Europarlementariërs ontevreden over voorstel Europese diplomatieke dienst (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Members of the European Parliament have expressed anger over a series of papers outlining how the EU's future diplomatic service may look.
"What is on paper at the moment is insufficient, utterly insufficient," says German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok, in charge of drawing up parliament's opinion on the issue.
MEPs fear that current proposals, drawn up and circulated by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton last week, seek to take away too much of what is directly the European Commission's responsibility.
They also do not contain key parliament demands such as having budgetary control over the service and the right to call nominees to head the EU's 136 delegations abroad to come and give their views before parliament.
While formally only having the right to be consulted on the setting up of the External Action Service (EAS), MEPs say they intend to make full use of their co-decision powers on finance and staff rules, both of which have to be changed to accommodate it.
"We will use our power on budget and staff regulation. If we don't find a compromise we will not give agreement to these two elements on this," Austrian Socialist MEP Hannes Swoboda said.
The diplomatic service, a stand-alone institution, is likely to have a staff of around 6,000 people drawn equally from the commission, the council secretariat and member states.
But the intricacies of the service and the search for a new balance of power between member states and the commission have unleashed a fierce battle in the EU capital. The commission fears losing key policy areas to the EAS, while member states fear a diluted service with a divided chain of command.
In the dispute, parliament is a natural ally of the commission.
"We cannot accept the insistence of the council to be more or less the supreme decider on this issue, because foreign policy is not only CFSP [Common Foreign and Security Policy] as such but it is all that the commission did until now did in their commission delegations.
So it cannot be that the council appropriates all the issues and the nominations. And of course it would mean a reduction of the influence of the parliament," says Mr Swoboda.
Parliament's rhetoric comes on the back of commission anger at Ms Ashton's early proposals. Chief among the commission's priorities is to hold on to the management of the EU's development budget. It also wants to curb the proposed autonomy of heads of EU delegations and to maintain control over countries within its neighbourhood policy - all contrary to the Ashton papers.
The internal squabbling reached such a low point last week that Britain and Sweden wrote a letter to Ms Ashton in which they both pledged support for her plans and warned her not to cede too much ground to the commission and the council secretariat.
An EU source familiar with the negotiations admitted there was a "certain amount of scratchiness around Brussels" but noted that this was to be expected when it concerns the "creation of the first new institution this town has seen for 50 years."
For Ms Ashton, who sees her main "legacy" as being the EAS, it likely to be a major test even to manage to stick to her timetable of presenting her formal proposal at the end of March and having it agreed by the end of next month.
"The basis from where our discussion has to go out is the commission line, then of course, you have to take into account some of the concerns of the council and the parliament," said Mr Swoboda, summing up the institutional balancing act that the EU's top diplomat will have to manage.