A lot of things, you will agree, have changed since 1983 – even in the world of diplomacy. For one, the EU has moved from a loose federation of states towards a new kind of polity – never a United States of Europe, heaven forbid, but more than just a loose arrangement of member-states.
But reading George Walden’s comment about Europe’s putative diplomatic service in the Times I can’t help but feel that he is still living in the age when he left the Foreign Office – when David Cameron was 17.
The EU diplomatic service is not the novelty that pro-Lisbon politicians claim. To a large extent, it already exists in the more than 120 European Commission delegations and the 11 high-level EU envoys. Head of EU delegations are called ambassadors and though they have until now shared responsibility for presenting the EU with embassies from the rotating EU Presidency, they have operated exactly in the way that the former mandarin suggests can never happen.
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