An Emerging Diplomatic System for the Eu? Frameworks and Issues

This paper addresses the general problems encountered in an analysis of EU diplomacy, and specifically the emergence of the EU ‘diplomatic system’. The first part of the paper reviews the literature on the changing nature of diplomacy, identifying issues relating to boundaries, capacity and legitimacy and paying particular attention to multi-level and multi-stakeholder diplomacy. This review then forms the foundation for consideration of the EU as a ‘diplomatic system’, focusing on two key aspects. The first of these concerns the nature of the diplomatic milieu that has developed and is developing in the EU. The second concerns three areas of diplomatic practice: first, the institutional development of EU diplomacy; second, the conduct of strategic diplomacy aimed at positioning the EU in the global arena; third, the development of structural diplomacy which has led to EU engagement in peace-building and state-building. The conclusions review the prospects for the EU’s diplomatic system after the Lisbon Treaty, and identify potential future challenges or opportunities in the world arena. Evaluating the character and role of diplomacy in a transformational world order presents a number of interrelated issues. Not the least of these is the continued centrality of its forms and functions in world politics contrasted with relative marginalisation as an area of academic enquiry in an age dominated by processes related to globalisation, regionalisation and global governance. This is largely explained by the images associated with diplomacy as a core institution of a system of sovereign states embracing a set of principles and working practices rooted in values embracing secrecy, hierarchy, a dissociation with domestic arenas, insulation from non-state actors and pursuit of national interests in an age where the overarching claims of global interests are asserted. At the same time, however, the functions of communication and negotiation central to the processes of diplomacy have never been in greater demand, stimulated by increasingly complex agendas and diverse sites of diplomatic activity. This tension between the apparent marginalisation of diplomacy and its centrality in contemporary world politics has shadowed the narratives of change in the international order, paralleling the debate on the significance or otherwise of the state through differing explanatory `waves’ of globalisation theory. One result has been a renewed interest in the essence of diplomacy and an attempt to locate this outside the dominant assumptions that its association with the Westphalian order have created. Debating diplomacy in this broader context assumes particular significance in the European Union (EU). On the one hand, the nature of its internal processes in terms of their sheer density