Daniel sent us this one — he's asking how the European Union actually coordinates its foreign policy, whether the policies are binding on member states, and how much room individual countries have to do their own thing. And honestly, the question itself names the central paradox. The EU has a foreign minister who can't command anyone to do anything. So what's the point?
That is exactly the right place to start. The EU has a High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy — currently Kaja Kallas, who took over from Josep Borrell in December of twenty twenty-four. She runs the European External Action Service, chairs the Foreign Affairs Council, represents the EU at international summits. She looks like a foreign minister. She travels like a foreign minister. But she has no army, no intelligence service, and no authority to commit a single member state to anything.
She's the manager of a team where every player has a veto and their own jersey.
That's not bad. The role was created by the Lisbon Treaty, which took effect in December two thousand nine. It merged two previous positions — the External Relations Commissioner and the old Common Foreign and Security Policy High Representative. The idea was to give the EU a single face and a single voice. But the treaty didn't touch the underlying decision-making structure.
Because foreign policy is the last thing any country wants to hand over.
Trade policy — the EU has exclusive competence. The European Commission negotiates trade deals on behalf of all twenty-seven members, and individual states cannot strike their own. That's why the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in October twenty twenty-four sailed through — trade competence, Commission's domain, done. But foreign policy? That's intergovernmental. It's not supranational. The member states own it.
Let's get into the mechanics. How does a foreign policy decision actually get made in Brussels?
Article twenty-four of the Treaty on European Union. CFSP decisions in the European Council require unanimity. Every single member state has to agree. One country says no, and the whole thing stalls.
Hungary has a veto over EU foreign policy. Malta has a veto. Luxembourg has a veto.
Every single one. And they use them — or threaten to use them — constantly. The twenty twenty-three sanctions packages against Russia after the invasion of Ukraine were unanimously agreed, but Hungary and Slovakia secured carve-outs for oil imports. Viktor Orbán held up a fifty billion euro aid package for Ukraine for weeks in late twenty twenty-three. The unanimity requirement means every decision is a negotiation where the most reluctant member sets the ceiling.
The EU's Russia policy is essentially the policy that Viktor Orbán will tolerate.
That's the reality. Now, there's a mechanism called constructive abstention. It was introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty in nineteen ninety-seven and carried into Lisbon. A member state can abstain from a decision without blocking it — they issue a formal declaration, they're not bound by the decision, but they accept that the decision commits the Union. It's been used exactly twice.
In twenty eleven, Cyprus abstained on a decision about EU naval operations against Somali piracy. In twenty fourteen, Finland abstained on certain Ukraine sanctions. That's it. The mechanism exists, but states don't use it because abstaining signals division, and division is what everyone's trying to paper over.
It's like a safety valve that nobody wants to admit they need.
The preference is always to negotiate until everyone can say yes — which means the final text is often vague enough that everyone can interpret it differently. The EU's foreign policy pronouncements are masterpieces of constructive ambiguity.
What about enforcement? If a decision is made, and a member state just ignores it, what happens?
This is where it gets interesting — and by interesting I mean toothless. Under Article two seventy-five of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the European Court of Justice has almost no jurisdiction over CFSP. The court can review the legality of restrictive measures against individuals — sanctions listings, asset freezes — to ensure due process. But it cannot rule on the substance of foreign policy decisions, and it cannot compel a member state to comply with a CFSP decision.
The policies are legally binding, but there's no court that can enforce them.
Legally binding in theory, optional in practice. Compliance is political, not legal. If France decides a particular EU position doesn't serve its interests, there's no mechanism to force France into line. The only enforcement is peer pressure, reputational cost, and the broader logic of EU membership — you don't want to be the country that breaks ranks too often, because you'll need solidarity on something else next week.
The dimmer switch of diplomacy.
Which we've talked about before in a different context. The EU's foreign policy works on a spectrum. When member states already agree, the machinery hums. When they don't, it seizes up. Kaja Kallas can propose, she can convene, she can cajole, but she cannot command. She's a conductor, not a composer.
Let's talk about the EEAS — the diplomatic corps. Five thousand staff, more than a hundred and forty delegations worldwide. That's bigger than most countries' foreign services.
It's substantial. The European External Action Service was created by Lisbon as well — it's the EU's diplomatic arm. They have ambassadors, they issue démarches, they negotiate on behalf of the Union. But here's the thing: they're diplomats without a sovereign. They represent a collective that can, at any moment, disown them.
Because any member state can veto whatever they've negotiated.
An EEAS negotiator in, say, Tehran can spend months crafting a position, only to have it unravel in a Foreign Affairs Council meeting when one member state objects. The staff are highly capable, but they operate in a permanent state of contingent authority.
The Iran nuclear deal is the perfect case study for this.
The JCPOA — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — was signed in twenty fifteen. The EU, through then-High Representative Federica Mogherini, coordinated the diplomatic track and chaired the negotiations. It was the EU's signature foreign policy achievement. But when the United States pulled out in twenty eighteen under Trump, the deal started crumbling, and who had to step in to try to keep it alive?
Individual member states. France, Germany, the UK.
The EU as a bloc couldn't save the deal because the extraterritorial reach of US sanctions meant European companies couldn't do business with Iran without risking their access to the American financial system. So the EU created INSTEX — the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges — a barter mechanism to bypass US sanctions. It was clunky, it barely functioned, and it ultimately failed. The lesson: when a major power like the US applies pressure, the EU's collective foreign policy fractures along national lines.
Because French companies have different risk tolerances than German companies, and German companies have different exposure than Italian companies.
Each government answers to its own electorate, its own business community, its own strategic calculus. The EU can coordinate, but it can't override those domestic imperatives.
Let's talk about the opt-out culture. Denmark has had a formal opt-out from CFSP since nineteen ninety-three.
The Edinburgh Agreement. Denmark negotiated four opt-outs from the Maastricht Treaty — defense, the euro, justice and home affairs, and EU citizenship. The defense opt-out means Denmark cannot participate in EU military operations or defense cooperation. It's been a live issue — Denmark held a referendum in June twenty twenty-two to abolish the defense opt-out, and it passed, largely because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But the process of integrating fully is still ongoing.
Ireland has its constitutional neutrality.
Ireland's not formally opted out of CFSP, but its constitution requires that any participation in EU defense arrangements be approved by referendum. The Irish position is that they'll participate in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, but anything that looks like a common defense is politically toxic. And then of course the UK left entirely.
Which removed both a major obstructionist voice and a significant military power.
The UK was the classic awkward partner in CFSP. It blocked the creation of an EU operational military headquarters for years, arguing it duplicated NATO. It vetoed anything that smelled of federalism. But it also brought one of Europe's two serious military forces, a UN Security Council seat, and genuine global reach. Brexit simplified EU foreign policy coordination — fewer veto players — but it also diminished the EU's collective weight.
The EU lost muscle but gained coherence.
That's the trade-off. And it's not clear the net effect is positive.
Let's talk about PESCO — the Permanent Structured Cooperation. This was launched in twenty seventeen as a way to deepen defense cooperation among willing states.
PESCO is the embodiment of the "coalition of the willing" approach within the EU. It started with twenty-five member states — only Denmark, Malta, and the UK opted out initially. The UK's departure and Denmark's referendum shift have changed the math, but the core principle remains: PESCO projects are voluntary. States sign up for the ones they want. There are currently dozens of projects — military mobility, cyber defense, medical command — but participation varies wildly.
It's not a European army.
It's not even close. It's a menu. Countries pick and choose. That's not a criticism — it's probably the only way to make progress given the political realities. But anyone who tells you PESCO is the embryo of a European army is selling something.
Let's look at some specific cases. The Israel-Hamas war that began in October twenty twenty-three. What did EU foreign policy look like there?
It was a mess. And it's a perfect illustration of how unanimity produces paralysis. In the immediate aftermath of the October seventh attacks, the EU couldn't agree on a unified call for a ceasefire for weeks. Austria, Czechia, and Hungary blocked any language that was critical of Israel. Spain, Ireland, and Belgium pushed for stronger Palestinian solidarity and a ceasefire call. The result was a series of carefully worded statements that essentially said nothing.
Ursula von der Leyen visited Israel and expressed unconditional solidarity. But she's the Commission president, not the High Representative.
That created its own institutional drama. Von der Leyen's trip wasn't coordinated with the member states or with then-High Representative Josep Borrell. Multiple member states complained that she had overstepped — she was speaking for herself, not for the Union. But the Commission president has a higher profile than the High Representative, and she used it. It exposed the fault line: when the EU's institutions can't agree on who speaks for Europe, the whole edifice looks rickety.
Because foreign policy credibility depends on consistency, and consistency requires a single voice.
Which the EU structurally cannot guarantee. When Kaja Kallas says something, she's speaking on behalf of twenty-seven governments that may or may not agree with her. Every statement she makes is a negotiated text. She can't ad-lib. She can't respond to events in real time with anything substantive, because anything she says might be disowned by a member state the next morning.
What about the EU's response to China? You mentioned the EV tariffs — that was trade policy, smooth sailing. But what about the South China Sea?
The EU imposed tariffs of up to forty-five percent on Chinese electric vehicles in October twenty twenty-four — that was under trade competence, Commission-led, no unanimity required. But on the South China Sea, the EU has never managed a unified position beyond the vaguest statements about freedom of navigation and respect for international law. Because foreign policy requires unanimity, and member states have wildly different relationships with China.
Hungary and Serbia — well, Serbia's not a member, but Hungary — have deep economic ties to China. Germany's auto industry is terrified of retaliation. The Netherlands has the ASML semiconductor equipment issue. France wants strategic autonomy.
Every member state has a different China policy. The EU can't have one because there isn't one. The best they can do is de-risk, diversify, de-risk — the three D's — which is a slogan, not a policy.
Even that language was watered down from "decouple" because Germany objected.
The EU's China discourse is a masterclass in lowest-common-denominator diplomacy. Every word is negotiated.
We've established that unanimity is the bottleneck, constructive abstention is a dead letter, enforcement is nonexistent, and the High Representative is a conductor without a baton. What about the structural workarounds? The coalitions of the willing?
This is where the real action happens. The Weimar Triangle — France, Germany, Poland — has become the engine of EU policy on Ukraine. The Nordic-Baltic group — Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — coordinates closely on Russia sanctions and defense posture. The Mediterranean group — Italy, Spain, Greece, Malta, Cyprus — works on migration. These are the real decision-making forums.
EU foreign policy is actually a patchwork of regional caucuses that occasionally converge in Brussels.
That's more accurate than the official narrative. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. The EU has twenty-seven members with vastly different geographies, histories, and threat perceptions. Estonia's foreign policy is shaped by the fact that it shares a border with Russia. Portugal's is not. Expecting them to have identical priorities is unrealistic.
The architecture is designed for coordination, not command.
That's the insight. The EU's foreign policy machinery is not a government. It's a very elaborate coordination framework. It works brilliantly when member states already agree — the sanctions on Russia in February and March twenty twenty-two were agreed with astonishing speed, because the invasion created a moment of genuine consensus. But when member states disagree, the machinery can't manufacture agreement. It can only reveal its absence.
Let's talk about the twenty twenty-two decision to grant Ukraine EU candidate status. That was unanimously approved, but only after...
After Hungary was placated. The European Commission had been withholding billions in EU funds from Hungary over rule-of-law concerns. The sequence was: Orbán lifted his veto on Ukraine candidate status, and shortly afterward, the Commission released some of the frozen funds. Nobody said it was a quid pro quo, but everyone understood it was a quid pro quo.
The transactional nature of unanimity.
Every veto is a bargaining chip. Every member state knows it. The system incentivizes obstruction because obstruction gets you something. If you're the one country holding out, you have leverage that you can trade for concessions on something else entirely — agricultural subsidies, structural funds, a commissioner portfolio.
Unanimity doesn't just produce lowest-common-denominator outcomes. It actively rewards bad behavior.
That's the structural critique. And it's why France and Germany proposed moving to qualified majority voting in certain areas of foreign policy in twenty twenty-three. The argument is that unanimity is paralyzing the EU at a moment when the geopolitical environment demands speed and decisiveness.
Will it happen?
I'm skeptical. Changing the voting rules requires treaty change, and treaty change requires unanimity. You need everyone to agree to give up their veto. The smaller member states in particular see the veto as their only leverage in a Union dominated by France and Germany. They're not going to surrender it lightly.
We're stuck with the group chat where everyone has veto power.
That's the EU's foreign policy. And the group chat is about to get bigger. Ukraine, Moldova, and several Western Balkan states are on the accession track. Every new member adds another veto player. The coordination problem gets harder with every enlargement.
Enlargement and effectiveness are in tension.
And that's the strategic dilemma the EU has never resolved. Do you want to be a big tent with diluted foreign policy, or a smaller core with sharper teeth? The EU keeps choosing the big tent, because enlargement is seen as a geopolitical imperative — anchoring Ukraine and the Balkans in the European order. But the cost is a foreign policy that moves at the speed of the most reluctant member.
Let's shift to the practical question. If someone is trying to understand what the EU actually thinks about a foreign policy issue, how do they figure that out?
Don't read the press releases. The official statements from the EEAS are negotiated to the point of meaninglessness. What you want to read are the Foreign Affairs Council conclusions. These are the agreed texts that come out of the monthly meetings of EU foreign ministers. They reveal the actual consensus — where the red lines were, what language was fought over, what was left out.
What was left out is often more revealing than what was included.
If a Foreign Affairs Council statement on, say, Venezuela doesn't mention sanctions, that's not an oversight. That means someone blocked it. You read the gaps. You also track which member states issued their own statements afterward. If France, Germany, and Italy issue a joint statement that goes further than the Council conclusions, you know the consensus text was a floor, not a ceiling.
If a member state issues a statement that contradicts the Council conclusions?
Then you're seeing the limits of EU foreign policy in real time. Hungary has issued statements on Ukraine that directly contradict the EU's collective position. The EU can't stop them. The most it can do is issue a tepid rebuke through a spokesperson.
The actionable framework for interpreting EU foreign policy news is: first, ask which member states drove the position. Second, ask which ones stayed silent. Third, assume the final text represents the most reluctant member's comfort zone.
That's the framework. And it will serve you better than treating "the EU" as a unitary actor. The EU is not a country. It's not a federation. It's a treaty-based organization of sovereign states that have chosen to coordinate their foreign policies when they can, and to go their own way when they can't.
The twenty twenty-one Australia submarine deal is a good example. France had a massive contract to build diesel-electric submarines for Australia. Australia canceled it and announced AUKUS — a nuclear submarine partnership with the US and UK. France was furious. Called it a stab in the back. Recalled its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra.
The EU's collective response was... Because other member states didn't share France's anger. Germany, the Netherlands, others — they weren't going to damage their relationships with the US and Australia over a French commercial contract. The EU issued some supportive statements, but there was no collective retaliation, no coordinated diplomatic punishment. France was on its own.
Because foreign policy is national, even when it's dressed up in EU clothes.
That's the core truth. The EU's foreign policy is binding in the sense that member states have signed treaties saying they'll coordinate. It's non-binding in the sense that there's no mechanism to force them to when they don't want to. The entire edifice rests on the assumption that member states see coordination as being in their own interest.
Which it usually is. That's why the system persists.
Small states get amplified by speaking through the EU. Malta's voice on Mediterranean migration matters more when it's part of a twenty-seven-member bloc. Large states get legitimacy — France's Africa policy looks less neo-colonial when it's channeled through EU frameworks. Everyone gets something. The system works just well enough that nobody wants to blow it up.
Not so well that anyone would design it this way from scratch.
That's the EU in a sentence.
Where does this leave us? The EU is pushing for strategic autonomy, but its foreign policy machinery is intergovernmental. The High Representative has stature but no power. Unanimity is sacred but paralyzing. And the Union is about to get bigger and more diverse.
The open question is whether qualified majority voting will ever extend to foreign policy. France and Germany put it on the table in twenty twenty-three. There's a mechanism — the passerelle clause in Article thirty-one of the Treaty on European Union — that allows the European Council to switch certain CFSP decisions to qualified majority voting without a full treaty change. But it requires unanimity to activate, and several member states have made clear they'll block it.
The passerelle clause requires unanimity to bypass unanimity.
It's a perfect EU paradox. The countries that most want to preserve their veto are the ones that would need to vote to give it up. It's not happening anytime soon.
In the meantime, the world doesn't wait. The US is unpredictable. China is assertive. Russia is revisionist. The Middle East is volatile. The EU needs to act, and its machinery is designed for a slower, more stable era.
Which is why I expect we'll see more coalitions of the willing and less EU-wide foreign policy. The Weimar Triangle format — France, Germany, Poland — will probably become the de facto decision-making core on Eastern Europe. The Nordic-Baltic group will continue to lead on Russia. The EU's foreign policy will increasingly be made by subsets of member states acting together, with the formal Brussels machinery providing the stamp of legitimacy after the fact.
The future of EU foreign policy is less "speaking with one voice" and more "speaking with several voices that happen to be harmonized.
That's well put. And it's probably more realistic than the aspiration of a single European foreign policy. The EU is not going to become a state. Foreign policy will remain intergovernmental. The question is whether the coordination mechanisms can be made agile enough to keep pace with events.
The group chat analogy sticks with me. It's messy. Everyone has veto power. The conversation moves at the speed of the slowest participant. But it's the only group chat that exists at this scale, and occasionally it produces something that none of the participants could have achieved alone.
The JCPOA is the best example. The Iran deal was a genuine EU foreign policy success. The High Representative chaired the negotiations. The EEAS provided the diplomatic infrastructure. The member states stayed united. It ultimately failed because of US withdrawal, not because of EU dysfunction. The machinery can deliver when the conditions are right.
The conditions are: pre-existing consensus among the major member states, a clear and limited objective, and a negotiating partner that wants a deal.
That's the checklist. When those conditions are met, the EU can be an effective diplomatic actor. When they're not, it's a talking shop.
For anyone watching EU foreign policy, the takeaway is: don't ask "what does the EU think." Ask "which member states agree on this, and what are they willing to do about it.
That's the lens. And if you apply it consistently, EU foreign policy stops looking baffling and starts looking predictable. The statements are vague because the consensus is shallow. The action is slow because the vetoes are many. The outcomes are modest because the ambition is constrained by the most reluctant member. None of this is a bug — it's the design.
The design of a system that prioritizes legitimacy over speed, inclusion over decisiveness, and sovereignty over solidarity.
That's a choice. It's not an accident. The member states chose this architecture because they wanted to coordinate without surrendering control. They got exactly what they designed.
Alright, I think that covers it. The EU has a foreign policy apparatus that looks like a government but functions like a coordination committee. Its decisions are binding on paper but unenforceable in practice. Member states pursue their own foreign policies constantly, and the system accommodates that through opt-outs, constructive abstention, and the simple reality that nobody can stop them.
The High Representative is the most interesting job in diplomacy — enormous visibility, zero hard power, and a mandate to create consensus where none exists.
The glockenspiel of global diplomacy. Highly visible, technically an instrument, nobody's quite sure what it adds.
I was going to say the triangle in the orchestra — you wait ninety minutes for one note, and if you miss it, nobody notices.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: Slovene is one of the few languages that preserves the dual grammatical number — a separate verb form for exactly two subjects — and the earliest systematic documentation of its chemical terminology, including words for compounds like "apnenec" for limestone, was compiled in the eighteen-tens by the linguist Jernej Kopitar while corresponding with naturalists near Lake Baikal.
Where does this leave us? The EU's foreign policy is less like a government and more like a very complicated group chat where everyone has veto power. It's messy, it's slow, it's frequently frustrating. But it's the only game in town at this scale, and when the stars align, it can still pull off something remarkable. The question is whether the stars will align often enough in the years ahead.
Whether the group chat can function with thirty-five members instead of twenty-seven. That's the stress test coming down the pipe.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it genuinely helps. We'll be back soon.
With more questions and, occasionally, some answers.
