Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass.

Go to InCompass-Hevon Europe.com for free access to all our podcasts to date.

This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Christian Leffler.

Christian Leffler has very recently retired as Deputy Secretary General of the European

External Action Service.

You were there very much at the outset of the creation of the European External Action Service,

so I'm keen to, before we talk about current affairs and the current challenges facing the European Union,

I'd like to talk a bit about the birth of the External Action Service.

It strikes me that when we had a gentleman called Javier Solana

performing this role as high representative of foreign security policy

before the service was actually in operation,

you were Deputy Head of Staff,

Chris Patton, who in the European Commission was Commissioner for

External Relations. So in a sense you had already back in 1999, 20 or years ago, two individuals,

two different institutions dealing with foreign security policy. How did that work in practice,

the overlap? Well, indeed, the creation of the post of higher representative in 1999 which

was taken up by Javier Solana was an innovation at the time and complemented the work done by

the external relations commissioner of the European Commissioner. Fairly early on we established a

very close relationship between Patton and Solana and between the two

cabinets. We met very regularly and fairly early on we came to the conclusion

that what the European Union really needed was not a Patt and a Solana what we needed was a

Patana in other words bringing the two together Salana had the profile

...