move back to a more classical communist structure, including a Central Committee that held its first plenary meeting in almost 20 years in September 2010 and a Supreme People's Assembly, also reactivated after 30 years and whose chairman Kim Yong-nam has been mentioned by approved foreign spokesman of the regime Alejandro Cao de Benós as the “new leader” of North Korea (more on that later.) With this reinforced institutional structure, Kim Jong-il was hedging against failure by his son to establish his power in order to avoid eventual regime collapse while, at the same time, reinvigorating old structures with new, loyal appointees that should normally support the new power transition.

Also during 2009 and 2010, new generals were appointed, among them Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong il’s sister, and Kim Jong-un, both given the rank of 4-star generals on September 27, 2010, the day before a Workers' Party of Korea conference in Pyongyang. On 28 September 2010, Kim Jong-un was named vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and appointed to the Central Committee of the Workers' Party. His birthday has also become a national holiday, celebrated on January 1. Songs of praise for Kim Jong-un are sung on special occasions, and he has been given the public title of “Brilliant Comrade.” 

On October 10, 2010, Kim Jong-un attended, alongside his father, the Workers' Party's 65th anniversary celebration, a move that fully confirmed his position. In January 2011, according to the South Korean right-wing newspaper Chosun Ilbo, the regime began purging around 200 protégés of both Jong-un's uncle Chang Sung-taek and O Kuk-ryol, the vice chairman of the National Defence Commission, to further prevent either man from rivaling the projected heir. Further steps were expected during the 2012 celebrations of Kim Il-sung’s birth; however, Kim Jong-il’s death means change will have to come sooner than expected.

The international situation the Dear Leader leaves behind

In his work Authoritarism in an Age of Democratization, scholar Jason Brownlee asserts that only 9 out of the 258 dictators that have ruled a country for at least 3 years after the World War II actually managed to successfully arrange a hereditary power transfer, Kim Il-sung being one of them. However, there are no known precedents in modern politics of a second hereditary succession, and the sudden death of the former dictator could dangerously hasten and imperil the process.

Diplomatic sources confirm that the stability-craving Chinese leadership expected Kim Jong-il to live for 2 or 3 more years, meaning he would have had extra time to groom his appointed successor – duly approved by China – and solidify his path to the throne. China, the DPRK’s leading trade partner and aid donor, and almost only friend in the international arena, has rushed to praise the deceased leader, show its continued support for the North Korean regime – directly through the words of President Hu Jintao – and assert that China would welcome a visit from the new North Korean leader at a convenient time to both sides, thus underlining Beijing's keenness for a smooth succession.

Kim Jong-il had been unusually active during what turned out to be his last months in power, visiting China several times pledging for food and fuel aid while also studying economic reforms in Northern and Eastern China as a possible model for progressive economic transformation at home. In fact, China had become Kim Jong-il’s last valid trade partner and ally: the DPRK was more isolated than ever before after fellow rogue dictator Muammar Gaddafi's death and Hosni Mubarak’s demise in Egypt – Egyptian companies are suspiciously behind North Korea’s mobile phone network and construction of the giant Ryugyong Hotel. Lee Myung-bak, President of South Korea since 2008, left behind his predecessors’ conciliatory Sunshine Policy, and the Obama administration's apertures towards the regime were put on hold after Pyongyang tested his second nuclear device in May 2009.

However, the current diplomatic status quo caused uneasiness among the North Korean elites, as it supposed a dangerous departure from the confrontational, multiparty negotiation style that has been a staple of North Korean diplomacy since the Kim Il-sung era. They have been extremely skillful at dealing separately with confronted powers – such as Mao's China and the Soviet Union since the 1960s – and obtaining concessions from all involved parties. The last example thereof had been the six-party talks, a result of the DPRK withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and involving all relevant regional powers, seen as North Korea as a way to extract aid and other benefits from the economically powerful nations that surround it and as a possible successor to bilateral or coordinated negotiations with the U.S., South Korea, Japan and China that probably allowed the regime to (barely) survive after the end of the Soviet Union and its subsidized trade. Therefore, overreliance on a single diplomatic ally – a fact exacerbated by the increasingly dominating economic and military position of China in Asia – is a risk the DPRK is not really keen on taking.

In line with that goal, Pyongyang recently agreed with U.S. negotiators to stop its uranium enrichment program in exchange for 240,000 tons (20,000 tons a month for a year) of high-protein biscuits and vitamins, but not rice, a prime food commodity that could easily be funneled from the needy to the military and eventually be resold in black markets. This tactical move, confirmed by sources close to the North Korean leadership, makes sense on a quadruple ground for the DPRK.

First, it helps alleviate malnourishment and food shortage problems that could obviously cause dissatisfaction among the population – already hit by an estimated 140% inflation rate since the failed currency reform of December 2009 – and eventually complicate the power transfer. Second, it helps the North Korean regime to bolster its food stocks towards 2012, the year earmarked for the nation to become "modern and prosperous". Third, it helps attain these two key goals for internal stability without giving much in return: stopping the uranium enrichment program does not mean dismantling the surprisingly modern facilities where the fuel was being processed. Moreover, as Alejandro Cao de Benós, the only official regime spokesman of non-Korean origin, has argued, North Korea does not really need to expand its nuclear arsenal beyond the 6-12 bombs it might already possess: in other words, Pyongyang sees its nuclear capabilities as a merely dissuasive diplomatic tool and is by no means interested in a crazy nuclear arms race. Finally, the fourth goal that this deal with the U.S. accomplishes is partially overcoming overreliance on China, thus opening a way for further partners with whom to negotiate with a well-known trading chip of key strategic value in the current geopolitical context: help us and we will not (completely) fall into China's lap.

Just a young successor or a ruling clique?

The question most media outlets and intelligence agencies are asking themselves right now is the role Kim Jong-un will be able to play after the sudden death of his father. Too young, too inexperienced, too early: the odds could well be against him if he chose to absorb too much power or a faction of the army or the leadership plotted against him. However, to the eyes of the brainwashed North Korean people, a second hereditary succession might be seen as legitimate: apart from the well-known isolation from foreign realities (no Internet, no contact with foreigners and radio and TV sets pre-tuned to government stations), the refined propaganda machine created by Kim Il-sung and perfected under Kim Jong-il's tenure combines Confucianism (the values of the old Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea from 1392 until 1910), Christian religious imagery (to vividly justify the God-like status of the Kim family), Stalinist propaganda and repression methods and fascist Japan's myth building and discursive elements create a suffocating propaganda environment from cradle to death for the vast majority of North Koreans.

Moreover, the propaganda machine has quickly revved up the Kim Jong-un discourse. On December 19, 2011 the Korean Central News Agency already described Kim Jong-un as "a great person born of heaven," a propaganda term until then reserved to his father and grandfather, and "the eternally immovable mental mainstay of the Korean people". Meanwhile, the Workers' Party Rodong Sinmun newspaper asserted that he is "the spiritual pillar and the lighthouse of hope" for the military and the people, while also claiming that Kim Jong-un was born on Mount Paektu, the same place in which Kim Jong-il's birth in 1942 was theoretically greeted by a double rainbow and the formation of a new star – Soviet records place his birth at a village near Khabarovsk, in Siberia.

However, something different from a personalized rule by the unproven Jong-un might be in the works. When asked by several international media outlets about the leadership status in the DPRK, approved spokesman and KFA Chairman Alejandro Cao de Benós stated that the new leader was Kim Yong-nam, the 86-year old Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly 86, while asserting that Kim Jong-un’s political career is just starting and that he is being hailed not as a supreme leader but as a shining star that “will lead the new generations down the socialist path”.

Mr. Cao de Benós’ assertions should not be taken at face value but, as usual with news emanating from official North Korean sources, with a pinch of salt. First and foremost, he is implicitly corroborating that Kim Jong-il died too fast, too soon for his son to assume the leadership. Moreover, reading between the lines we can foresee a strong chance that North Korea is headed, at least in the short-to-mid-term, towards a collective leadership. By assuring that the new leader is a figure that chairs a rubber stamp, quasi-ritualistic institution, the North Korean elites are leaving the door open for more influential figures to take a leading role.

Therefore, and also in line with the hypothesis laid out by several leading South Korean experts, the key figures – at least in the short term – will be, apart from the young heir apparent, the aforementioned Kim Yong-nam (probably the least important figure of the whole bunch); Vice Marshal Ri Yong-ho, Chief of General Staff of the army as well as vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, an outsider trusted by Kim Jong-un; Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong il’s sister, 65 and a four-star army general; and her husband, Jang Song-taek, Vice Chairman of the National Defense Commission and reportedly the man entrusted by Kim Jong-il himself to “take care of his family, including Kim Jong-un.” 

Collective leadership should be seen as a practical way to avoid internal tensions that could cause regime collapse in a context of a second hereditary succession involving an unproven youngster in a society where the military holds paramount power. As already stated, the revamped institutions the country enjoys since 2009-2010 might help explain what many analysts consider a more stable situation than the one Kim Jong-il inherited when his father died in 1994. Only unexpected events or an ill-advised move by the inexperienced Jong-un, who is expected to be named Chairman of the National Defense Commission before Kim Jong-il’s funeral on December 28, could stir opposition and create a context in which institutional failure could take place. 

Will relations with South Korea and the U.S. improve?

Important developments in opposite directions were taking place just before Kim Jong-il's death. On the one hand, there was a clear and unexpected rapprochement with the Obama administration, with exploratory talks starting last summer and leading to the above-mentioned aid deal. On the other hand, we observe a clear dismissal of South Korean efforts to turn the page after the 2010 Cheonan corvette sinking and Yeonpyeong island shelling: despite efforts by Seoul’s new Minister of Unification Hyun In-taek, Pyongyang rebuffed all calls for a bilateral meeting and is indeed waiting for a possible government change after the presidential elections that will take place in South Korea in late 2012, hoping that the new president will show a more conciliatory attitude than current leader Lee Myung-bak.

Looking forward, we should expect the new North Korean leadership to ratify the still secret deal with the U.S. and seek similar aid packages from other partners, such as the European Union. As some analysts have pointed out, an invitation to reopen six-party talks with the U.S., China, Russia, Japan and South Korea should not be ruled out, although the priority of solving internal affairs will probably delay foreign policy overtures. Relations with South Korea can indeed only improve, either via the resumption of multiparty talks or if Pyongyang’s hopes turn out to be true and South Korea's next president turns out to be a progressive who adopts a more conciliatory, Sunshine Policy­-based approach.

Can we realistically expect some kind of glasnost or perestroika in the DPRK? Obviously, only time will tell, but the most obvious answer right now would be no unless the current regime collapses. In fact, an opening-up policy would severely undermine the legitimacy and power structure of the current leadership, built upon extreme secrecy that keeps most of the population in the dark about outside reality and thus allows the regime to keep their loyalty despite extreme hardship.

However, we might indeed expect a progressive economic opening and reform process. As argued by reputed scholar Andrei Lankov, a fast, full-scale economic transformation process, mirroring the transformations in China or Vietnam during the last 2 or 3 decades, would prove disastrous for the current leadership, and will undoubtedly be avoided by the North Korean ruling class despite increasing Chinese pressures for aperture.

Least but not least, is unification with South Korea possible? The answer, right now, should be a strong no… unless the regime collapses. Apart from the North Korean elite’s self interests, the current status quo greatly benefits China, which sees the DPRK with a mix of Cold War thinking – i.e. as an impoverished, unpredictable but loyal buffer state between itself and South Korea, an American satellite – and a capitalist utilitarian approach – i.e. as a source of valuable minerals, of infrastructures with key strategic and commercial importance and, in the mid-term, also of cheap labor for its exporting industries, – and is therefore not interested in seeing the DPRK fall into Seoul’s lap. This explains its unwavering supportive attitude towards the North Korean regime: we can fully expect China to increase its material support for North Korea to ensure the internal stability necessary for a smooth transition.

Combined with internal legitimacy and institutional support, China’s help and influence, recent American overtures and non-intervention by other regional powers – wary of upsetting China and unsettling the current stability in Northeast Asia – should be enough to guarantee a smooth leadership transition. However, in the unlikely event of regime collapse, the most feasible solution would be an eventual merging with South Korea, probably with UN mediation and after both Chinese and U.S.-South Korean troops occupied the country to prevent mass refugee flows and to assure control over the DPRK’s stock of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Still, reunification would pose a huge economic and social challenge to South Korea, on a much higher scale than the much-compared German reunification of 1991, and would require massive international help – an even thornier issue in a recessionary economic context. All of this, combined with the quickly fading interest in reunification among many younger South Koreans, explains why none of the involved parties will press for the status quo to radically change. Time, once again, seems to be on North Korea’s rogue leaders’ side.

The elite-led globalization and the erosion of East Asian values

I just attended the first day of an East-West dialogue organized yearly in Barcelona. Among the speakers was UN Deputy Secretary General for Communications, Mr. Kiyotaka Akasaka, who talked about Asian values as opposed to Western values, citing examples related to job preservation in companies within a context of economic crisis in Japan, thus helping explain why unemployment has not risen substantially in a country that has been affected by underwhelming growth rates and deflation for more than 20 years. I think that Mr. Akasaka is right in the example he cited, but wrong in extrapolating such values to the wider East Asian region, and much less to the whole of Asia.

Before focusing on our argument, we should first clarify some terminology choices. It might be argued that, instead of using the term "Asian values" (or, more narrowly, "East Asian values"), we should be speaking of a set of values corresponding to group-oriented societies, as opposed to individual-oriented societies, mostly rooted in Calvinist and Lutheran Christianism and with the United States and the United Kingdom as paradigmatic and leading examples. However, here I argue that East Asian nations can not be considered as purely "group-oriented", a definition that would better fit, for instance, most predominantly Muslim societies.

Indeed, East Asian tradition, based on Confucianist, Sintoist and Taoist principles, dictates not only an harmonious social order, but also stresses the individual's ultimate responsibility to succeed (in order to lead the family in a virtuous manner, in the case of men, and to adhere by the rules and work hard within their sphere of influence, in the case of women). Therefore, we should in fact be speaking of a mixed societal model, combining group-oriented elements as well as some of the most extreme approaches to individualism. Consequently, it makes sense to differentiate those so-called (East) Asian values from Western (or, for that matter, Muslim ones).

It is this mixed character of East Asian values the one that explains its partial erosion coupled with economic development. However, as Mr. Akasaka somehow pointed out, there is an exception among the three developed countries in the region: Japan. Even though global trends are also affecting Japan's business culture and eroding notions such as lifetime employment, as well as affecting equality levels, the insular state still resists some extreme individualist tendencies that have already taken hold in South Korea and are creating a two-speed China, with a rapidly growing wealth gap between even richer urbanites and privileged classes (which are well known for not sharing their wealth with the wider society via charities or other social endeavors and that alledegly would not mind deserting their home country in order to enjoy their privileged lifes far away from pollution, food unsafety and cultural repression).

Younger South Koreans, for their part, are widely known for their extreme competitiveness, consumerism and individualism, as shown by the eroding support for national reunification on economic concerns. Moreover, the South Korean is one of the most unequal modern societies: while its GINI inequality index is far away from China's third-world levels, the country, ranking 15th on the recently released UNDP Human Development Index, sees how its privileged position turns into a not-so-brilliant 28th place when adjusting for inequality levels, in what means the sharpest drop among all nations not named United States of America (which falls from the 4th to the 23rd position when adjusting results for inequality).

Although a plausible explanation lies in the fact that Japan was allowed to keep its peculiar mix of modern-traditional culture after its defeat in World War II, thus allowing a smooth transition to a post-totalitarist social-democratic system, Korea had its national pride, economic system and cultural values shattered after the long Japanese invasion, the division of the peninsula in two and the subsequent Korean War, while China underwent a dramatic transformation under Maoism and the precepts of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.


However, there is another important factor that should not be overlooked when assessing this difference: timing in economic development. Japanese economy boomed during the 60s (over 10% average growth during that decade), kept growing strongly during the 70s and, by the 80s, it was already a world leading economy (prompting many U.S. analysts and intellectuals to warn about the Japanese threat to U.S. supremacy, helping the U.S. Government successful bid to force Japan's central bank to let the yen revalue against the dollar, thus accelerating the advent of Japanese economic stagnation). Continued growth during that decade was based on real estate and investment bubbles that burst by the end of the decade and prompted a lengthy period of subpar growth and deflation from which Japan seems unable to exit. 

Japan's transition to a modern, world-leading economy took place during the 60s and the 70s, during the height of the post-World War II social contract, under the Bretton Woods system, the Western European social democracies and the growing social network in the U.S., which reached its apex during the Carter administration. In a global context of Cold War and with the existance of what was perceived as a viable economic and political alternative, Communism, ruling over the USSR and China, European and U.S. economic and political elites, fearing the spread of Soviet-sponsored revolutions across Asia and, above all, Western Europe, consented to the demands of workers and labor unions and installed a series of successful welfare states, where state-run companies amounted to a sizeable share of the total economic output and where inequality was restrained by means of high rates of progressive taxes and relatively high salaries for low- and mid-tier employees.

However, this unprecedented social contract began to crumble under the weight of Margaret Tatcher and Ronald Reagan. The first, after the undeniable failure of the country's finances and subsidy-based social policies under Edward Heath and Harold Wilson [1], and the second, decided to strike a decisive blow to a stagnating and overstretched Soviet Union after the progressive economic opening of Deng's China, allied to set the foundations of a new economic paradigm, neoliberalism. Fed by the technological revolution and the prompt end of the Soviet Union, it set the foundations of today's globalized economy while also sowing the deregulation seeds that flourished in the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis.

It is in this more unstable context that South Korea consolidated its growth, from one of the poorest countries on Earth after the end of the Korean War (1953) to a technological and economic global power in the 21st century. The military dictatorships that ruled the country did not really kick-start and consolidate its economic growth until the 1970s, under Park Chung-hee. Growth continued strong during the 80s, by the end of which decade the country already enjoyed a democracy. The hiccups of the 1997 financial crisis notwithstanding, the technological advances and market globalization of the 90s and the 00s only consolidated South Korea's growth model, partially based on the Japanese family-run, state-sponsored big companies but with a far more individualistic and neoliberal approach (despite the obvious protectionism of its internal market) that reached its apex during the last few years, under President Lee Myung-bak.

China's case is even more extreme. As previously mentioned, China only started to open its previously quasi-autarkic socialist economy after Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and the innovation and reform policies introduced by Deng Xiaoping. In other words, China's race to the top started at the same time that neoliberalism made its appearance on the world scene, and picked up speed precisely when the current wave of market-led globalization took off, i.e. during the last two decades, exporting and expanding transnational company culture and elite-controlled investment flows all around the globe. It is within this context that values consumption and individual wealth that China, coming off 40 years of state-led socialist limitations to private entrepreneurship -- undeniably a strong psychological factor that gives even more sense to the conscious choice of many Chinese for a radical change of approach, for individualist wellbeing as opposed to common wellbeing --, has become the world's second economic power, although one with acute internal inequalities and still with the status of middle income economy.

Add to that the fact that rapid growth processes tend to lead to inequality, especially during the transition from a low income to a middle income economy, coupled with the material, physical and economic deprivation that both Chinese and Koreans had experienced for generations (unlike the Japanese, who enjoyed great power and a prosperous economy until, albeit partially based on cruelly oppressing their neighbours, their defeat in World War II) and we have a cocktail which is explosive enough to explain the erosion, at least on the social equality camp, of the so-called East Asian values in those countries.

[1] Although the pre 1979 Labour government almost needed help from the IMF, arguably it was because it had invested heavily in drilling oil on the North Sea. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, the first oil came ashore after 15 years of investment. The cost of oil exploration by British Petroleum and British Gas is why the UK needed financial help: oil proved difficult to find and banks pulled out. The British people used to own these two companies with profits going to the public purse. However, the Tatcher government quickly privatized them.

Bilateral triangulation: the DPRK, the ROK and the US amid renewed talks

News broke out during the recent ASEAN Regional Forum meeting, held on July 26-27. Two days earlier, it had been speculated that the U.S. planned to meet on the sidelines with North Korean representatives. They did eventually meet, but South Korea was the first to do it, allegedly under heavy pressure from both the United States and China -- craving stability after the dangerous tension of 2010 -- to accept North Korea's willingness to talk. Both meetings, focused on the eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula were considered a very positive first step by all involved parties.

Washington, assuming that any move to contact North Korea unilaterally could damage Seoul’s credibility and role in future negotiations – as also attested by South Korean officials and media, who claimed that Seoul should play the leading role in any negotiations at the first hint of a North Korea-U.S. meeting[1] –, probably leaked the plans, prompting a swift South Korean reaction: the first meeting on the sidelines with the DPRK had Seoul’s top nuclear envoy as the protagonist on July 22.

However, Washington secured the visit of a top North Korean diplomat – Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan – to New York, where he is scheduled to meet Washington's envoy for Korean peninsula affairs, Stephen Bosworth. The same day he landed in the U.S., the North Korean side expressed that finally signing a peace treaty ending the Korean War would be “the first step for settling the Korean issue, including denuclearization”.[2] 

However, once again, the US were quick to engage Seoul and make sure its ally had a say and felt actively and relevantly engaged in any negotiations – thus trying to trump North Korea’s strategic gamble, based on their typical approach of having two powerful partners (whom they aim to treat as diplomatic equals to Pyongyang) ready to collide (like the US and China right now), while alienating Seoul and extracting benefits from all parties involved – by putting a North Korean apology for last year`s sinking of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan and shelling of Yeonpyeong Island on the agenda.[3]

This clear and encouraging example shows the two-sided approach of the Obama administration towards the Korean issue. As already stated during the Presidential campaign, the Obama team is open to dialogue with North Korea, having fostered this recent round of talks when grasping North Korea’s desire to negotiate, partly shown by Kim Jong-il’s recent visits to China (also used as a diplomatic test for the U.S.: talk with us or see us definitely fall into China’s lap) and his failed trip to the Russian far east to meet President Medvedev. 

However, and despite clear ideological differences with President Lee’s strategic views, the U.S. approach also shows respect for the leading role South Korea has to play in all negotiations, looking hard not to alienate Seoul by giving it the due priority in initiating talks with the North in Bali and by reminding North Korea that apologies for last years’ provocations were due to Seoul.


What the U.S. negotiators are almost certain to do will be forcing Kim Jong-il’s government into acknowledging the strategic impossibility of making its Washington-Beijing diplomatic grand bargain work, despite mounting North Korean pressure to extract preemptive diplomatic gains: as reported by the Washington Post, North Korea has already issued several statements aimed at obtaining an initial advantage in any negotiation, first asking the U.S. United States to sign a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, and later warning that a new nuclear arms race could start if the U.S. continues to modernize its nuclear arsenal and expand its missile defense systems.

One more reason why Washington is not going to fall into Pyongyang's trap is its clear will to maintain a smooth military and security relationship with South Korea . With the main goal of preserving the current security status quo in East Asia by both deterring North Korea and hedging against the rapidly expanding Chinese military power, the Obama administration has been notably hawkish on this side of relations. The recent change of the chief of the 28,000 American troops stationed in Korea for a more battle-tested general attests that, under the Obama administration, the alliance has been reinforced. Equally telling is the fact that Lockheed Martin seems willing to outsource production of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and transfer stealth technology to Korea in case Seoul decides to buy such aircraft.[4] According to Lockheed’s Stephen O’Bryan, U.S. government has approved the production of the F-35 final assembly and checkout for Japanese assembly.[5] Even if the U.S. government will have the final say about the extent of technological transfer, Lockheed is optimistic about it. 

To sum it up, the Obama administration has adopted, as already advertised back in 2008, a hawkish military approach towards North Korea – also helped by the growing perception of China as a military threat and the unfolding of operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan, moving the security emphasis progressively back to the Pacific shore – and a hawkish-dovish approach as regards to diplomacy, quickly pushing hard sanctions after the 2010 incidents – with the strong support of South Korea’s conservative government[6] – but also being quick to interpret Pyongyang’s message about its willingness to negotiate again by mid-2011. One reason both sides seem more willing to talk now is .


[1] For instance, the conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo recently asserted that “Pyongyang should remember that N. Korea was only drawn back to the dialogue table on the understanding that talks with South Korea come before any talks with the U.S.”

[2] An undeniably surprising statement, taking into account that, until as recently as last month, the regime no longer referred to the possibility of abandoning its nuclear capability in return for political and economic concessions, instead arguing that it would only feel no need to retain its nuclear weapons once the American nuclear threat was removed and South Korea was cleared of its nuclear umbrella – an unlikely scenario, as it would require the end of the US–South Korea alliance.

[3] Despite this move, the U.S. is also seen as quietly pressuring Seoul to stop obsessing about the apology for the Cheonan sinking and move on with dialogue.

[4] Korea is currently seeking to develop domestic multirole fighters with stealth capability and purchase 60 high-end aircraft from a foreign aerospace company.

[5] Italy, which plans to buy some 130 F-35s, has also been allowed to have a final assembly line to produce its own F-35s as well as the ones it will deliver to the Netherlands.

[6] Despite the fact that South Korea has been the biggest economic loser of the sanctions, with an estimated $2.5 billion in trade losses, mostly related to the Kaesong industrial complex.

The EEAS revolution

After a long absence, mainly due to the author's overload of work (combining professional obligations with two Masters' programs at the same time is no easy task), Foreign Policy Watch is ready to go again. To start the revival, I will reuse a paper I presented a month ago for my Master's in European Studies.

After reading a rather uninspiring -- just another article criticising the EEAS and the EU's seemingly non-existant foreign policy, so nothing new here -- piece on the European External Action Service on Project Syndicate, I have thought it would be nice sharing my alternative, rather positive view of probable policy spillovers that we could witness  as the youthful and insecure EEAS hopefully matures into a more stable and decisive body. Enjoy!

The EEAS revolution: the role of the European External Action Service in promoting accountability in foreign policy and deepening the European integration process

Abstract

With less than one year of existence under its belt, the European External Action Service is still in the process of becoming a full-fledged reality. Any analysis of the current state of affairs and predictions about its future evolution will be inconclusive.

However, it is not too early to discern the positive developments its inception and successive growth will surely bring about to both the European Union and the world of diplomacy: widening the diplomatic agenda to include new global issues, reinforcing democratic accountability and accelerating the European integration process could be three of the overarching consequences of a correct and comprehensive implementation of the new EU foreign service.

Introduction

Despite the fact that it only makes a brief appearance in Article 27.3 of the Lisbon Treaty, which entered into force on 1 December 2009, the inception of an European External Action Service is one of the most important innovations included in the failed Constitutional Treaty and rescued in the Lisbon Treaty in the area of Common Foreign and Security Policy.


A direct consequence from the implicit recognition, both in the 2003 European Security Strategy and its 2008 implementation review, that EU Member States are no longer in position to face the threats and challenges of a rapidly changing world order by themselves[1], the main goal of this new European foreign service is – as stated in the Treaty – assisting the double-hatted High Representative in fulfilling her multiple tasks while acting in coordination with national foreign service corps.

Being neither part of the European Commission nor of the Council, the EEAS – which, after the Parliament Decision of 8 July and the Council Decision from 26 July 2010, was officially launched on the symbolic date of the one-year anniversary of the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty (1 December 2010) – will still be dominated by officials coming from both institutions, while also adding a significant number of seconded officials coming from the diplomatic services and the foreign ministries of the 27 Member States (which will conform at least 1/3 of the total work force of the EEAS). They are currently being dispatched to the almost 140 EU Delegations across the world, as well as staff the headquarters in Brussels, organized in regional and thematic desks.

Generally speaking, the European External Action Service (EEAS), now at the start of a 5-year plan to become one of the world’s biggest diplomatic corps, represents a significant opportunity to enhance the EU’s foreign policy making capabilities (Whitman, 2010) based upon a more comprehensive and effective use of its vast resources and an increasingly strategic approach towards the definition and implementation of the relevant instruments. Its potential relevance explains the profusion of literature focused on how the EEAS can improve the strategic decision-making, horizontal and vertical coherence, visibility, effectiveness and efficiency of EU external action.[2] However, other potentially beneficial aspects, that we could consider the spillover effect of the new diplomatic actor, have seldom been considered among scholastic circles.

Therefore, this paper will focus on identifying and defining the scope of three related positive developments, both affecting the EU and the international community, that we envision will come hand in hand with the EEAS: the inclusion of new issues in the global diplomatic agenda, the reinforcement of the accountability and legitimacy of EU foreign policy (with its possible spillover to the methods employed by other democratic actors) and the potential of the EEAS as a tool to deepen European integration. Both the origin and the possible evolution of these developments will be explained based on existent information about the EEAS extracted from official EU documentation and scholastic papers.

New global issues in the diplomatic agenda

What can the European External Action Service, a supranational diplomatic corps representing a postmodern confederation of states and 500 millions of citizens, bring to the table of global diplomacy? The answer lies in a basic evaluation of the main characteristics and capabilities of the EU as an international actor.

Economic power, civilian power and cultural power characterize the strengths of the European Union at the international level. While it has been able to comprehensively exploit its large economic leverage, the projection of civilian and cultural power – key elements in order to consider the EU as a truly normative power – has lagged far behind its economic status. In order to maximize its international visibility and better project its soft power, the EU Member States decided to create the EEAS, a structural diplomatic body, focusing on world governance issues – the environment, human rights, human security, democracy promotion, etc. – while also including some elements of traditional diplomacy.

This duality faithfully reflects the two hats the High Representative wears: the Council’s, representing the traditional interstate diplomacy, and the Council, father of the postmodern identity of the EU and responsible for the structural diplomacy elements of the EEAS – whose delegations will receive orders from the Commission in the fields it has competence (Priego, 2011).
However, the key differential element of the EEAS should be multiplying the EU’s capacity to project its soft power and the views upon which it is based. Taking an active role in world diplomacy via a pan-European, non-traditional foreign service will help the EU in its goal of including emerging global challenges – such as climate change or sustainable development, as well as human rights promotion[3] – and pushing up their priority among the ever-conservative world of diplomacy.

Making Europe’s voice heard also involves being innovative and actively defending the Union’s principles. By bringing a breath of fresh air to the international diplomatic agenda, the EU will also reinforce its own global, united position and become more assertive and effective in international negotiations related to global governance issues.[4]

Reinforcing the accountability, legitimacy and transparency of EU foreign policy

A traditional weak point (or, some would argue, strength) of national foreign policy structures has been political and democratic accountability, as well as transparency over the policies pursued and their implementation methods. Even if foreign ministers are accountable to the national parliaments and can be replaced by governmental decision, the overall apparatus, including the diplomatic corps, have famously been independent from political and public scrutiny.

Will that also be the case with the EEAS? Although Bátora (2010) asserts that democratic accountability has been overlooked in the process of defining the functioning of the EEAS[5], many signals point towards yet another first of the EU-way. Modern foreign policy should, despite the resistance from diplomatic circles, be compatible with the democratic accountability and decision-making processes. In order to do that, the EEAS should resist isomorphic pressures putting emphasis on plain effectiveness – to the detriment of transparency and democratic accountability – and acknowledge the fact that modern democracies, ruled by the growing interconnectedness of internal and external policy, don’t consider democratic accountability and foreign policy effectiveness as being incompatible. 

If a global actor is especially ready to accept this principle, it must be the EU[6]: a supranational actor with a newly conferred legal personality (officially, since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty) whose external action, as detailed on Article 21 TEU, is meant to focus on the very same values inherent to the European project, including promoting democratic values and good governance. In other words, the EU should lead by example, and the sheer visibility of its foreign service – with almost 140 delegations all over the world – should make its own democratic accountability and legitimacy – both to internal EU publics and external stakeholders –a key concern, capable of defining the whole sustainability of the European foreign action.

Despite the concerns expressed by authors as Bátora, the European Parliament has made sure that its influence and supervisory role of the EEAS went far beyond of approving its budget – in itself an already influential control mechanism.[7] Political and democratic accountability of the EEAS vis-à-vis the EU institution that basically gives democratic legitimacy to the EU also encompasses the direct supervision of the two Deputy Secretary Generals and the Chief Operating Officer[8], gained on the negotiations – the so-called Quadrilogues – following the rejection by both the Commission and the European Parliament of Baroness Ashton’s first proposal for the structure and composition of the EEAS, presented on 25 March 2010, that culminated with the Madrid four-party agreement in June.

Moreover, the agreement also included direct scrutiny over new Heads of Delegation (i.e. EU Ambassadors), as the High Representative accepted, duties after the Barroso-Vale de Almeida controversy[9], that any appointed Ambassador would appear before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament before taking up his/her duties. Finally, the European Parliament also asked the Lady Ashton to prepare a Declaration on Political Accountability defining the main lines of cooperation between the Parliament, the High Representative and the EEAS. The result is an agreement between the institutions that provides a solid ground for cooperation and parliamentary scrutiny.

Policy communication is, together with its formulation and implementation, also a key element to attain public legitimacy and accountability, both among internal and external publics. This is the reason why, once again in an unprecedented move in the diplomatic sphere, the EEAS had to possess its own media service. However, looking at the online news site one cannot, as of June 2011, detect much activity, the latest news being from a year ago and the most relevant links bringing the user straight to the Council press website and the EU general press room. The impossibility to confirm whether this lack of activity is due to the still ongoing building of the service or due to its premature abandonment would make criticism inappropriate. However, it would be a shame that, in the era of accountability via open, easily accessible information, the EU decided not to implement an already-planned media outlet to communicate the policies pursued and executed by the EEAS to all stakeholders.

Despite this possible misstep, and taking into account the current state of affairs, the fact that the EEAS will play, together with the Commission and the High Representative, a leading role in strategic decision making concerning key foreign policy instruments such as the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, the Development Cooperation Instrument or the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights, among others, has to be seen as a positive development for greater transparency and democratic accountability. Cooperation with the relevant Commission DGs will be intense and, although there are concerns about the delays in policy definition and implementation this could imply, visibility, transparency and efficiency will surely benefit from it.

We can, therefore, see an EEAS that, in its dual role of serving both the EU member states and the EU’s interests, will act as a cosmopolitan normative entrepreneur with multilevel and multipronged accountability, both vis-à-vis internal and external stakeholders (Bátora, 2010), built around human security principles and developing multilevel channels of communication (Martin, 2009).

The EEAS as a tool for deepening European integration

As Galeziak (2011) points out, the EU is able to deploy most foreign policy instruments any national actor could make use of, but seemingly still lacks the will to employ them strategically and coherently. Could the EEAS act as a unifying organization that helps lead reluctant Member States into the fold of EU foreign policy? Could it foster further integration? The answer to these questions should be affirmative.

Most scholars agree that the transversal role the EEAS will play can and should bring greater coherence both at the horizontal (i.e. among EU institutions) and vertical (i.e. between the EU and its Member States). From that, and also taking into account its particular organizational structure and certain innovations of the Lisbon Treaty, we can infer that it will become a tool for deepening political integration and reinforcement of the community method, with clear spillovers into the foreign policy arena. In other words, if the CFSP has been widely considered the first step towards a politically integrated EU, the EEAS could well be the second.

As Whitman (2010) points out, the 2009 Swedish Presidency advanced the notion of the EEAS as a sui generis body, separate from the Commission and the Council Secretariat. Such an approach introduced two challenges for the EEAS to overcome: inter-institutional competition and integration. While the first has already been settled with the Quadrilogues that took place during the first semester of 2010, the issue of integration is still unresolved.

The EEAS will reunite actors from the Member States, the Council and the Commission under the same roof. While this can lead to tensions, it is also a unique opportunity to promote mutual understanding between the quintessential community institution, the arm of the Member States in Brussels and foreign officials of the Member States themselves, thus creating synergies at the horizontal and vertical levels. To put it more graphically, people who worked on different documents for a same region or topic will now work together, reviewing inputs from the Commission and the Council to improve implementation and be more coherent and strategic.[10]

This positive conclusion can be reached via the application of basic principles of social psychology: the concepts of group belonging and self-identity, intimately interconnected and closely linked to the professional sphere in which the relevant subjects develop their careers. As Tajfel and Turner’s (1986) social identity theory points out, each individual defines himself in terms of belonging to a social group and looks for a positive social identity. Although this can be seen as a double edge sword – works of these authors show that small differences can provoke conflicts between groups –, conflicts due to the fact that the staff of the EEAS originated from different groups should be overcome by the osmotic absorption of the dominant in-group rules and identities of the new organization.

Organizations of all natures have a certain operational culture and identity which is, in its turn, transmitted to all its members, shaping their professional identity. In the case of the EEAS, this carries two important implications. First, the culture and identity adopted by this new organization will shape the decisions and working procedures it will adopt, a crucial aspect in a supranational entity as the EU, where different ways of operating – mainly the community/supranational and the intergovernmental methods – coexist.

In the case of the EEAS, a newly created organization, the distinctive institutional identity will necessarily derive from three main organizations: the Commission, the Council, and the national diplomatic services. As Ongaro (2010) points out, two mechanisms will determine this transfer of routines: identities traveling with the staff from their former environments and the adoption of new routines via systematic contacts with other organizations with consolidated routines. 

Taking into account that most EEAS staff has been transferred from the Commission and that former employees of both the Council and the Commission come, despite their different procedural methods and environments (see above), from the same supranational entity and bureaucratic machine, the most plausible is that a novel set of routines, stemming primarily from the Commission but also influenced by Council identities, will take hold.[11] 

This has, subsequently, a clear implication as far as organizational culture is concerned: the community method will prevail in the collective image of the EEAS. Implications of this could be wide-ranging, one of them being that the key body of EU representation and foreign policy implementation would probably tend to implicitly prioritize internally and externally coherent and cohesive policies. As the EEAS will have a key role in the foreign policy-making process, the logical outcome should be recommendations that prioritize the Union’s view over possible diverging interests of the Member States, thus creating a down top effect to further integration. 

Additionally, as pointed out by Quille (2010), the Lisbon Treaty also reinforces the role of EU Member States in the areas of CFSP policy planning, formulation and implementation. Although seemingly contradictory with a reinforced, more coherent EU foreign action, and even further from the prospects of deepening integration, multilateral and multilevel governance of foreign policy issues could help reduce the inherent fear national political and diplomatic elites have towards the loss of sovereignty in the realm of external policy. 

In its turn, this direct participation in EU policies would give the states a greater sense of ownership in EU policies and reinforce their confidence in Brussels structures – namely the High Representative and the EEAS –, which should increasingly feel and be entitled to design and execute the CFSP on behalf of all Member States.[12] In other words, this apparent step back could create strong synergies that would let the European Union take several steps forward in the political integration process.

The European External Action Service should provide continuous bottom-up analysis simultaneously to the EU institutions and Member States, which will favor common positions of the Union, in particular with regard to matters of a geographical or thematic nature. This will, in its turn, facilitate the convergence of Member States’ national interests and the emergence of a truly common foreign policy (de Vasconcelos, 2010).

A final aspect that should be taken into account, a combination of conjectural and structural factors, would be the probable downscaling of the diplomatic corps of several Member States. Smaller European countries, with limited foreign policy budgets and already without diplomatic representation in many countries, can have a natural tendency to rely on ever more efficient and able EU delegations to service their citizens.[13] This logical tendency can be amplified by a conjectural factor that is affecting many European countries: the debt crisis, which obviously affects national spending. One of the budget allocations where cuts would carry less political and social cost is, quite obviously, foreign affairs. Therefore, budgetary restraints, combined with a display of reliability and efficiency by EU delegations, could only accelerate this downscaling process.

Conclusions

With just a few months of life under its belt and its structure still far from being fully developed, any analysis of the accomplishments of the EEAS until now will be far from relevant or fair. 

However, initial trends can easily come to shape future developments, thus making it relevant to trace the first steps of this new CFSP instrument. Specifically designed to assist the High Representative in its tasks, both at the Headquarters in Brussels and in the almost 200 delegations the EU has abroad, the EEAS could play a key role in reverting two of the most criticized aspects of EU foreign action: its lack of cohesion and coherence, both at the vertical (i.e. between the EU and its member states) and horizontal (i.e. between the different EU institutions and policies) levels.

Such improvements will create synergies that, in its turn, could have a spillover effect that would advance political integration at the European level, promote democratic accountability and legitimacy for the European foreign policy and effectively push for the introduction of new and relevant topics into global diplomatic debates. 

Being dependent of both the Commission and the Council, although namely with a stronger output from the former, the EEAS is well positioned to build stronger bridges between community policies and the still intergovernmental CFSP. This would create a culture of cooperation within the foreign policy structure that should reinforce the community idea. Moreover, greater direct participation by Member States could also work towards reducing their reluctance towards moving from a divisive intergovernmental approach towards a more integrated and coherent European foreign policy.

Strict adherence to the wording used in the treaties has been a contentious issue throughout CE/EU history. Although the Lisbon Treaties include clauses explicitly aimed at avoiding the natural expansion of community competences in the field of CFSP, some degree of gradual, seamless integration at that level cannot be ruled out. This does not imply that the EEAS will engulf national diplomatic missions anytime soon, but the expected role of support and coordination could evolve into a stronger leadership position, provided political will and momentum are found. The current economic crisis could also play a role, pushing smaller Member States to cede their diplomatic representation abroad to the relevant EU Delegations, thus accelerating the integrative process.

In a rapidly evolving international context, shaped by a seemingly unstoppable transfer of power from West to East, the EU and its member states should make sure to have one single voice in the international arena. It is no longer a matter of speaking louder: as we move forward ahead, uncoordinated European nations would surely struggle at even making their voices be heard. 

Strengthening the role of the EEAS and, in turn, of the High Representative, could only be seen as a positive step towards a more unified Europe, projecting its soft civilian and normative power with greater effectiveness, both in its troubled immediate neighbourhood and further afield. Having a single and unconventional diplomatic voice will also help the EU in its goal of including emerging global challenges – such as climate change or sustainable development, as well as the respect for human rights – into the international diplomatic agenda, so far almost exclusively concerned with traditional transnational policy issues.

One of the most recognizable strengths of the EU is its comprehensive soft (civilian and economic) power, which should allow for an effective use of the less intrusive foreign policy instruments available: classic diplomacy, transformative diplomacy and cultural diplomacy. In order for the EU to optimize their use, the EEAS must surpass the limits of a CFSP that has so far been conceived on the basis of the minimum common denominator: only then will the EEAS harness all its potential as normative power and democratic legitimacy multiplicator, able to project and self-reinforce core EU values such as democracy and good governance. 

However, it will only go as far as the Member States are willing it to go (Verluise, 2010). Although initial perspectives seemed to tilt towards the negative side – especially based on TEU Declarations 13 and 14[14], which considerably limited the margin of maneuvering of both the High Representative and the EEAS –, subsequent negotiations and developments allow for a much more positive outlook.

To sum it up, and using Priego’s (2011) words, the EEAS is a key step towards European integration that will strengthen the EU’s role as a global actor while transforming diplomacy itself.

---

[1] A vision reinforced in the document Project Europe 2030: Challenges and Opportunities, issued by the reflection group led by former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González and including 2 chapters (out of a total 9) devoted to EU foreign action, which asserted that the European Union must choose between becoming either a global agent of change or preparing for a managed decline into irrelevance. Moreover, the report also suggests the creation of a specific unit specializing in prevision and analysis inside the framework of the EEAS.

[2] A non-exhaustive list would include works by Bátora (2008), Cellerino (2010), Missiroli (2007), Keukeleire and Smith (2010), Galeziak (2011), Gavas and Maxwell (2010), Quille (2010) or Verluise (2010).

[3] Implicitly in line with this reasoning, the EEAS will include a specific Human Rights structure both at its headquarters in Brussels and in all relevant delegations abroad.

[4] We can find a very recent example thereof in the hard position taken by the European Union on climate change, announced on 20 June 2011, tying advances in Kyoto Protocol compliance to overall efforts by other powers.

[5] He even adds that the very composition of the service raised democratic issues already far before its final inception, as shown by the 2005 reports by the Commission and the Parliament mentioning the service could have a ‘life of its own’.

[6] Even if we have to acknowledge that the EU itself faces problems of democratic accountability, which were however remarkably addressed in the Lisbon Treaty by heavily reinforcing the role of the European Parliament and also giving a voice to the national parliaments.

[7] In fact, as commented by Quille (2010), Member States attempted to push forward a different structure to fund the EEAS, but the position of the European parliament – i.e. assigning it a separate budget line of the European Union – prevailed, thus being subject to the budgetary discharge rights of the European Parliament.

[8] In this aspect, the often criticized vertical structure of the EEAS – chosen instead of a more horizontal approach – makes it possible for the European Parliament to exert a more direct and effective political supervision and control over the foreign service and its top officials. Moreover, as argued by Galeziak (2011), given the multitude of tasks the High Representative needs to fulfill, a strong figure – the Executive Secretary General – that will ensure the correct functioning of the Service and a second authority – the Chief Operating Officer – should provide a positive asset for the running of the Service.

[9] In an extremely controversial move that allegedly did not have the agreement of the High Representative, Durao Barroso, the President of the Commission, appointed his fellow Portuguese and close collaborator, the Director-General for External Relations (RELEX), Mr Vale de Almeida, as Ambassador of the Union Delegation in Washington. 

[10] The fact that EEAS personnel come from three different sources should not be a major worry for them to acquire a shared culture: even the most powerful foreign service of our days, the US Foreign Service, divides its staff in three blocs according to their precedence.

[11] Verluise (2010) gives us some detailed insight on the practical signification of this shared identity. According to the French analyst, the this invisible cultural cleavage will mean that the community culture, inherited from the DG Relex, will take hold in the geographic and thematic desks, as well as in the delegations, while the intergovernmental culture, stemming from the Council, will have a bigger weight in the semi-autonomous crisis management structures.

[12] Ideally, the Member States will take decisions at the Council level based on the proposals – including those for military cooperation and resource pooling – presented by the High Representative and drafted in close cooperation with the EEAS (and the Commission when applicable).

[13] It must be noted, however, that some commentators argue that this process can also naturally occur with other Member States’ embassies or consulates: nationals of any EU country, who are allowed to seek assistance from the diplomatic services of any EU Member State when abroad, can indeed choose the most reputed consulate – as far as efficiency and standards are concerned –, and not necessarily the EU delegation.

[14] Declaration 13 states that the High Representative and the EEAS do not affect the responsibilities of the Member States as they currently exist, while Declaration 14 adds that the High Representative and the EEAS will not affect the existing legal basis, responsibilities, and powers of each Member State in relation to the formulation and conduct of its foreign policy, its national diplomatic service, relations with third countries and participation in international organizations.