Note from the editor: the below article was published on the 1st of March on the website of the German Development Institute, and in German on the sites of Die Zeit and Deutsche Welle

The approval of the second EU-Commission of José Manuel Barroso by the European Parliament on 9 February should prove a defining moment for European development policy. The Lisbon Treaty changes the institutional setting for the external relations of the European Union (EU) and while intra-EU horse-trading over policy responsibilities and budgets is ongoing, it is likely that development will play a more prominent role.

Nevertheless, the Treaty was never about to unite trade, development, humanitarian aid and foreign policy into one institution. Nor has it changed the fact that the EU can only act forcefully and coherently when member states’ political will and development imperatives concur. Even so, the trend towards integration of EU external policies is real and the Treaty continues this process. Progress will not be smooth or uniform and although the transition period may be difficult, the Barroso II Commission will have the opportunity to demonstrate the added value of deeper coordination to member governments and citizens.

Raising expectations

From a development perspective, EU external policy reforms have been eagerly anticipated on at least two grounds.

First, there is a growing realisation in Brussels and member state capitals that development policy is central to EU external action and ranks alongside other areas such as security and trade. The notion that development, long considered ”low politics”, can complement harder foreign policy tools is hardly new, but the ring-fencing of the EU development budget has been a double-edged sword that safeguarded development spending but also kept other instruments from being used for poverty eradication. Some commentators have argued that development policy risks subordination to narrower political and security interests, while others expect that the more external policies are harmonised, the more prominence development will have. The jury is still out as to which of these views will prevail.

The second promising move is the Lisbon Treaty’s creation of an explicit institutional link between the various Commissioners with external relations responsibilities, the European Council, and individual member states. The new post of High Representative of the Union for Foreign and Security Policy has three main tasks: to conduct the common foreign and security policy (CFSP) and common security and defence policy (CSDP), to conduct the Union’s external relations, and to ensure consistency with other external policies, especially development, enlargement and trade. The intention is to strengthen coherence and efficiency by centralising strategic planning and oversight.

The “gang of five”

There are signs that the first post-Lisbon Commission will deepen policy coherence for development, not least due to the qualities of five key Commissioners. At the European Parliament hearings, all stressed the importance of consistency in EU policies and the need to work closely with High Representative Baroness Catherine Ashton and the new European External Action Service.

Both Ashton and EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht bring experience with development issues to their portfolios. In her former capacity as EU Trade Commissioner, Ashton dealt ably with the thorny Economic Partnership Agreements negotiations, which aim to establish development-oriented free trade arrangements with some of the world’s poorest countries. De Gucht spent some months as EU Development Commissioner in 2009, and is a former Member of the European Parliament and member of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly. At his hearing he promised to facilitate the Parliament’s greater trade policy role foreseen in the Lisbon Treaty.

New EU Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs gave a strong performance at his hearing. Former EU Energy Commissioner Piebalgs is widely respected, an attribute that bodes well for development policy coordination. He will represent the Commission on the Foreign Affairs Council, a role which he may be able to use to keep development policy at the core of the EU’s external action.

The humanitarian assistance portfolio was allocated to Kristalina Georgieva following her Bulgarian colleague Rumania Jeleva’s unsuccessful Parliamentary hearing. The former Vice President of the World Bank has the opportunity to raise the EU’s emergency response profile, although the dividing lines between her role and that of Piebalgs are as yet unclear.

The major addition to EU Commissioner for Enlargement Štefan Füle’s portfolio is likely to be the European neighbourhood policy. While the decision to separate the neighbourhood from other developing regions has raised eyebrows, Füle promised the Parliament that he would work to foster development based on economic and political reform in neighbouring countries.

Grounds for cautious optimism

The Barroso II Commission reflects the reality that in the EU, policy coherence must emerge from a multi-actor decision-making system in which nobody wants to risk exclusion where core interests are at stake. The allocation of portfolios indicates that the need for coherence is to be balanced by a desire to prevent any one Commissioner or the entire College becoming too powerful. Responsibilities are simultaneously diffused and overlapping and there is potential for turf wars.

Baroness Ashton’s small high-level working group is working closely with key member governments on the institutional configurations of post-Lisbon EU foreign policy. Discussions are reportedly difficult and a compromise on finalising the division of labour, personnel and policy responsibilities will take time, not least regarding the European External Action Service. Nothing will be decided until everything is decided – the working group’s report due in April is unlikely to contain more than a broad outline and detailed blueprints are not expected before the European Council meets in June. The world will not wait too long for Europe to get its act together. US President Obama’s decision to cancel his attendance at the EU-US summit planned by the Spanish presidency for May is a signal that should concentrate minds.

Dr. Mark Furness and Davina Makhan, Department “Bi- and Multilateral Development Cooperation”, German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)

The October 2009 issue of The Broker featured an opinion piece from 3 current directors and 1 former director of leading European development institutes that formed the start for this discussion blog. The 4 institutions – DIE based in Bonn, ECDPM based in Maastricht, ODI based in London and FRIDE based in Madrid - have joinedt forces again. They have just published a Memorandum titled ‘New Challenges, New Beginnings: Next Steps in European Development Cooperation’. The report presents practical recommendations for moving forward in Europe’s international engagement, based on an analysis of the current state of play and the key challenges Europe and the world at large is faced with.

The report deals with a range of topics in twelve different chapters, including peace and security, migration, climate change, trade, development finance, and policy coherence for development, and identifies five key priorities for action.

First, the authors call for a new EU leadership in thinking about how development cooperation can deal with shared global problems. The Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen illustrated the complexity of reaching agreement on collective action and the EU’s inability to play a leading role. Renewed EU efforts are needed for effective Copenhagen follow-up actions, feeding into the climate change negotiations in April/May/June and the next Conference of Parties in November/December in Mexico. The review of the Millennium Development Goals, to be discussed at a UN Summit in September 2010, provides another opportunity for the EU to provide valuable input. In June, Canada will be hosting a G8 and a G20 meeting, where the EU can make its voice heard.

Second, the authors point to the need for the EU to improve the effectiveness and targeting of its development aid and deliver on its financial commitments. The EU has pledged to scale up aid to 0,7% of its Gross National Income (GNI) by 2015, setting an intermediate target of 0,56% for 2010. Yet according to the Commission’s own estimates this lower target will not be met until 2012 and a further 20 billion funding gap will need to be filled over the next two years. Besides the quantity, the quality of EU aid deserves extra attention. While the EU has been actively involved in shaping the international aid effectiveness agenda, resulting in the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action progress on the ground has been slow.

Third, the report calls for greater efforts to ensure that all EU policies contribute to the Union’s development goals, what is often referred to, also in previous blog contributions, as ‘policy coherence for development’. Regardless of commitments made by the European Union to ensure PCD, the authors state that it has remained more of an aspiration then a reality. They encourage the EU to seize opportunities created by the Lisbon Treaty to strengthen PCD, including through the new European External Action Service, and to adopt an ambitious results-oriented PCD Work Programme.

Fourth, the authors underline the importance of new investment into genuine partnerships with developing countries. The spirit of the Cotonou Partnership Agreement between the EU and ACP countries, including its principle of co-decision, can be used as a model for EU cooperation with other regions. Furthermore, as reality is often less rosy than the partnership paradigm as included in joint agreements, the EU should ensure that actual dialogue takes place, based on the principle of mutual accountability and in full respect of partners’ national and regional specificities. By supporting a reform of the governing structures of the World Bank and the IMF, the EU can contribute to making sure that voices of developing countries are heard in those institutions.

Finally, the authors call for the EU to improve cooperation between Member States, so that the EU works as one. The European Consensus on Development and the EU Code of Conduct on Complementarity and Division of Labour provide valuable frameworks for EU donors to work together in developing countries, but progress on the ground has proven to be slow. To speed up progress, the authors’ recommendations include a more systematic assessment of comparative advantages of EU donors and encouraging EU representatives at the country level to take the issue forward. There should also be better information sharing among EU donors, and an effort to unlock the potential of the new EU delegations in partner countries to facilitate a more effective European contribution to development on the ground. The EU is further encouraged to speak with one voice at international fora.

For those interested in reading more, I invite you to download the full report or executive summary. You might also find it interesting to know that the analysis and recommendations of the memorandum will be discussed by the Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Development with Commissioner Piebalgs and the authors on 17 March 2010. In a future posting to this blog, one of the authors will report back on that discussion.

Those of you who are subscribed to the Broker magazine will have already come across it, but this brief post is to highlight an article in the most recent edition by Otto Holman, reader in international relations and European integration studies at the University of Amsterdam.

In the article, Otto Holman reflects on the recent posts in this Blog on the future of Europe, and present his own analysis of the implications of the entering into force of Lisbon for the future of Europe as a global actor. Based on his analysis of recent events in 2009 and socio-economic projections for 2010, he argues that that the EU's soft power expectionations are "no longer in line with the EU's capability to uphold a degree of internal social cohesion".

On that basis, he doubts whether the Lisbon Treaty will strenghten the EU's external performance while the Union lacks "credible power, soft or otherwise, to the outside world".He thus reaches a conclusion that "In any case, the EU, coherent or not, will not be taking on a leading role due to its own internal crisis. The Lisbon Treaty will not change anything in this respect."

Folllowing this more intensive blogging period over the past three months, we will continue to monitor whether Holman's predictions will become a reality in the new year, and will occassionally add new blog posts in this space. We also invite you to share your own comments on his views and those by others in this blog. If you would like to contribute to this blog and share your own views, then please feel free to send me your proposed contribution at the following address: nk -at- ecdpm.org .