The European Union's diplomatic service may be heading for the chopping block. According to reporting first published by the Financial Times, France and Germany have begun discussions on a sweeping reorganisation of the European External Action Service — a move that could strip powers from foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and pull large parts of the EU's external machinery back toward Brussels institutions and national governments.
Some officials quoted in the reporting do not rule out the most drastic outcome: the EEAS, in its current form, ceasing to exist.
The EEAS was created by the Lisbon Treaty to give the EU a single foreign-policy voice. It runs a network of more than 140 EU delegations around the world and sits, awkwardly, between the European Commission, the Council and 27 national foreign ministries. The reform options under discussion would claw functions back to those bodies, limit the independence of the High Representative, and weaken her control over that global delegation network.
The complaint dressed up as the reason is coordination. EU foreign policy is famously a tangle of overlapping mandates, with the Commission, the Council, the EEAS and national capitals often duplicating each other's work. Reformers say the structure is inefficient and needs streamlining.
The timing tells a different story. The push gathered force after Kallas began speaking out independently on sensitive issues — most notably EU relations with China — and floating positions that capitals had not yet signed off on. For member states jealous of their grip on foreign policy, an assertive High Representative is a problem to be managed, not an asset to be empowered.
Kallas, for her part, says she "welcomes these debates" and concedes the system could work better with less duplication. But she has argued for strengthening the EEAS, not gutting it — the opposite of what Paris and Berlin appear to have in mind.
This is a fight about who runs European foreign policy at the worst possible time to be having it. With a war on Europe's eastern flank, a conflict in the Middle East dragging on its economy, and an unreliable ally in Washington, the EU keeps insisting it needs to "speak with one voice." Dismantling the very body built to provide that voice — because national capitals dislike how loudly its head is speaking — would send the opposite signal. The likeliest outcome is not abolition but a clipped, weakened service that answers more closely to Paris and Berlin. Either way, the lesson for Kallas is blunt: in EU foreign policy, the member states still hold the knife.
