THE EFFECT OF INTERNAL COHESIVENESS ON EEASAUTONOMY

The EEAS was created to make the EU a more effective player on the global stage. The member states, however, never gave up their foreign ministries and are free to interact with third parties themselves. This ‘non-exclusive’ delegation raises several questions about how disagreement between the member states affects EEAS autonomy. How strictly do they exercise control over a service that they can bypass? There are several consequences of non-exclusive delegation, such as that member states retain a lot of expertise on foreign policy. The question becomes, how free is the EEAS to pursue its own agenda when member states disagree with each other on a topic of foreign policy? Or formulated as the research question: what is the effect of internal cohesiveness on EEAS autonomy? A case study is conducted with several cases within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It reveals that the EEAS can be controlled and held to stick to all the member states positions, but that this effect may go away after a while and it can return to policies more in line with its own agenda.