European External Action Service - Budget & posts

According to a Council document forwarded from the Council Secretariat to the Council's budget committee, there is the need for a draft budget and a staff plan for the European External Action Service (EEAS) for 2010.

The proposed EEAS budget (this is a Council proposal, not a formal Commission proposal!) is an amendment to the 2010 EU budget and it is necessary to have it even before the EEAS is formally in place because:

"there is a serious and real risk of major disruption of operations (including payments of salaries and other obligations), at headquarters and in delegations, which would be prejudicial for the reputation of the newborn EEAS."

The figures (indicative as explained in the footnote!) can be seen on the bottom of page 6 of the document which shows that for 2010 the EEAS could have 1563 posts of which 411 come from the Council and 1114 from the Commission, 38 posts would be newly created. Of the 1563 EEAS people, 1082 would work in Brussels and 481 in delegations all around the world. A detailed split of the the 411 Council staff members is in the annex.

As you can see, the figures at present don't include any member states' diplomats because the EEAS is not in place yet. It also doesn't seem to involve much additional posts except for the 38 proposed.

However, this Council Secretariat's proposal gives quite a good indication on the possible dimensions of the new EEAS and the possible share of posts coming from the EU bureaucracies.

I suppose that this is not the last word, though.

War & Peace

(Best if enlarged to full screen and sound turned on loud enough.)



See also: more language versions

My 1000th Euroblog post: Join the "My Europe" experience!

Next week, from May 3rd until May 9th, European bloggers are going to organise a blog carnival titled "This is My Europe" - and I thought it would be worth dedicating the 1000th post of my own euroblog to announce this here.

Whether you have a blog or not, you can join and write, either by sending us the link to your blog post or by posting your complete article directly on our #myeurope platform, both through this form. It doesn't matter whether you write in English or French, Estonian or Maltese, Russian or Turkish, just write about Your Europe, your thoughts, wishes, ideas, angers...

The team of editors of Bloggingportal.eu is looking forward to your contributions!

I myself have been "Watching Europe" since 1 July 2008 with 1000 blog posts. I found my way into the circle of people blogging about European issues - I call them eurobloggers - through the EU blog directory (not updated anymore) that Nosemonkey had set up and kept updated at the time - I was included around August 2008. Since then, I have stayed around the block.

And believe me: When I started the blog, I didn't think that I would ever reach 1000 posts, especially not in just 22 months.

In the first year of my euroblog, quite some posts have been devoted to my thoughts about Europe and about European blogging, besides my focus on the European Parliament elections. Just some examples:

• What is Europe and why am I writing about it?
• Digging deeper
• Talking to Europe
• The European Dream
• A European blog = A European blogger?

More recently, I tried to explain how my mind became a "European Mind", why I am blogging in English, and I told a story about the strange notion of "Strangers". These are all different kind of reflections on how I perceive Europe, the European Union, and the blogging about both.

But these are just my thoughts on Europe, and I hope many of you will join to tell stories about your Europe, making #myeurope a shared experience of European bloggers and European blogging.

Let's shape the next week into our joint European week 2010 - be part of the experience!

Euroblogging 2010

Euroblogging 2010 will be:

• more professional;
• more diverse;
• more policy-oriented;
• more multi-lingual;
• more conflictual;
• still Brussels focused.

To be checked on 31 December 2010.

Anything missing? Any objection?

PS.: The Merchant of Venice has more predictions for the EU in 2010.

2009 - a summary

2009 has been the year the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, and as usual almost nobody outside Brussels has noticed.

What everybody noticed were the European Parliament elections 2009 that have dominated this blog for the first half of 2009. The last election day and the Monday after the elections were the most successful days (in terms of visitors and hits) of this blog in the first semester. I should also remind you of the Th!nk About it! blogging competition where I was invited to moderate a discussion at the final event in Rotterdam.

The second semester was much more quiet with the summer break - until my visits to Hungary where I spoke to local and regional journalists and to the "Brussels bubble" in October. This visit was extremely fruitful, meeting people I only new through blogging and Twitter, and discussing issues that are very relevant to my own research as a political scientist. These days in Brussels have been covered in a four-part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4.

On 3 November 2009, we finally saw the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty that has put the EU on a new constitutional basis on 1 December 2009 - probably the last "major" reform for at least a decade.

And over the year, we got many new and renewed faces for the top EU posts: Jerzy Buzek as European Parliament President (my comment), José Manuel Barroso as European Commission President (see the very first Chasing Brussels Podcast episode), Hermann van Rompuy and Catherine Ashton for European Council President and "Foreign Minister" (Eurobloggers' comment) as well as Pierre de Boissieu as EU Council Secretary General (comment by Grahnlaw) and his successor Uwe Corsepius (my portrait. Not to forget the new European Commission as proposed by Barroso at the end of November that is awaiting confirmation in January.

Well, and we have seen the amazing evolution of Bloggingportal.eu that has become the point of reference for the Euroblogosphere that I expect to continue to mature in 2010, where we will have to move to more policy-related issues after a year dominated by institutional and personality issues.

I myself am looking forward to 2010, not least since I know my own life will change again as I might move to Brussels for some time in Spring, and I will continue blogging as I did in 2009 - although I don't think I will be able to repeat the amount of almost 600 posts published over the year...

PS: My special thanks this year go to the Swedish Presidency Twitterers and blogging Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt for their work in making the Council Presidency the most transparent ever, serving as examples to build upon in the future!