From the Convention to Lisbon: External Competence and the Uneasy Transition for Geneva Delegations

The Geneva EU delegations1 are a useful focus for analysis of the transition from Commission External Service to European External Action Service. Geneva encompasses an unparalleled breadth of UN agencies and international organisations (Ceps, 2011). Many of these long pre-date the creation of the UN or even the League of Nations, for example, the International Telegraph Union (ITU) created in 1865, later renamed ‘International Telecommunications Union’ or the Universal Postal Union (UPU), created in 1874, or the more recent and better known World Trade Organisation, created in 1995 to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Geneva also hosts the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Conference on Disarmament (CD) and the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), as well as a plethora of other organisations, too numerous to mention, but all areas where the EU has been more or less active for decades. Early academic research (Taylor, 2006) on the Geneva Delegation focused almost exclusively on economic and trade diplomacy; presumably viewing the EU’s multilateralism at the UN in Geneva as unimportant.