The European External Action Service: Living Forwards by Understanding Backwards

Among the many changes introduced to the European Union's (EU's) external relations role by the Treaty of Lisbon, one of the most significant is the establishment of a European External Action Service (EEAS) to support the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). However, the treaty article relating to the EEAS is vague and does not specify precisely the form that this new institution will take. This article considers the options for the design of the EEAS along five dimensions: membership, the scope of responsibilities, the centralization of tasks, the rules for controlling the new body, and the flexibility of its institutional arrangements. Equally, the establishment of the EEAS builds on past foreign policy cooperation between EU Member States, and it is therefore important to consider how such cooperation was structured in the past in order to comment on the design options for the future EEAS.