It is a great pleasure and privilege to be here. It is extremely important that European civil servants not only report and are accountable to the Council, the member states and the European Parliament but we also try to reach out to national parliaments, which are given a particular role in the Lisbon treaty. Time is limited for everybody but we try our best to have good contacts with national parliaments and I very much appreciate the opportunity to be before the committee today. I do not want to speak for too long because I would like us to have the opportunity for questions and dialogue. I thought I should speak for ten or 15 minutes, if that is acceptable. I will cover three broad areas: first, the setting up of the service; second, some of the policy challenges and one or two of the modest successes we have been able to have; and third, the point raised by the chairman namely the relationship with national foreign ministries and national embassies in third countries.
On the setting up of the service, I was given this slightly odd title for a public servant, chief operating officer. I was at the Institute of Public Administration today and I met somebody from the National Audit Office of the UK, who also had the title chief operating officer. I felt less lonely. My experience is that whatever my responsibilities, it mostly appears to me that I am responsible for what does not operate, rather than what does. The setting up of the new service is challenging. We are not starting from scratch. Sometimes I think people think we are creating something completely new, ex novo. In fact, what we are doing is bringing together the different elements of the bureaucracy in Brussels which were dealing with external relations within a single organisation and linking that with the delegations in third countries which were previously Commission delegations. We are not creating a massive new operation. I hope we are producing efficiencies of scale, greater consistency and pulling together strands that were previously operating relatively autonomously. That is the objective, but as members will know or anybody who has had experience of bringing together bureaucracies, administrations or even companies that merge, it is not easy to create a common identity. I am a surprise myself.
I was 32 years in the European Commission. I am a fan of the Commission, but when you step outside and realise how the Commission had its culture, the Council secretariat from whom we take about 400 to 500 people had its administrative culture and then, we are putting into the mix, people from member states's foreign services and they each come with their distinct administrative culture. People's ideas of what constitutes best administrative practice, of what constitutes a good way of organising things can be quite different. One of the first things we have had to try to do is to build some common sense of identity. We are not helped in this by the fact that for the moment we are still spread across eight buildings in Brussels. Most people in the new service are still sitting at the same desk in the same building, doing the work they did before the service was created. We have not been able to pull everybody together into a single building which we hope we will do at the end of the year. That is another challenge, to move all these people into a single building.
It was a challenge to pull these elements together. We have succeeded in doing that and getting the operation up and running. The other challenge was that we had to do this while continuing with the work; that did not go away. When we came into the office on 1 January, we were suddenly the European External Action Service but the work was still there from the 31 December. It was the same work but we had to do it in a slightly different way. Apart from the challenge of administrative culture, we have had problems of informatic systems because we have people working out of the Council informatic system and the Commission informatic system and we are trying to connect these two together - and they are designed not to connect. These are all the slightly tedious and boring bureaucratic problems of setting up a new service, most of which we have overcome. It has absorbed a certain amount of energy and time to put a structure together and to be clear about who is doing what and to have an organisational chart that makes sense. We have achieved that and the next phases will be to move the organisation into a new building and to continue the process of creating a common sense of identity for the people in this service, coming from different administrative constituent parts.
The other challenge is that we are responsible for managing our own staff and our budget. Previously, this was managed centrally in the Commission for those of us in the Commission and centrally in the Council secretariat. Now we have had to set up our own administration to manage our budget, we have had to make a proposal for our own budget for next year. I have already been to the European Parliament several times. I was at the Institute for Public Administration and Deputy John McGuinness was there as chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts and we discussed some of the issues that arise about the accountability of civil servants in front of politicians for budgetary matters. We are now responsible for the administrative budget of the new service and we have had to manage our own staff. I have already touched on some of the difficulties of that. We are slowly working our way through these issues and establishing a working organisation. The move to a new building will be a very important milestone in that process.
I will now deal with policy. Members will be aware, as Harold Macmillan said, "Event...". We started out with a certain sense of priorities, but after a few days in the office, the Arab spring started, which was a game changer in terms of our neighbourhood policy. Ms Catherine Ashton had identified three main priorities, the neighbourhood, strategic partners and security and crisis management or conflict prevention and crisis management. Clearly the neighbourhood policy was given a really new impetus with the events of the Arab spring and all that has happened since. We have responded reasonably well. I know there are some who are criticise the fact that we did not see it coming. We did not, but we are in reasonably good company. Quite a few others did not see it coming, but we are starting to reflect on whether there are better ways of trying to spot events before they happen. Some administrations have been trying to do that and spending a great deal of money to do it, without having found the magic formula. One lesson we learn is that we must try to have a more forward looking agenda to see if we can spot other events that may come upon us, for which we could be slightly better prepared.
We have worked hard on showing responsiveness to the events - and Ms Ashton attaches a great deal of importance to this - without any sense that we are telling these countries what they have to do. In her trips there she is very clear that these countries want space, while they are having a revolution and changing, and they want to decide how to take this forward and how to organise their constitution and their path to democracy and human rights. They do not want us to lecture them and to give them a ready-made solution which they can copy. This has meant that we have not been massively present in doing things. We have made offers of what we can contribute but we are waiting to see how and when these offers will be taken up. If I take the example of Tunisia, where it all started, we created a task force and the first meeting took place at the end of September. It was a strong moment of bringing together European and international bodies that can help in the process of change and identified a sort of agenda of concrete actions, talking about the recovery of frozen assets or boosting foreign direct investment and job creation. Clearly one of the major priorities for all of these countries is economic progress and growth because one of the driving forces of this change in many ways was the particularly high youth unemployment. We are watching very carefully what is happening in those areas where things are going less well, whether in Syria or other parts of the region. Libya was a very special case with a UN resolution, military intervention and continued military fighting. Europe has been active in taking a firm position about the departure of Colonel Gadaffi as well as being one of the early recognisers of the TNC initially in Benghazi and now in Tripoli. We are part of the contract group on Libya. This is an area in which Ms Ashton has invested very heavily.
That takes me logically to the area of the Middle East peace process which is obviously a very important issue. The Arab spring interacts with the prospects for peace in the Middle East. This is something where Ms Ashton has been extremely active. In the run up to the UN General Assembly and the issue of Palestinian statehood, which ran the risk of provoking perhaps a confrontation and possibly even divergence on the European side as to how this would be managed Ms Ashton was active in the region before the UN General Assembly and then in New York she was active in trying to find a way forward which would avoid this becoming an issue of confrontation which would damage the prospects for peace talks. She is very active in the Quartet. Both sides are now willing, in principle, to re-engage on peace talks. One of our top priorities is to ensure that happens. It is very clear and widely acknowledged that Europe is playing a much more active role in this area than it did before now. In the past, it was clear that we paid but we did not necessarily play. We are still paying but we are also now playing. I know that Ms Ashton attaches huge importance to this. Equally, as high representative, Ms Ashton is the chief European representative trying to find a way forward on the nuclear issues in Iran. It is still a difficult issue. It needs to be taken very seriously.
I mention three other policy areas, the first of which is the eastern neighbourhood. We have been very preoccupied with the south Mediterranean and north Africa. Partnership in Europe needs to look to the south and to the east. The eastern neighbourhood is in the news a little more these days, unfortunately, as a result of the sentence given to Ms Tymoshenko in Ukraine. We are well aware of the issues in Belarus. Other countries in that region are struggling in various ways. There is a great deal of tension in the region. Several frozen conflicts in the region have the potential to flare up at any moment.
The eastern partnership summit in Warsaw last week was reasonably successful. It showed the extent to which Europe can play a helpful role and some of the difficulties that exist. We wanted to issue a strong statement criticising the Government of Belarus, but the other partners were not prepared to agree to that. They agreed that they do not particularly like what is happening in Belarus, but they did not want to associate themselves with a critical declaration, perhaps because of a sense of regional solidarity. We may feel that every state in the EU has a clear view about how judgments should be passed on some of these regimes, but it is more complex when one is actually in the region. The Balkans continues to be an area of great importance. The question of Kosovo and Serbia is full of tension at the moment. We are working hard to try to diminish that tension and find a peaceful way forward.
On strategic partners and crisis management, broadly speaking, we define our strategic partners as those countries that have the capacity to change things in the world through what they do. By virtue of their size, influence or strategic positioning, countries like China, Brazil, Russia and South Africa have the capacity to significantly influence the environment in which Europe operates globally. We are working closely with each of these countries. We have intensified our contacts with them in recent years.
In particular, we are trying to move away from what is largely an economic and trade focus. Many of these countries see Europe as a big market or as a big economic power, but they pay less attention to our views on world events, global issues, human rights and security issues. Ms Ashton's new role as high representative and vice-president makes it possible for us to make a connection between what we are doing in the trade, development and humanitarian fields and Europe's foreign policy and security concerns about the direction the world will take in the 21st century.
We know we face challenges in the connected areas of conflict prevention and crisis management. We have civil and military missions in various places around the world. Ireland can take great pride in what an Irish military commander did in Chad a few years ago. We are involved in a naval counter-piracy operation off the coast of Somalia. We have people on the ground in Kosovo as part of the EULEX mission. We are also developing the capacity to be able to provide support in crisis management, conflict prevention and post-crisis reconstruction. We are very active in helping to try to get Haiti, for example, back on its feet.
I would like to make a few remarks on the question of the service's relations with the national delegations of member states, which was raised by the Chairman. One of the great success stories from a bureaucratic point of view was the manner in which Commission delegations in third countries transformed themselves into EU delegations overnight. The Commission had a very extensive network of delegations. The Presidency had the role of co-ordinating and federating the member states in a given capital. Under the Lisbon treaty, the Commission delegation became the EU delegation, and took on that Presidency role, with immediate effect from the entry into force of the treaty. I will not attempt to hide the fact that a number of us were nervous about how this change of role might work from day one. Our own Commission heads of delegation had not done this before. Member states suddenly found they were not being chaired by a fellow member state holding the Presidency but by someone formerly of the Commission but now of the European External Action Service. One can imagine that there could have been some personal tension or difficulty, but it went remarkably well.
I pay full tribute to all our member states for their extreme co-operation, solidarity and patience during that process. It was an amazing testament that they felt the process of pulling EU embassies together in a more visible way would enhance their standing in the country in question, rather than diminishing the role of national embassies. This has worked extremely well. We have a large network. We are present in approximately 135 countries. We constitute one of the largest diplomatic networks in the world, after China, the United States and the largest of our member states. It is interesting that many member states have a presence in a much smaller number of countries. We are working intensively on the important relationship between the EU delegation and the member states.
I will attend a meeting of secretaries general of foreign affairs ministries in Copenhagen at the end of the week. The Secretary General of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Mr. David Cooney, will be there on behalf of Ireland. The question of how the synergy between these two operations can be intensified is on the agenda. We need to ensure that if Ireland, for example, is not present in a country, it can get delegation rights or copies of the reports about political and economic events and thereby benefit from that. We will consider how buildings and facilities like telecommunications and security can be shared. This is a whole agenda. Obviously, it will not happen between one day and the next. Technical complexities are associated with putting it in place. There is huge scope for doing so.
The media in a member state that is a not too distant neighbour of this country has often tried to push me into saying our efforts in this regard mean we want to abolish national foreign services. We do not. That is absolutely not the point. We are adding value as a European service. It is true that as we are forced to cut budgets, reduce staff and trim expenditure, we can take a serious look at the synergy between the EU level and the national level in helping member states to decide whether they really need to be present with a full embassy and a full staff. They may decide to be present in a lighter way in some countries, benefitting from the facilities of the EU delegation. They may decide they do not want to be present in other countries, in the knowledge that they have a footprint there through the EU delegation, which can channel information to them and report back to them in a way that makes the desk officer in Dublin, for example, feel that some information about what is happening on the ground is coming from diplomatic sources.
It will take between five and 15 years to achieve the objectives of this project, which offers huge possibilities including synergies, better division of labour and - hopefully - better value for money for the public service at national and European levels.
I am conscious that I have already spoken for slightly longer than I intended. I will conclude by saying I think the External Action Service will grow and develop. We can be judged after nine months or a year. This is a project of between five and ten years in which we have embarked on a new capacity for Europe to assert itself globally, project our values and work in close synergy with national foreign ministries in pursuing our foreign policy objectives.
