Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
THURSDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2007
Mr Graham Avery
Q1 Chairman:
Graham, thank you very much indeed for being here with us today.
You are obviously very hard working because you were giving evidence
to our colleagues in another place yesterday and we know how much
you are writing. Some of us have recently seen the volume which
three institutes have produced here on various aspects of the
Treaty where, again, you were one of the contributors. We would
like today to go through some questions on the Reform Treaty.
We have not got too much, so I think it is going to be a question
of trying to have rather short questions and the answers being
as long as they need to be. We are taking a note of this and we
will be publishing our evidence. We will be sending you a copy
of the transcript for you to make any changes, but if at any stage
you feel you want to go off the record, please, will you let us
know and we will not put that part in the recorded material. I
wonder whether you would like to give us the rationale for the
changes which are proposed in the area of foreign, security and
defence policy in the Reform Treaty, and do you believe the Treaty
will be able to serve as the basis for a more effective and coherent
foreign and security policy for the Union?
Mr Avery: Let me begin briefly by introducing
myself: I worked for 33 years in the European Commission in different
capacities, and in fact, I worked before that for Her Majesty
in Whitehall, so I have seen service on both sides of the Channel.
In my last post in the European Commission I was co-ordinating
the Commission's preparation for the foreign affairs parts of
the Constitutional Treaty, so I have an insider's view of what
was going on then. I have to emphasise that I no longer represent
the European Commission, and the views I express here today are
my personal views, which may be different, probably are different,
from the official view of the European Commission. A few days
ago I sent to your colleagues a draft article which I wrote on
this topic that may be of interest for you, and this morning I
took part in the presentation of another publication at the European
Policy Centre, and I give you copies of it now, hot off the press
this morning. It is the report of a working group at the European
Policy Centre on the European Foreign Service to which I contributed
a chapter. I will try to reply to your question about the rationale
for the changes. My analysis of what I call "the new architecture
for foreign policy in the Reform Treaty" is that it is another
step along the road in a series of institutional changes which
are on the way to the European Union's development of a foreign
policy, beginning with Maastricht, and continuing with Amsterdam,
which created the High Representative. We now have a rationalisation
of the system. It is not a revolutionary change and it probably
will not be the last change in the development of the arrangements
for the foreign policy, but one of the principal reasons for these
changes is the existence of the two pillars: the Community Pillar,
which is managed by the Commission on the basis of decisions by
the Council and with the consultation of the Parliament, and the
second pillar, which is Common Foreign and Security Policy, in
intergovernmental mode. The new Treaty changes nothing at the
level of decision-making: Common Foreign and Security Policy will
still be in the intergovernmental mode and the other things, development
policy, trade policy and so on, will still be in the Community
mode. What the Treaty does is to bring together the activities
upstream and downstream of the decision-making. By upstream I
mean the preparation, the formation and the proposal of policies
and by downstream I mean the execution of the decisions and the
representation of the European Union. Let me put my point in another
way. This two-pillar system, the existing institutional structure,
is dysfunctional to a certain extent because in the Brussels institutions
there is a considerable overlap of activity between the two agencies
concerned, the Commission and Council, and, frankly, duplication
of work. For what concerns the world outside the European Union,
there is a multiplicity of voices: the Union is sometimes represented
by the six-monthly rotating Presidency, sometimes by the High
Representative, sometimes by the Commission, and sometimes by
all three at the same time. What credibility do we expect our
partners, the Chinese or the Russians, to give us when we present
ourselves in such disorder? In brief, for me what the Treaty is
seeking is coherence and better visibility.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Perhaps
I should have said in welcoming you that you have the rather impressive
record of having served both in the cabinets of Christopher Soames
and Roy Jenkins, so you will have seen different British Commissioners
as well as seeing the Commission from the inside, as you say,
from the moment of Britain's entry into the Union. Lord Hamilton?
Q2 Lord Hamilton of Epsom:
Would the Common Foreign and Security Policy retain its intergovernmental
character? What impact do you think the Treaty may have on the
UK's foreign and defence policy?
Mr Avery: On the first part of your question,
the answer is very simple, yes. As I explained, the mode of decision-making
is not changed in any way. In that sense, the declarations which
accompany the Treaty—excuse me, I do not have them to hand—which
say it does not affect the rights of Member States are absolutely
valid. In response to the second question, what impact would it
have on the UK, candidly, it is difficult to predict. I think
it is rather for the British Government and the British Parliament
to decide how to use this Treaty. As I said, my thesis is that
it gives the European Union more coherence and more effective
action in the world. It is up to the British Government how far
it wants to exploit that. Let me put my point in another way and
perhaps in a slightly more provocative mode. I find it quite worrying
the extent to which the debate on this Treaty in the United Kingdom
focuses on the way in which European Common Foreign and Security
Policy can hamper or hinder the United Kingdom. For me the question
should really be posed, how can the British use the European instruments
in order to pursue more effectively British interests in the world.
Q3 Lord Hamilton of Epsom:
Yes, but when it comes to European embassies, you have got a problem
if there are people competing who are trying to win contracts
who are all Europeans?
Mr Avery: I am not sure that on the point you
make about contracts the Treaty changes anything.
Q4 Lord Hamilton of Epsom:
I am talking about business. How can a European embassy reflect
the interests of a British company that is bidding against a French
one?
Mr Avery: I do not think these Union delegations
which the Treaty creates will have trade promotion functions,
they will only have things to say on trade insofar as the European
Union itself is competent to speak on trade matters, which is
in international negotiations in the World Trade Organisation.
I do not think the creation of these Union delegations prejudices
in any way the activities of export promotion or contracts by
British firms.
Q5 Lord Hamilton of Epsom:
It would if they subsumed the existing embassies in those capitals.
Mr Avery: That is absolutely not the intention.
The Treaty says, expressis verbis, that the task of these
Union delegations is to co-operate with the missions of Member
States in non-Member countries. The object is absolutely not to
take over their role. The role which will be taken over by these
Union delegations outside Europe is, as I mentioned, the role
currently exercised by the six-monthly rotating Presidency or
by Mr Solana. There will now be a mission, a Union delegation,
based in third country capitals which can speak authoritatively
with one voice for the Union, but only on those matters where
there is a position of the European Union.
Q6 Lord Hannay of Chiswick:
It might help us to understand this better if you were able to
give us a rough idea of how many places in the world the European
Commission already has offices because, of course, in all those
places this will be largely a change of label, it will not mean
opening something new. I think I am right in saying they now have
offices in a very, very large number of places, do they not?
Mr Avery: The Treaty says that there will be
Union delegations and they will report to the new-style High Representative.
It does not say they will be in the European Diplomatic Service,
but people generally agree that they will form part of the European
External Action Service. The Treaty does not explicitly say that
these Union delegations will be based on or replace the Commission
delegations, that is a decision which remains to be taken, but
the vast majority of opinion I have heard is precisely, as you
say, that Commission delegations will be abolished and instead
the nameplate will say "Union Delegation". Presently,
the Commission has something more than 120 delegations accredited
to around 150 countries. I do not entirely agree with you that
the role of these delegations will be practically unchanged. Since
this new service is to include people seconded from national diplomacies,
there will be people in these Union delegations coming, I hope,
from national capitals, including the British Foreign Service
and, in addition, these delegations will do some things which
up to now Commission delegations were not supposed to do. They
will speak for the European Union on matters of Common Foreign
and Security Policy, and that is an important novelty.
Q7 Lord Hannay of Chiswick:
Could we look now for a bit at the High Representative in his
new form if this Treaty is ratified and comes into force, that
is to say the double-hatted one, not the present form. I judge
from what you said before that you do think it will improve the
effectiveness and coherence of the EU's external action. Perhaps
you could explain that a little bit. Do you think there are any
risks from this double-hatting? At the time it was first put forward
in the Convention there were quite strong arguments against it
by people like Lord Patten, who did not think it was the right
answer at first sight. How will the policy coherence in foreign
policy be ensured between the Foreign Affairs Council, which the
High Representative is going to chair, and the other formations
of the Council, which, it appears, will continue to take decisions
with considerable external foreign policy implications? In your
view, what is the relationship likely to be—this seems to
be the area in which absolutely nothing is written down—between
the role of the President of the European Council in the field
of external policy, if he has one, and the role of the High Representative?
Mr Avery: I will try to reply to those three
questions in reverse order. First of all, the relationship between
these two new personalities, I would remind you there is a third
personality who comes into the picture, which is the President
of the European Commission. What you might call a "foreign
affairs triangle" will be created in which the relations
between the persons concerned, and good relations, will be absolutely
essential. Frankly, it depends on the personalities. This is perhaps
not the place to speculate on who the persons will be, but it
is rather clear that in the middle of 2009, supposing this Treaty
comes into force at the beginning of 2009, there will be three
big posts to be filled: the President of the European Council,
the President of the Commission and the new-style High Representative.
There is no formal structure for their liaison, but I am absolutely
certain they will have to develop informal structures. Your second
question was about the coherence between the new-style Foreign
Affairs Council, presided by the Solana figure, and the other
compositions of the Council for domestic and other policies. Again,
that is an area where nothing is written in the Treaty, and I
am not conscious that in the Council's Secretariat they have come
to any clear ideas about how it is to be done. I limit myself
to saying that you have this problem in national administrations
where foreign secretaries and foreign ministries are faced more
and more with the fact that activities of environment ministries,
energy ministries, not to mention agriculture ministries, impinge
on world affairs, and the interface between the domestic and the
international becomes more and more common.
Q8 Chairman:
On that particular question, before you go on, could I raise one
issue which does concern us a little bit. In the Reform Treaty,
the section setting out the functions of the Foreign Affairs Council
makes it clear that it will not legislate, therefore if there
is a need for legislation in areas of external affairs, development
aid, humanitarian aid and other matters, it would presumably have
to be taken either in the General Affairs Council, not presided
over by the High Representative, but by the rotating President.
Mr Avery: I am sorry, I am not familiar with
the disposition you are referring to.
Q9 Chairman:
I am not sure, I have not got my text on the Treaty.
Mr Avery: I was not aware that the competence,
if we may use that word, of the Foreign Affairs Council is limited
in such a way. I have always supposed that, for the examples which
you mentioned, and also for enlargement, those decisions would
be taken in the Foreign Affairs Council.
Chairman: There is this particular clause
in the current draft which concerns me and which perhaps I can
write to you about because I think it is something we will need
to look at.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I think we had
better ask Jean-Claude Piris.
Chairman: We will ask Jean-Claude.
Q10 Lord Hannay of Chiswick:
I have a feeling we may be misconstruing something.
Mr Avery: On the first question, you asked about
the risks and I would say, yes, there are risks of all sorts.
One risk is that the Working Hours Directive will be infringed
because this poor guy will have to work 24 hours to get his job
done! To be more serious, there is already a full-time job which
Solana does as High Representative. The job of Vice-President
of the Commission is also a full-time job. I want to emphasise
this because in analyses of the new architecture the fact that
this High Representative will be a Vice-President of the Commission
is frequently overlooked. In the Commission he will be responsible
for co-ordinating all the external affairs dossiers. That means
he will have, let us say, four Commissioners handling fields which
he is supervising. In the Commission at the present time there
are four Commissioners doing external relations, with a total
of six Director Generals of Services and there is a serious need
within the Commission to co-ordinate these things better. When
Chris Patten was Commissioner for External Relations, although
he was not a Vice-President, it was accepted that he had a co-ordinating
function for external affairs in the Commission. In the present
Commission the co-ordination is undertaken by the President, and
despite the many capabilities of José Manuel Barroso, he
is President of the Commission and has many other things to do.
I want to emphasise that for me a very important part of the task
is handling the Commission, but there is a third hat. This guy
will have the two hats, the famous double-hatting we have mentioned,
but in addition he will be chairing the Foreign Affairs Council.
I have to say, I think the problems of that have been underestimated.
Let me put it this way. This person will be at the same time submitting
proposals to the Council, both with his CFSP hat and with his
Community hat, and then presiding and making the compromises and
the arbitrations for the decisions. This is not an easy thing
to do, so I think there is a risk of overload. If Solana is a
human dynamo, which is certainly the case, then I think his successor
will have to be a superhuman gymnast!
Q11 Lord Hannay of Chiswick:
Following that, the third question about the way in which the
President of the European Council and the High Representative
would interact and you added the President of the Commission,
surely this problem is going to be really quite difficult to resolve
in the context of the ever increasing number of "summits"
at which the EU meets Russia, China, the United States, Latin
Americans or whatever it is. What is going to be the EU's representation
on such occasions after this Treaty is entered into force? It
sounds to me awfully likely that it will be exactly the same as
now with some slight shift, that is to say, you will have the
President to the European Council, the President of the Commission
and the High Representative and they will all be there, except
there will not be the rotating Presidency there. How do you think
it is going to be handled? It is surely not very straightforward,
is it?
Mr Avery: I think you are exaggerating the problem
a bit. In a nation state, normally you have a head of state, sometimes
a president, you have a head of government, a prime minister,
and you have a foreign minister, and they have different interlocutors
when it comes to other countries. I do not think this problem
is really insoluble. For me, perhaps a more delicate problem is
how they get on with each other and how they co-operate and develop
policies and decisions within the Union. Who is in charge within
the Union seems to me quite a tricky question.
Q12 Lord Hamilton of Epsom:
The Constitution envisage there will be a Foreign Affairs Minister
for Europe and now under the Reform Treaty we have a High Representative,
how do their roles vary or do they not?
Mr Avery: The roles of what was called the Foreign
Minister and what is now called the High Representative, as far
as I can see, are identical. The titles are different but the
functions are the same. Personally, I think the change from Minister
to High Representative is good, despite the fact that it is not
very euphonious—from a linguistic point of view, this person's
title is impossible, it gets first prize for the world's worst
acronym—but for me it was an error to call this person a
Minister. "Minister" is borrowed from the vocabulary
of a nation state and it gave the impression that the European
Union is modelling itself on a nation state, which is simply not
the case. The European Union is a sui generis formation,
therefore I think it is better that he is not called a Minister
but something else, even if it is difficult to pronounce.
Q13 Lord Truscott:
Going back to the External Action Service, to a certain extent
we talked about the rationale for its existence, but how do you
think the Service will work in practice, and how will it relate
to the UK diplomatic corps and also other EU diplomatic services?
How do you think it will be held to account? Do you think it also
raises other issues, like dealing with intelligence, for example,
and how those can be held?
Mr Avery: You ask a lot of questions there and,
again, I will try and attack them in the reverse order. I will
start with intelligence because I think that is the easiest. I
have not met anybody yet in the Brussels circuit who thinks that
an intelligence capacity should be a priority for this new Service.
I think I am right in saying that of the existing 27 Member States
only nine have intelligence services anyway, so there are a number
of Member States that seem to have conducted foreign policy without
the aid of intelligence services. There are arrangements which
work quite well for the Member States to share their intelligence
with the Council Secretariat, and insofar as this new Service
is involved in the sharing, there is no problem about its officials
having the necessary security vetting, just as people in the Council
Secretariat have. There is a question about how useful this kind
of intelligence is. I have to tell you that the European Commission,
which does not have spies or anything like that, has invested
quite a lot in its open media intelligence, where you analyse
what the media is saying, and it is relatively cheap and rather
useful. You asked a question about the accountability of this
new Service. I think its political accountability must be through
its boss, who will be the High Representative/Vice-President.
He will be in charge, and they will be working for him. For what
concerns their administrative and budgetary accountability, in
my scenario the would be subject, just like any other European
institution, to the Court of Auditors, the budget procedure and
so on. One of the questions which is not decided by the Treaty
is the institutional status and location of this new service.
It is quite a thorny question. Should it be inside the Commission?
Should it be inside the Council? Should it be equidistant between
the Commission and the Council? Personally, I do not like the
approach which says it should be equidistant because the precise
object of this service is to be as near as possible to the Commission
and the Council. For me the preferred form would be to have an
agency. There are some interesting examples of agencies here in
Brussels which report and work both for the Council and the Commission
but keep these activities separate. One is the Interpretation
Service and the other is the Anti-Fraud Office, and they succeed
in doing this work well. Have I answered your questions or did
I miss one?
Q14 Lord Truscott:
I think you have answered how it would work in practice, but how
would it relate to existing diplomatic services?
Mr Avery: How it would work in practice is an
enormous question because its role is not clearly described in
the Treaty. Its fundamental role in the Treaty is to assist the
Vice-President High Representative but, of course there is still
some uncertainty about how far his role extends. There are no
decisions, but there are some ideas about its structure. Most
people would agree that this new service needs to have world coverage
in the sense of having desks for all the main parts of the world,
as foreign services do. The geography is at least as important,
if not more important, than the thematic work of a foreign ministry,
so this organisation should have geographical desks. Many of us
argue that these geographical desks should not be reduplicated
in the European Commission and in the Council. If that happens,
instead of reducing overlap and duplication, you have magnified
it. Those are the remarks I wanted to make about the structure.
Plainly, the structure also needs to make the double-hatting real.
If this new service consists of two columns, one dealing with
Common Foreign and Security Policy, the other dealing with Community
policies, we really have not improved anything very much. As for
relations with the British Diplomatic Service, I think it is a
very interesting question which you will have to put to the Foreign
Office, how they envisage it. There will be national diplomats
seconded to this service. In the discussions which took place
in 2005 all the Member States said, "Yes, we want to participate",
but when faced with the question now, "How many do you think
you will send?" no-one had a figure. It is very difficult
to get an estimate of the total numbers involved. We also posed
the question, "Will you send the brightest and best or will
you send the people you are really quite happy to see go?"
These are also important questions. All the Member States which
talked about this two years ago agreed that there would have to
be a geographical balance but, of course, there should not be
national quotas. That is nothing new and exceptional. In all the
institutions we have the practice of ensuring a national balance.
It is interesting that the attitudes of Member States to this
new service differ. For the smaller Member States it is quite
interesting. I was in Lithuania last week talking to them about
this and, manifestly, if you are a Lithuanian it is much more
attractive to be Head of the Union Delegation in Tokyo than to
be Lithuanian Ambassador in Tokyo. So for them it is very interesting
to have access to this bigger structure. On the other hand, the
small countries are quite afraid that the Directoire phenomenon
will occur, and that basically the big Member States will run
the show. There are also different attitudes according to age.
When I talk to the younger diplomats I know, they are really quite
enthusiastic. It is an interesting idea to go and serve somewhere
in a European organisation and then come back. The people in mid
career are not quite so sure about its implications for their
careers, but generally the people at the top seem to be rather
in favour.
Q15 Chairman:
Could I ask you one supplementary on this. That is the scope of
the External Action Service and both ends, both in Brussels and
also in the field, and perhaps the answers are in this book you
have given us today. In Brussels, we assume it would be most of
the people who are dealing with foreign and security policy within
the Council Secretariat, presumably quite a lot of the people,
if not all of the people, who are working in the Directorate General
dealing with RELEX external relations, perhaps the people working
in the Directorate General dealing with enlargement and then,
with diminishing degrees of certainty, the Directorate General
dealing with development and those responsible for humanitarian
aid, international trade, et cetera.
Mr Avery: Let me remark that this book which
I have given you includes a useful, annex in which there are the
reports which were produced two years ago jointly by Solana and
Barroso, which already give the outlines of some of these components.
To give you orders of magnitude of numbers of persons, everyone
supposes that the staff presently working for Solana, which is
approximately 300 people of all grades, would normally go into
this service. People have supposed that most or all of the Commission's
External Relations DG, that is 750 people, would go into it, but
in the case of the Commission, it is a bit more complicated than
that because there is more to external affairs in the Commission
than the one Directorate General for External Relations; there
is Development and there is Enlargement. Let me just make a small
parenthesis. A very delicate but important question will be the
relationship of the Commissioners for External Affairs to the
new Service and the new Vice-President. It is sometimes said that
the relationship will not work because in the Commission each
Commissioner is equal and no-one is superior to the other, but
in my interpretation, the Treaty changes that. The Treaty says
that for the first time there will be a hierarchy. In the past,
Vice-Presidents may have had big jobs but they were never hierarchically
superior. There will be, let us say, four Commissioners subordinate
to this new Vice-President; they ought to act as his deputies
and they ought to have access to and be working with the Service;
if you imagine the alternative, which is that they keep their
own troops, the result would be massive duplication. That was
a parenthesis, and I was saying that exactly who comes from which
part of the Commission is a very delicate question which remains
to be decided. Then there are the Commission's delegations. Roughly
speaking, they have 1,000 Brussels-based staff of all grades and
about 4,000 locally employed staff. Many of these locally employed
staff are European nationals, and altogether there are 5,000 bodies.
I often say that, if you look at the numbers, the delegations
will be the Crown Jewels of this operation. What Mr Solana is
lacking in his present position are eyes and ears outside the
European Union. That is one of the reasons why there has been
a proliferation of Special Representatives—I think there
are now nine or ten of them—precisely because he was unable
or unwilling to employ the Commission's delegations for that role.
Those are my remarks about the general dimensions of the Service.
Q16 Lord Hannay of Chiswick:
In the past, one of the things which has inhibited everyone working,
including Solana, with the Commission delegations is their extraordinary
inequality of ability and professionalism and the fact that too
many jobs have gone to a sort of Buggins's turn rotation and also
there has been huge resistance for good people working in Brussels
to go and serve out in foreign parts. Is there anything being
done to address this quality problem because it does rather seem
that if this system is to work at all, it can only be if there
is a much more professional approach to the External Service than
has been achieved so far?
Mr Avery: In general, people who serve in Commission
delegations are not trained for the kind of political reporting,
political analysis and all those things, which go with the traditional
role of diplomacy. The Commission has tried to do better training.
It must try twice and three times as hard. One of the things which
I insisted on—it is mentioned in this report which I have
given you today—is that a capacity for training for this
new service is a priority. I mean that in two directions, not
only should people who work in the European institutions—the
Commission, Council, Secretariat—learn about diplomacy,
but people coming from the national diplomatic services should
be adequately informed and trained in how the European Union works
and what it is about. Some people propose a European diplomatic
academy. I am not in favour of creating a new institution, we
have got enough of those already, but we could create a network,
a virtual European diplomatic academy, using the very good elements
which exist already, and training should certainly be a priority.
Q17 Lord Hamilton of Epsom:
What is the impact of the limited extension of Qualified Majority
Voting in areas of common foreign and security policy?
Mr Avery: To be honest, I do not feel very capable
of giving you a reply on this. I cannot remember exactly where
these extensions are, but wherever they are, I do not think they
are likely to have much impact. Why do I say that? In Common Foreign
and Security Policy what counts is the political will, not whether
there is unanimity or Qualified Majority Voting. For me, the question
is where is the political will to make decisions and take common
action.
Q18 Chairman:
I wonder if we can move to one of the issues on defence. The Treaty
makes provision both for enhanced co-operation to apply to CFSP,
but given that enhanced co-operation has not had very much success
so far, and given one already has the provisions for constructive
abstention anyhow, perhaps that is not the way we go forward.
On the other hand, it does have very explicitly these provisions
for permanent structure co-operation in defence. Do you feel this
does have the potential for the development of more effective
EU crisis management capabilities?
Mr Avery: If you will forgive me, I am going
to pass on that question because on these military security questions
I feel insufficiently qualified to give you useful advice.
Q19 Chairman:
In that case, I will not ask you the question, unless you feel
you would like to answer it, on the mutual assistance clause.
Mr Avery: I will pass on that too.
Chairman: Very well.
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