European Diplomacy through Co-locations between Member State Missions and EU Delegations in Third Countries

The demand for European diplomacy has risen from various sides – be it from inside the European Union (EU) or outside. The practice of European diplomacy is often associated with the ideas of the EU being a single actor on the global stage or speaking with one European voice. Even though the Treaty of the European Union entitles the EU to implement a Common Foreign and Security Policy, the power to initiate legal action in this field still lies within the responsibilities of the member states. Their willingness to cooperate on foreign affairs is a key prerequisite to strengthen European diplomacy. The establishment of a European External Action Service (EEAS) under the Lisbon Treaty should enhance the cooperation between the diplomatic services of member states and the EU in third countries. One form of cooperation on a logistical basis is called co-locating. The phenomenon of sharing resources among bilateral member state missions and EU delegations of the EEAS is, for some, one step towards a more coherent European voice; others argue that it is a simple matter of expenses. Since co-locations have hitherto been rather unexplored in the prevailing literature, this thesis attempts to shed light on this new area of study and find factors that might increase the probability of a member state cooperating with the EU through co-location. This is done through a sequential explanatory design, which combines a quantitative study including all 28 EU member states with a follow-up case study on the Netherlands. In the first part, three main independent variables are tested with the help of bivariate measures of association: the size of the diplomatic network, the public opinion on European foreign policy, and budgetary constraints. While the results for the last two factors did not show a correlation with the creation of co-locations, the size of diplomatic services demonstrated to be strongly related to the probability of sharing premises with the EU. According to the study, countries with a larger diplomatic network in place are more likely to have co-locations. The second part investigates co-locations from the Dutch perspective. Through means of interviews with the Dutch Foreign Ministry, four influential factors could be identified that augmented the findings of the quantitative study: the Dutch interest in the third country, the structure of cost reduction, the type of diplomatic partner mission and the degree of likemindedness between the co-locating countries.