The Diplomat
Socialist MEP Ignacio Sánchez Amor, a member of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, presented a study in Brussels yesterday that sets out a series of proposals to move towards “a true European Diplomacy”.
The study, which he commissioned from researchers Paula Lamoso, Ignacio Molina and Pol Morillas, evaluates in depth the current architecture of EU diplomacy and also draws up a series of recommendations to strengthen it, including Sánchez Amor’s proposal for the creation of a European Diplomatic Academy.
During the presentation, Sánchez Amor pointed out that “the EU needs to have its own permanent instruments in External Action to strengthen its capabilities and its global action”, and also in response to illiberal and authoritarian systems that seek to jeopardise the EU’s objectives and interests abroad.
In the study, the researchers make a number of recommendations for enhancing EU diplomacy. These include recommendations addressing the current configuration of the European External Action Service (EEAS), the need for the EU to develop its own external action tools, fostering a diplomatic corps spirit and strengthening the EEAS’s strategic planning capabilities.
“The EU’s political agendas are inevitably conditioned by the continuous emergence of crises of different natures around the world and the instinctive need to react to them, which leaves little time for analysis of the horizontal aspects of the mass,” Sánchez Amor pointed out.
The report also includes some of the obvious challenges when it comes to acting as a global actor, such as, for example, the absence of a common European cultural diplomacy, as the Socialist MEP from Extremadura pointed out, who stressed that the EU needs its own image to convey our common identity and European way of life.
The event was attended by the authors of the study, Ignacio Molina and Paula Lamoso, as well as the Secretary General of the European External Action Service, Stefano Sannino, who praised Sánchez Amor’s proposal to create a European Diplomacy Academy.
Paula Lamoso, for her part, spoke of the need for the EEAS to establish a medium- and long-term strategy for EU External Action, in order to be able to contribute its added value and strengthen the post of EU High Representative in order to guarantee a true Common EU Diplomacy.
