EU doesn’t have a joint foregin policy. Foregin relations is still an intergovernmental matter.

„The Common Foreign and Security Policy […] deals only with a specific part of the EU's external relations, which domains include mainly Trade and Commercial Policy and other areas such as funding to third countries, etc”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Foreign_and_Security_Po...

This is a random result when you search for Borrell in Moscow. Look for his behavior in Turkey if you want some more examples of how random this guy is while he is considered an EU representative. His position requires for him to coordinate responses of the 27, but he is just wandering around wasting time and resources. As far as the EU is an economic powerhouse, letting dictators do whatever they want while allowed access to the market is making him irrelevant.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/borrell-...

The HR post is a bit of an in-joke in European circles. It's being given to 2nd-rate European politicians who like to travel, and has zero effective power. The hard decisions are all taken among NATO members and are then ratified in the European Council.

Sadly this is one of the current issues of the EU project, nation-states flatly refuse to hand over anything related to defense. It's a great victory for the US.

Some EU member states (Hungary, Poland) are very much against handing over any diplomatic power to the High Representative. Hungarian government is basically acting as a Putin proxy here and Polish ruling party feeds on constant conflict.

I agree. At the same time Borrell has enough independence to make him a distinct face. He decides where he goals, what to say, how to behave when the EU is being mocked. Even if you say that he is just a glorified PR, he is an awful PR.

It looks that I'm picking on him, but he is just a very good example. I can talk a lot about others, but this thread is politicized enough already.

No, they're not a Putin proxy. What they're doing is literally pissing against the wind. A recent example: Hungary has bought vaccines from Russia and China which are not approved by the EMA. Now their recipients are basically not recognised as vaccinated and will face travel issues.

Yeah, the HR role has been systematically sabotaged since its inception, by way of appointing weaker and weaker nominees and starving it of any real power. At the moment it's a glorified PR position, with no decisional power whatsoever. Javier Solana effectively lost the battle for being the EU "foreign minister" and since then it's all been about individual member states.

Chances are this will not change until there is a serious rethinking of the European role in NATO. As long as the big decisions are taken there, there is no real role for an EU "ministry" beyond trade interests.

as it should be, the EU states act collectively at most trough NATO and the current decade EU so focused on being the political voice of its members is something being tacked on against the initial premise by which its members came together; the EU should always had been an economic union first to combat the tremendous advantage of the internal market that both USA and China enjoy and nothing more.