Channelling Voices: Understanding EU Coordination at the OSCE

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) with its inclusive membership of 57 participating states serves as a major forum for dialogue on security issues in the wider European space. As a security actor in its own right, the European Union (EU) has developed its own presence within the organisation over time. Despite not being a formal participating institution of the OSCE it nonetheless effectively speaks exclusively on the joint behalf of itself and of its member states. In addition to outlining an official EU position to the other OSCE participating states, such EU activity requires extensive coordination between the EU’s foreign policy institutions and the foreign ministries of its member states. As such the EU’s coordination at the OSCE serves as a direct illustration of the emergence of a multi-level European diplomatic system that involves formal and informal cooperation between a variety of member state and EU actors which all partake in foreign policy decision-making. This paper outlines how the EU’s formal positions within the organisation are coordinated on the ground in Vienna and explores challenges and opportunities for the EU’s desire to speak with a single voice within the organisation. Departing from a bureaucratic politics perspective it then argues that while the EU’s coordination mechanisms allow it and its member states to have a larger voice within the organisation than any one EU member state would, the set-up of the current system nonetheless significantly reduces diplomatic flexibility and can lead to the over-representation of the views of specific member states. The argument of this paper is based on extensive empirical work that draws on interviews with EU and member state diplomats based in Vienna conducted for this purpose.