Introduction
The focus of this chapter is on the organisation and role of expertise in the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as it has gradually taken shape since the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty (December 2010) and the subsequent creation of the European External Action Service (EEAS). A separate chapter dedicated to CFSP is justified for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the decision making process in this sensitive policy field differs from that in other EU policy fields where in most cases the European Commission has the exclusive right of initiative and the European Parliament is co-legislator together with the Council. In this primarily intergovernmental field, the member states and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HRVP) are in the lead. This set-up has also implications for the organisation and sources of expertise, with the European Commission occupying a much less central role than in other policy fields.
Secondly, the creation of the EEAS is a watershed for the organisation of European foreign policy expertise. For most of the history of European foreign policy cooperation, the member states served as the main source of foreign policy expertise. The bigger ones, supported by well-established national foreign ministries and a wide network of embassies, were generally better placed than the small ones. The establishment of a Policy and Early Warning Unit following the entering into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam (May 1999) was a first attempt to complement the national expertise with an autonomous body for European-level information gathering and analysis. It is however only with the Treaty of Lisbon and the establishment of the EEAS that we see the rise of a significant Brussels-based player in the foreign policy field (Dijkstra and Vanhoonacker 2011). The question arises how this new actor has dealt with the challenge of gathering expertise for its day-to-day decision making.
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Thirdly, the question of expertise in CFSP is interesting because of its specific character. The expertise required in the area of foreign policy is related to international developments and countries, regions and organisations that are situated outside the European Union. Although part of the expertise is available on the basis of open sources, it also requires presence on the ground. It is therefore interesting to explore how the Union delegations, who now have competences in all aspects of external relations, fulfil a role as sources of expertise.
Last but not least, it is interesting to see how the EU is responding to the changing needs as a result of processes of globalisation and the increasingly complex and technical nature of international dossiers. While the traditional diplomat used to be a generalist with strong negotiation skills and a high sense of cultural sensitivity, the new international context often also requires technical knowledge. In other words, the required expertise needs to be much more multi-faceted than it used to be.
The central question addressed in this chapter is how the HRVP and the EEAS have organised the gathering and processing of European foreign policy expertise and whether this has led to contestation, either from the member states, the Commission, or the broader public. We start by conceptualising the current use and organisation of expertise in the field of EU external action. In line with earlier work conducted on the politics of information (Blom and Vanhoonacker 2014), we make a distinction between the rules of the game underlying the organisation of expertise in the EEAS and the day-to-day practice of these rules. Building on social psychology, we motivate our choice to focus on expert groups rather than on individual experts as our basic unit of analysis. We do not limit ourselves to subject matter expertise but also include political expertise, procedural expertise, policy expertise and expertise on experts (Garret et al. 2009) (see also Blom in this volume). As a second step, we examine how the EEAS acquires and processes expertise in the concrete case of the Asia-Pacific department. As the organisation and role of expertise in the EEAS has not been researched so far, our research is very much of an exploratory nature.
Conceptualising Expertise in the EEAS
In The politics of Information—The Case of the European Union (Blom and Vanhoonacker 2014) a conceptual distinction is introduced between the ‘constitutional politics of information’ and the ‘operational politics of information’. Constitutive politics of information, “concerns first of all the formal institutionalization of the way in which policy relevant information has to be accessed, distributed and processed, possibly including the standardization of its provision and its statistical quantification. As such, ‘constitutive politics of information’ is about the choices that have to be made in the institutionalization of the provision of information and advice and about the contestability of these choices and the interests involved. Operational politics of information concerns the ways in which the actors who are involved in the daily processing of policy relevant information actually go about thanks to and despite the formal instructions and formats decided upon in the constitutive process. As such it also includes strategic and manipulative acts of ‘informing’” (Blom and Vanhoonacker 2014, p. 9). This distinction can be specified with a view to the use of expertise in policy processes. ‘Constitutive politics of expertise’ then refers to the (sometimes politically contested) processes by which political principals formally decide on the rules covering the use of expert groups by their bureaucratic agents. Political principals may for example decide on who is formally eligible for positions in expert groups/committees; on recruitment procedures; on the overall composition of the expert group (e.g. on gender, interests, or geographical balance); on how broad or restricted the mandate of an expert group should be—inspection and assessment of the ‘evidence base’ of policy proposals only (‘diagnostic’ use of expert groups), or also the evaluation and formulation of policy alternatives?; on whether, if in-house expertise is not sufficiently available or suspect in the eyes of the outer world, the commissioning organizational unit should rely on independent epistemic communities, or on expert groups purposively established by the organization self (cf. Dunlop 2010); on during which phase of the policymaking process expert groups have to be consulted and when exactly expert reports have to be delivered; on how binding expert advice will be (strict coupling), or whether it can be taken into consideration as just one of the informational inputs (loose coupling); etc.
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How fixed and detailed prescriptions on the intake and use of experts may be, there usually will still be room for ‘operational politics of expertise’. ‘Operational politics of expertise’ refers to the actual organizing and maneuvering of expert groups by civil servants in order to get the desired outcomes/advices—and this thanks to, and in spite of the rules fixed during the constitutional phase. For a start, representatives of the commissioning bureaucracy may claim the role of chair in order to stay in charge of the agenda and minutes, of how uncertainty and dissent come to the fore in the final advisory reports, and to act as gate-keeper between the expert group and the political level. Bureaucracies that fear ‘expert drift’—i.e. expert groups developing and following their own agenda and preferences—, may counter that by inviting experts who do not know each other personally and/or who don’t have a common agenda, or simply by establishing expert groups on an interdisciplinary basis. Against expert pressure commissioning bureaucracies may establish different expert groups, preferably with different disciplinary/professional backgrounds in order to insulate themselves from each particular expert group and to create more leeway. The representative of the commissioning bureaucracy can furthermore attempt to frame the mandate or objectives of the expert group in a way that suggests political infeasibilities.
Scholars working in this field have also noted that “The lone analyst working in isolation to extract the meaning from a set of data is the exception rather than the rule” (Woolley et al. 2008, p. 353). Inspired by research on the internal role differentiation and dynamics of expert groups (e.g. Woolley et al. 2008; Franz and Larson 2002; Majchrzak et al. 2007; Stasser et al. 1995; Garret et al. 2009), we distinguish the following five dimensions of expertise/expert roles relevant for policy expert groups:
1.
Subject matter expertise is related to the content of the issue at hand, more specifically to the scientific, technical and normative aspects of policy problems and their proposed solutions. It refers to intimate knowledge of the cause-effect relationships between the variables pertaining to a specific domain, or to the skill of interpreting the normative aspects of possible political courses of action against the background of more general and widely accepted moral frameworks (cf. Lindvall 2009).
2.
Political expertise refers to the ability to assess the political feasibility of possible courses of action/policies—what are the preferences of the formally competent decision makers, what is their combined win-set—and to the ‘skills to effectively steer negotiations to an outcome’ (Beach 2005).
3.
Procedural expertise refers to extensive knowledge about the legal parameters and requirements of possible policy solutions and about the formal procedures policy-making and –implementation are subject to: which institutions/actors have to be involved in which capacity, when, and how? (cf. Beach 2005; Talberg 2008; Haverland 2009).
4.
Policy expertise refers to “knowledge of the range of policies and instruments, past and current, proposed and enacted, governing a particular policy area as well as knowledge of how they work” (Page 2010).
5.
‘Expertise on experts’ refers to the ability to identify experts—knowing who has what kind of expertise—and to handle expert groups with a view to elicit expertise opinion/information and getting shared and unshared information at the table (to uncover ‘hidden profiles’) (Stasser et al. 1995; Garret et al. 2009, p. 101).
We also take note of the observation by Garret et al. (2009) that in order to be an expert, “any one individual must be able to perform well on multiple dimensions at the same time; however it is likely that specific individuals’ job functionality will require more expertise in some dimension than others” (Garret et al. 2009, p. 101).
This five-fold classification of expertise dimensions relevant for policy expert groups enables more explicit reflections on the operational dynamics between policy expert groups and their socio-political and legal environments. For example, within the EU context ‘expertise on experts’, and political expertise seem (prima facie) qualities that typically inhere in representatives of the EU bureaucracies who normally establish, compose, and chair the EU’s expert groups, while performing at the same time the role of gate keeper between the group and the wider bureaucratic and political environment.
In what follows, we will make use of the above-mentioned distinction between constitutive and operational politics of expertise and a multi-dimensional understanding of expert roles to get a better understanding of the barely researched sources and role of expertise in the European External Action Service. As mentioned, the main focus will be on the Asia-Pacific department, one of the five regional departments in the EEAS, responsible for a total of forty-two countries (excluding Central Asia) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).1 Headed by a managing director, it consists of seven geographical divisions as well as a horizontal division dealing with cross-cutting thematic issues. Additionally, it is the first point of contact for 19 Union Delegations. The choice to concentrate on the Asia and Pacific department was prompted, amongst others, by the fact that the EEAS is predominantly structured along geographical/regional lines and that this department, with its 7 geographical divisions, 1 horizontal division and 70 to 80 desk and support officers, is the biggest department of the EEAS. Moreover, compared to the crisis management pillar of the EEAS, the geographical departments are strongly under-researched.
From a methodological point of view, the research on which this chapter is based is of a qualitative character, its ‘raw’ empirical materials being distilled from documents related to the establishment and functioning of the EEAS, and from 17 interviews. These were conducted in the period 2014–2017 with staff of the EEAS, the Commission, Permanent Representations and with representatives from non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Most of the EEAS interviewees were staff working for the Asia-Pacific department, while a few were based at the Human Resources department.2
Expertise and the EEAS: The Case of the Asia Pacific Department
The EEAS: Some Introductory Observations
Created in December 2010, the EEAS is still a relatively young body. Headed by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy who also is Vice President of the European Commission (HRVP), it has its headquarters in Brussels and is in addition supported by approximately 140 Union delegations all over the world. The Union Delegations are comparable to the national embassies to third countries and replace the former Commission delegations to third countries (Drieskens 2012; Austermann 2014). The heads of the Delegations fall under the direct authority of the HRVP. The staff of the EEAS, in both the headquarters and delegations, consists of officials of the Council General Secretariat, the European Commission and the Member States (Council Decision of 26 July 2010).
Although specialized scholars, member state representatives, and EEAS staff are still hesitant to positively identify the role, functioning, and core business of the EEAS, they all seem to agree that it is not the Foreign Ministry of the EU. It can in other words not be considered as a supranational replica of the Foreign Ministries of the member states and their traditional tasks (cf. e.g. Schmidt 2014; Wouters and Duquet 2012). As an EEAS staff member notes: “We are so many other things more. The EEAS has a much broader remit than any FM of a member state” (#4). Indeed, a quick glance on the organization chart of the EEAS suffices to confirm this. Tasks usually delegated to sectoral ministries, like security policy, crisis management, counter terrorism, and development policy are all covered by the EEAS, as well as the more traditional diplomatic undertakings of regular ministries of foreign affairs. This reflects the more general recognition in the diplomatic and academic world that under the condition of an ongoing globalization erstwhile ‘domestic’ policy issues acquire an importance that stretches far beyond the boundaries of the nation state and become entangled with the requirements and aims of ‘classic’ diplomatic foreign policy. Concentrating these new external challenges and responsibilities in the EEAS is at the same time an organizational expression of the ‘officially declared’ attempt to integrate the EU’s external policies and actions into a coherent whole—halfheartedly as this may be executed, according to some internal and external observers (Duke 2012; Marangoni and Raube 2014).
As recognized for example by Kinney (2000) with a view to US foreign policy and by Duke (2009) when it comes to EU-level external action after Lisbon, this march of new policy areas into the field of foreign politics requires the availability or at least the development and cultivation of skills and expertise which never belonged to the armory of the traditional diplomat. The EEAS must indeed be able to tap military, police, legal, and administrative expertise due to its responsibility for the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and more particularly crisis management missions. Development cooperation and neighborhood policy requires project management skills and often highly technical subject matter expertise. Even though the EEAS shares responsibilities for the foreign policy ‘financial instruments’ with the Commission, its contribution to the strategic planning of the implementation of these instruments also presumes management skills and expert knowledge.
Against this background it is puzzling that the EEAS has opted for, and sticks to a ‘rotation’ or ‘mobilization’ scheme which obliges almost all staff members to change every four years of department—even to the extent that staff working on the Southern Africa unit of the Africa department may be allocated to the EEAS Intelligence Analysis Centre (INTCEN). In other words, it seems that the EEAS is sticking to the traditional set-up whereby diplomats are in the first place generalists who have to be able to quickly familiarise themselves with new subjects and have the capacity to know where to find the relevant data and expertise. This does not seem to be a recipe for nurturing specific skills and expertise. Especially not in the light of the general literature on experts and expertise which estimates that it takes about 10 years of intensive experience and training in a specialized professional practice to become a genuine expert (cf. Simon and Chase 1973; Ericsson et al. 1993; Ericsson and Charness 1994). As one interviewee (#4) remarked: “there is an anti-expertise drive in the EEAS as it is now managed. [-] this is fueled by the mobility policy.”
The choice for a policy of rotation and the reliance on generalists rather than highly specialized staff has inevitably important consequences for the sources of expertise. For their proper functioning, generalists need the capacity to find and handle the required expertise. As a first step in our empirical research, we have therefore explored how in the case of the Asia-Pacific department, policy-makers deal with the challenge of acquiring and processing the relevant expertise. More in particular, we have tried to identify the sources of their expertise and in line with our interest for the constitutive and operational politics of expertise, investigated the ‘rules of the game’ and the day-to-day practices.
Sources of Expertise
It should be noted that the seemingly negative effect of the rotation policy on the development and cultivation of expertise has first and foremost an impact on the permanent staff originally recruited from the EU institutions—the Commission and the Council Secretariat. Member state diplomats (MSDs)—forming, according to the ‘Council decision establishing the organization and the functioning of the EEAS’ of July 2010, at least 1/3 of the total EEAS staff—are predominantly located in the civilian and military crisis management branch of the EEAS (Council Decision 2010). Although they are on the payroll of the EU, it is understood that they will anyhow return home after three or six years, to be replaced by fellow-countrymen who will again bring with them the military, police, legal, etc. expertise developed ‘at home’. On top of this contingent of MSDs, the member states also second national experts, so-called SNEs (‘seconded national experts’). According to an employee of the human resources division of the EEAS, interviewed on 13 November 20015 (#6), the number of MSDs is around 320, while the number of SNEs around 430. While the MSDs tend to be more generalists in line with the classic diplomat, the SNEs are the specialized experts with half of them being military personnel or coming from intelligence services. They are paid by the seconding member state but do not necessarily come from domestic ministries. They operate, among others, in the fields of cybercrime, international climate policy, and counterterrorism.
A regularly used recipe for access to expertise from the member states consists in organizing a workshop on a particular topic and asking them to send their experts. Also staff from international organisations (IOs) are sometimes invited. One of the advantages is that MSs and IOs take care of traveling and eventual lodging costs. The downside of this approach however is that the level of thematic expertise collected in this manner is uncertain. Often MSs do not send their sector specialists, but someone who happens to be already in Brussels. As an interviewee recalls his experience with organizing an expert conference on the Lower Mekong: “I called the MSs to invite experts. One third sent me a thematic expert. Two thirds sent their people from Brussels. Of course we had different levels of contribution. The people coming from the ministry of sector specialists, they were much more able to contribute” (#7). Therefore such an expert workshop may be of a more consensual than instrumental use. It helps to get a sense of the preferences and interests of the MSs while floating ideas and policy proposals to explore a possible consensus (cf. Metz 2013; Krick 2014) As another interviewee narrated: “I have already done a little bit of sounding of think tanks and then I will have an informal group of experts from MSs” (#9).
Clearly, the members states of the EU form together a very important external source of specialized expertise. Still, the expertise required for the EEAS as a whole is more wide-ranging than the expertise needed in the field of military and civilian crisis management branch, or the expertise delivered by the SNEs (cf. Eriksen 2011, p. 1177). This holds especially for expertise needed in the geographically organized departments and in the horizontal department for Human Rights, Global and Multilateral Issues. The question of the sources of EEAS expertise becomes all the more intriguing when realising that the operational budget of the EEAS (controlled by the Commission) is too scanty to allow for a reimbursement of traveling and lodging costs of invited external experts. It is certainly not at the same level that of the European Commission, with its about 1000 expert groups gravitating around the Directorates General, can permit itself (cf. Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2008, 2011). Moreover, the EEAS has over the past years suffered from a staff-reduction policy, meaning, inter alia, that exactly those with a lot of experience are not succeeded by new staff upon their retirement.
In light of the above, it is therefore not surprising that besides the member states, the EEAS has also been hunting for other sources of expertise. A key player hereby are the NGOs, and more in particular networks of NGOs (#2, #4, #6, #7, #8). They may either be of a more general kind, like Amnesty International and its worldwide network of regional and national representations, or else are more specialized like those in the fields of conflict mediation, advocacy against the death penalty, or campaigning for freedom of religion and belief. The advantages of inviting (networks of) NGOs to workshops and conferences—sometimes three to four times a year with the same group (#7)—are rather straightforward. For a start, they often dispose of highly specialized expertise in their field and may count renowned academics to their ranks. Moreover, ‘Brussels’ functions as a magnet, attracting numerous NGOs or their representations. As one interviewee put it: “The good thing is that in Brussels you have networks on everything.” “Since we are in Brussels, we have a dedicated network on human rights NGOs, which we call the human rights and democracy network, comprising about 48 NGOs led by a troika” (#8). A final advantage is that the costs of acquiring substantive expertise via NGOs are minimal to nil, since they are in the vicinity exactly to lobby the EU institutions and to be heard by them. Umbrella organizations will often take care of the invitations of their members and provide conference rooms and the like. Since the EEAS uses a secure video conferencing system with limited access, this is rather practical especially when conferences have partly to rely on Skype. It may sound anecdotic, but the way in which one interviewee recalled a workshop housed by Amnesty International is rather telling: “Amnesty offered the coffee and on my way to Amnesty I stopped by the nearby supermarket and bought some cookies” (#8).
Other sources of expertise are think tanks and academic institutions. The Asia-Pacific department has framework agreements with certain think tanks through which it can at any moment consult “a consortium of think tanks and experts … in a very swift way and [who] can respond very quickly when we request expertise” (#8). It is for this type of agreements that the budget to attract expertise is first and foremost spent. Especially the high flexibility of this type of cooperation is very much appreciated. As succinctly put by one of the interviewees: “I can order what I want” (#9). In contrast, contacts with academic experts are limited and seem to depend largely on personal initiative. One staff member, for example, asked DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission to identify academic groups doing research related to South-East Asia and ASEAN and ended up being served by 6 groups, all costs covered by the DG (#7).
The European Commission herself is undeniably also an important source of expertise for the EEAS, yet the relations between the Commission and the EEAS are complex. As Wouters et al. observed “the set-up of the EEAS to support the HR/VP in conducting CFSP and in ensuring coherence in the EU’s external action leaves the Commission running a parallel organisational structure in many policies related to EU external action” (Wouters et al. 2013, p. 46) This parallelism “is often seen as detrimental to bringing about more coherent and affective EU external action” (idem), and, so one could add, is sometimes a source of strain between the EEAS and the Commission. Trade policy, is firmly in the hands of the Commission, and de facto this also holds for (international) energy policy, if only because the Commission saw to it that the high level of expertise available in the field of energy policy did not go to the EEAS but went to DG Energy (Wouters et al. 2013). Development cooperation policy is a different story. When the EEAS was established, it was claimed by the Commission as being its own turf, yet the EEAS formally has a strategic guidance function in the programming of development policy, including the Development Cooperation Instrument (Council Decision 2010), and the same holds for the European Neighborhood Policy and its instruments. Defective coordination between the competences and functions of the Commission and the EEAS easily leads to tensions and suspicions of holding back information and expertise (Blom and Vanhoonacker 2015), Yet, as will be shown below, via the Union Delegations the EEAS can indirectly profit from the expertise available to the Commission in a way that would not that easily be secured in Brussels. These Delegations, composed of staff from the Commission, the member states and the Council General Secretariat, take advantage of the expertise brought in by staff of the Commission, sent to delegations to support for example the implementation of development projects or neighbourhood policies. Once belonging to the staff of a Union Delegation these Commission civil servants formally fall under the authority of the Head of the Delegation, and not under a Commissioner. So via its delegations the EEAS can indirectly profit from the expertise available to the Commission and this in a way that would not that easily be secured in Brussels. As an interviewee put it: “If you are in Brussels, development is done by the Commission. It is another institute, you have another relation” (#6).
Although our research has mainly focused on the gathering and processing of expertise at the EEAS headquarters itself, our interviews also revealed some interesting findings on the expertise gathering of the Union delegations which are worth mentioning. As a matter of fact, it appeared that the reliance on external expertise was not just a matter of the Brussels HQs but also of the Delegations, who very much cope with a lack of capacity. As almost every EU institution can ask the Union Delegations for information or expert advice, these delegations are rather overloaded. As an old hand of the Commission, who has his experience with the former Commission delegations and now is the head of a Union Delegation put it: “The delegations are under constant flow of ad hoc requests of reporting and sometimes the right hand in HQ does not know what the left hand is doing” (#8). The essential problem is that the rising work pressure within the delegation is not compensated by a reinforcement of the staff; on the contrary, the staff of the delegations is even reduced, partly because of shrinking development programs. Therefore, and also because diplomats cannot always interfere openly in the interior affairs of the host country, the delegations become more and more dependent on networks of local think tanks, civil society organizations, Chambers of Commerce, and the like (#8).
Summarising, the Asia-Pacific department EEAS accumulates its expertise from a wide scope of sources ranging from the member states, NGO’s, think tanks, academics and last but not least the European Commission. The next section reflects more broadly what we can learn from our mapping exercise by linking our empirical findings to the earlier proposed conceptualisation.
Lessons Learned
Overlooking the collection of external expertise from a more general perspective, it becomes clear that processes of expertise gathering and expert group creation are little formalized and rather ad hoc. They are basically dependent on personal initiative, decentralized, and without much interference by the hierarchical administrative and political top level. Put differently, what we learn from our case study on the Asia Pacific department, is that so far the constitutive politics of expertise has been rather lenient if not just weak. General rules or guidelines applicable to the entire organization are missing. The interviewees see this as an advantage rather than as a handicap because it gives them a lot of leeway. As one of them put it: “The good thing about this job is, that I really have few things I cannot do, that I think should be done” (#7). Asked whether the Commission guidelines for recruiting expertise—also not very strict and uniform—would not offer a useful template, the answers are evasive, if not simply negative: “Do we need instructions? I hope not because then you get into the bureaucratic way. I am not sure that we need it to have added value by systematizing or formalizing that” (#8).
Robert (2010, p. 251) has argued that, notwithstanding the Commission’s guideline on the formation and use of expert groups, the de facto little formalized practices of expert group creation by the Commission’s DGs underlines the perception of expert groups “as one of the instruments and guarantors of the autonomy of the European administration”. If that observation is valid, the expert recruitment practices of the EEAS would be even more supportive of its self-perception as an autonomous Service.
The lack of formal rules also has implications for the operational politics of expertise. It means that the actors involved have a lot of leeway to organize their search for expertise in the way they want. The case study on the Asia-Pacific department shows that this is not necessarily negative or problematic. On the contrary: the interviewees seem to be perfectly able to handle their needs and as mentioned above, they very much appreciate the high degree of flexibility and leeway in their day-to-day operations. A further finding with regard to the operational politics of expertise relates to the timing of the gathering process. From the interviews it transpires that expert groups are consulted in the early phases of policy development, sometimes even at the earliest moment just to get informed about the general context: “I need these academic encounters not for detail, but for shaping my opinion” (#7). Expert groups may of course also come in for discussing early policy drafts (#8), but typically not when it comes to the concretization and practical implementation of EEAS policies: “Think tankers are not good at translating things into action. Analytical work and bringing facts together, yes. But it is rare that you can develop with think tanks policy and make it operational” (#9).
EEAS staffers are moreover well aware of their role as those who commission expertise. Typically they will chair the expert workshops and conferences (#6) and if on particular occasions this is not feasible “we have a meeting before and then a post mortem after” (#7). They are conscious to take the lead, having an idea of how to steer expert group meetings in the direction of relevant/desired results:
A very important thing here is that you need to know your objectives. They will not set the objectives you will set the objectives. That is an important precept. These objectives derive from the political level and your own thinking. In the consultation process your starting point is clear. You can have as many experts as you want but if the workshop or the seminar is not structured properly the output will be next to zero.. [-] The setup of your report should be there. (#4)
Last but not least, our empirical findings also shed some light on the type of expertise respectively provided by the EEAS itself and the third parties with whom it is working. When presenting our classification of dimensions of expertise/roles of experts to interviewees and asking how they would classify their own expertise, they had no trouble to identify themselves as (1) ‘experts on experts’, (2) ‘political experts’ and (3) ‘procedural experts’ (e.g. #3, #4, #6, #9). In their capacity as ‘experts on expertise’, they proved well versed into identifying the sources that can complement the gaps in their own knowledge and as we have seen before, they tap on a broad scope of suppliers ranging from the member states and the European Commission to NGOs, think tanks and academics. Their role as ‘experts on expertise’ is furthermore exemplified by the capacity to critically reflect on the process of expertise gathering, making use of best practices such as working with experts from different professional and disciplinary backgrounds.
The bridging role characteristic for political expertise is illustrated by the awareness of the need to process and translate the input of the various sources into proposals that are understandable and acceptable to the political level (#4). One interviewee put it as follows:
The civilian report to politicians needs to offer an interpretation of what the expert has said. Experts often cannot put their ideas into the politician’s language. (#4)
“Bridging” means of course also to fulfill a gate-keeping role between the expert groups and those ‘political’ actors who are responsible for final decisions on policies. Thirdly, the interviewees also seem to be well aware of the importance of their knowledge of the formal and informal procedures underlying the decision making process (procedural expertise). One of the interviewees formulates it as follows: “You need people who know how to handle the European institutions. That is what you (meaning: the interviewers) call more precisely the procedural role. I have to know my competences. What are the shared competences and how to get the decision out of Brussels or how to get information out of Brussels?” (#9).
This identification with the roles of ‘experts on experts’, ‘political experts’ and ‘procedural experts’ leaves those on ‘subject matter expertise’ and ‘policy expertise’ uncovered. In our case study, we indeed see that it is precisely for these two functions that the EEAS staff regularly builds on external expertise. For the subject matter expertise, it is, as we have learned from our case study, common practice to rely on a wide range of sources, ranging from the member states and the Commission to NGOs, think tanks and academics. Although the EEAS is certainly not a blank sheet when it comes to subject expertise and the headquarters in Brussels can benefit from the knowledge of the Union delegations directly reporting from relevant third countries, there are always gaps and deficiencies in the level of detail. When it comes to policy expertise, the European Commission is particularly useful. This is especially the case in the area of development policy where the EEAS is mainly in charge of the strategic direction and not of policy formulation. As Wouters et al. (2013) observe: “policy expertise still lies in the Commission in many areas such as development cooperation, energy and trade.”
Conclusion
This chapter has sought to explore an intellectually stimulating puzzle, namely the seeming discrepancy between what the EEAS, as a contemporary bureaucracy of globalised foreign policy, may need in terms of expertise, and its management of human resources based on a policy of rotation. Its broad scope of responsibilities ranging from diplomacy to development and crisis management means that the EEAS must be able to draw on foreign policy, legal, military, technical and administrative expertise. It is therefore puzzling that the EEAS has opted for, and sticks to, a ‘rotation’ scheme which obliges almost all staff members to change every four years of department. At first sight, this does not seem to be the right recipe for nurturing specific skills and expertise.
The empirical sections based on a case study of the Asia-Pacific department however have shown that the EEAS is in general able to manage its need for subject matter expertise, notwithstanding its limited operational budget, successive reductions in staff numbers, and its staff rotating policy. Making use of our conceptualisation we have shown in a principled and systematic manner why the EEAS is indeed able to perform as an expertise driven organization. This has also demonstrated why the—initially rather puzzling—statement from a member of the HR department, that the rotation policy is there “to be able not to lose the expertise gained in a number of years but to be able to recycle that into the wider EU general interest” (#8), is after all convincing. To begin with, the distinction between ‘constitutive’ and ‘operational’ politics of expertise has proven useful when identifying and explaining the discretion officials in the Asia-Pacific department have in managing the access to expertise that they need. There are hardly any stumbling blocks in terms of setting up expert groups. As a consequence of this rather lenient attitude towards the constitutive politics of expertise, also the operational use of experts is rather smooth. EEAS staff members seem to be able to find the required sources rather easily and know in which phase of the policy process expertise will be organized.
Our distinction between five different expert roles provides insights into the specific expert roles required of officials in the Asia-Pacific department. We have shown how these roles are established, how officials are trained for these and how these are strengthened by the institutions rotation policy. As long as subject matter and policy expertise can be sourced externally if and when needed, EEAS staff can concentrate on expert, political and process expertise. Expertise on these three roles is seen to be essential to utilize the more content related forms of external expertise towards politically meaningful advice.
In line with the broader focus of this volume, we have in the introduction to this chapter also asked whether the way in which the EEAS has organized the gathering and processing of European foreign policy expertise has led to contestation, either from the member states, the Commission, or the broader public. Although we have to be careful to draw general conclusions from a single case study, our empirical research did not reveal any signals in that direction. There are occasional frictions between the EEAS and the member states, including between the EU delegations and member state embassies, as well as between the EEAS and the Commission. However, such tensions are not so much about the use of expertise but rather concern issues such as the delineation of competences, political reliability, and different degrees of openness (Bicchi 2014; Blom and Vanhoonacker 2015).
While further research is necessary to understand the reasons for this low level of contestation of expert information, the literatures on expertise and on foreign policy-making give us some indications. For a start, historically the contestation of the use of expertise, and in particular scientific expertise, has mainly occurred around risk policies, especially around risks concerning human health and damage to the natural environment (cf. Bimber 1996, p. 97; Jasanoff 1987; Weingart 1999). Foreign policy by contrast has never been classified as a form of risk policy. Moreover, foreign policy has traditionally not been a central focus of democratic politics, if only because foreign policy makers have generally resisted, and sometimes with good arguments, the kind of openness and transparency that facilitates citizens’ participation in democratic life (Lord 2011).
Much of the academic research on the—still relatively young—EEAS so far has been focusing on the set-up phase and early policy results (see for example Pomorska and Vanhoonacker 2016; Smith et al. 2016; Wouters et al. 2013). With a case study on the Asia-Pacific department, this chapter provides first insights into how the EEAS handles the gathering and processing of expertise. More extensive research on the EEAS’s reliance on expertise more broadly, and the degree of contestation that this may engender, will be necessary in order to arrive at a more complete picture.
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