Suddenly, after all the criticism levelled at the performance of Catherine Ashton in her first few months as European Union foreign policy chief, many of her colleagues are making known their encouragement and support for her.

The reason? Right now, no one wants to be filling a vacancy for a job now acknowledged to be dauntingly difficult, and especially at a moment when the incumbent is called on to fulfil a task requiring diplomatic dexterity of the highest order.

No, do not think Middle East, or Greece, or even Iran, Haiti, Chile or Russia. The task is the formation of the EU’s External Action Service (EAS), its corps of diplomats who, it is envisioned, will articulate the new unified voice of European foreign policy. Ashton will not and cannot carry out this task alone, but intolerable pressure now for her resignation or dismissal will leave a vacuum abhorrent to a process already complex and highly contested.

Created by the Lisbon Treaty, the EAS will have somewhere between 5000 and 7000 staff and about 136 embassies. That much is reasonably certain; the rest is the subject of a contest among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the 27 EU member states themselves.

In the next few weeks and months, with the most optimistic scenarios seeing the EAS set up sometime between May and June, the manner and rules for the appointment of the service’s diplomats must be finalised.

The European Parliament has won some ground in the matter, although in the end it may prove to be the least influential player. It will have powers of co-decision about the service’s budget and about its staff rules, and will have some form of scrutiny over appointments – the latter one of the consequences of the furore that followed European Commission President Jose Barroso’s fast footwork that saw him appoint an ally as EU ambassador in Washington, sparking ire among those who felt that they were entitled to a say in the matter.

Turf wars
Already there are draft documents and special-pleading letters circulating, along with public statements of intent.

Against a background of the notion that the staff of the EAS will be appointed with the EC having a third-share, the Council of Europe a third and the member states a third, some among the member states – the smaller ones, worried that they will be elbowed aside by the big players – are pushing for adequate representation, a point expressed in a letter by Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia.

Then there are other considerations, notably a geographical balance (an issue separate from relative size, and favoured by eastern EU states such as Poland), a political balance and a gender balance. Ashton has said publicly that she wants the appointments to be made with merit as the paramount factor, although gender should also be a consideration.

In this area, she has some support, at this stage at least. Not only did recent expressions of support for her, intended to strengthen her position, come from a range of foreign ministers – Miguel Angel Moratinos, of Spain, the current holder of the rotating EU presidency, Franco Frattini of Italy, and the UK’s David Miliband and Sweden’s Carl Bildt, but Miliband and Bildt specifically backed the idea of merit as the main consideration.

There is a further dimension to appointments. For all the talk of "the brightest and best" already doing the rounds, at least some states may be cautious about the trade-off of deploying top officers from their skills base to a new service over which individual capitals will not have direct control.

Command and control
The EU states, not surprisingly, mostly want to see an important role for the EAS but, in effect, only in relation to diminishing the predominance of the European Commission.

Significantly, even though the Lisbon Treaty was ratified by all states, it appears now to be sinking in across the bloc that a way has to be found for a vibrant EAS to dovetail with individual representations, an issue especially important in countries where Euroskepticism is a powerful factor, a category by no means limited to the UK. Speaking to the BBC’s Record Europe programme, Conservative MEP Charles Tannock said that there was a need to "engage pragmatically" in shaping the EAS.

The service, in the form reportedly envisaged by Ashton, will have a role on issues including neighbourhood development and international aid, areas that overlap with specific European Commission portfolios. It is a debate in itself how this latter idea would work, as Haiti and Chile already have shown, exposing expectations of action by Ashton, highlighting the role of international co-operation and aid commissioner Kristalina Georgieva, and not forgetting that in the case of Chile, it was the Spanish presidency of the EU that activated the ECHO humanitarian assistance team, the latter raising the question – in some minds, at least – whether that was Madrid’s preserve to do, or Georgieva’s, into whose line of responsibility ECHO falls.

Ashton was scheduled to present to MEPs on March 10 her proposals for the organisation of the EAS, with the European Parliament scheduled to debate reports on Europe’s common foreign and security policy the following day. On March 23, the European Parliament’s committee on foreign affairs is to hold hearings on the EAS. In the long term, if Ashton fulfils her promise to MEPs – and there is no reason to believe that she would not – she would be presenting herself for European Parliament hearings once the EAS is operational, as a form of accountability.

Outside the EU, there may well be in some quarters a welcome for the idea of dealing with an effective and significant EU diplomatic service; it is trite and hoary, but essential, once more to exhume Kissinger’s quote about "if I want to speak to Europe, who do I call?"

This raises what is certain to be a long-term issue about the EAS, once all the issues about mechanisms for senior appointments, decisions about the rank and scale of diplomatic representation and other thorny matters are resolved; just how well-resourced will the EAS be in the years to come? In the formative months of the new era of EU foreign policy (if that is what history will prove it to be) Ashton not only had to hitch rides on EU states’ official aircraft or fly commercial but, so diplomatic sources said, in her first days in office, she did not have a telephone.