ABSTRACT
European foreign policy has always had to face the twin problems of leadership and coherence. One response to what has often been perceived as a leadership vacuum has been, from the early 1980s, the tendency to form a ‘directoire’, or inner leadership group. This has usually consisted of Britain, France and Germany, although its membership is inherently variable, and contested. Such a tendency has in itself caused extra, and different, problems of incoherence from those already plaguing European foreign-making, in terms of both uncertain policy outputs and tensions between member states.1 This chapter will explore these difficulties, taking both a historical view of the evolution of inner groups over the last 30 years, and an analytical perspective on the issue, with a view to identifying the drivers of the tendency towards a directoire, and the balance-sheet of its advantages and disadvantages. The arrival of the High Representative as a focal point for European diplomacy, and a potential solution for the problems of leadership, will also be addressed, together with the further innovations contained within the Treaty of Lisbon. The focus will be on foreign policy behaviour in general, but also on the particular issue of EU leadership inside other international organizations.
