Allocating political attention in the EU’s foreign and security policy: The effect of supranational agenda-setters
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116520942317 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Frank M Häge |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Allocating political
attention in the EU’s
foreign and security
policy: The effect of
supranational
agenda-setters
Frank M H€
age
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University
of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Abstract
Supranational bureaucracies are often promoted as a solution to collective action
problems. In the European Union context, investing the High Representative for
Foreign Affairs and Security Policy with new agenda-setting powers was expected to
improve the coherence, continuity and efficiency of foreign policy-making. Relying on
novel fine-grained and comprehensive data about the content and duration of working
party meetings, the study maps and analyses the allocation of political attention to
different foreign policy issues between 2001 and 2014. The results show that the
empowerment of the High Representative by the Lisbon Treaty had little immediate
effect on the Council’s foreign policy agenda. However, the study also indicates that this
result might be due to a lack of capability and ambition rather than weak institutional
prerogatives.
Keywords
Agenda-setting, Council of the European Union, delegation, European External Action
Service, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy
Corresponding author:
Frank M H€
age, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick, Limerick V94 T9PX,
Ireland.
Email: frank.haege@ul.ie
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(4) 634–656
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1465116520942317
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Making the EU a more effective foreign policy actor
The establishment of supranational bureaucracies and the delegation of agenda-
setting powers to them by states is often seen as a way to overcome collective
action problems or reduce transaction costs (Keohane, 1984; Koremenos et al.,
2001; Moravcsik, 1993; Pollack, 1997; Stein, 1982; Tallberg, 2002). In the context
of the European Union (EU), the Lisbon Treaty’s creation of the new post of High
Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR) in 2009
was justified in these terms (European Convention, 2002). Being both a Vice
President of the Commission and the chair of the Foreign Affairs formation in
the Council, the HR was supposed to bring more coherence to the EU’s foreign
policy. In comparison to the pre-existing situation, where the chair of the Foreign
Affairs Council changed every six months with the country holding the rotating
Presidency, the establishment of the HR was also expected to ensure a more con-
sistent approach to the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). In addition,
being an impartial agenda-setter unaffected by national biases should have resulted
in more productive policy leadership and a more efficient policy-making process.
The overall aim of the drafters of these institutional reform proposals was to make
the EU a more effective and coherent foreign policy actor on the world stage
(European Convention, 2002: 11).
Yet, despite these high expectations, the actual effects of the establishment of a
supranational agenda-setter in the area of EU foreign policy have received little
attention in the literature.
1
An exception is Vanhoonacker and Pomorska’s (2013)
qualitative study, which evaluates the extent to which the first HR, Catherine
Ashton, has effectively applied various agenda-setting strategies during the first
two-and-a-half years of her term in office. One of these strategies is ‘arousing
interest’, which is related to the concept of political attention that is of primary
interest in this article. Vanhoonacker and Pomorska (2013: 1329) find that Ashton
clearly set out her foreign policy priorities, but the way this has been followed-up
by her and the European External Action Service (EEAS) has been ‘unconvincing’.
While providing valuable insights, an important point of comparison, and advan-
tages in other respects, qualitative research is necessarily restrictive and selective in
empirical scope. Relying on a new quantitative dataset of the number and duration
of Council working parties in different areas of foreign affairs, the current study
complements Vanhoonacker and Pomorska’s (2013) work by providing the first
large-scale mapping of the distribution of the Council’s political attention in this
policy field. By leveraging comparisons over time and across issue areas, the study
offers a systematic and comprehensive assessment of the effect of the establishment
of the HR and the EEAS on foreign and security policy-making. If the establish-
ment of and the delegation of agenda-setting powers to the HR had the desired
consequences, traces of these effects should be visible in the distribution of political
attention in the CFSP. The use of process-generated quantitative data to investi-
gate, on a large scale, aspects of the EU’s internal foreign policy-formulation
process is an innovation in an area of research that has so far overwhelmingly
H€
age 635
To continue reading
Request your trial