What role for the high representative post-2019?

Abstract

ABSTRACTDavid O’Sullivan reminds us of the minor miracle of CFSP – the “Copernican Revolution” as he calls it. He notes that we have come from a point in the 1970s at which EC foreign Ministers would move en masse from one city to another in a single afternoon just to distinguish clearly their separate roles between European Community business and their foreign policy discussions within European Political Cooperation (EPC). Even the “association” of the European Commission with foreign policy deliberations, he reminds us, was deemed both sensitive and problematic for most member states well into the 1980s. It is also important, I think, to highlight – and indeed to challenge – some of the underlying assumptions that we too often make about what the EU is and what it can and should be doing. This, I think, builds usefully on David’s salient points about the stark and sometimes revolutionary change in the machinery of the Union’s foreign policy.