The 200th anniversary of the Congress of Vienna, though overshadowed by the centenary of the World War I, has sparked a new set of debates about what diplomacy has achieved in world history, how it is changing, and what its future beholds. The emergence of modern diplomacy in the nineteenth century was the result of a lot of collaborative hard work of numerous generations that were genuinely in service of peace and order. The process of empowering diplomats as plenipotentiaries was not easy either. The sovereign had resisted to share even some piece of their authority permanently with men of state. Their reluctance to expand the mandate of the diplomats had in the end diminished their caapcity to be influential in the internatioanl sphere. Currently, the European Eternal Action Service (EEAS), which is in fact one of the youngest diplomatic actors today in global politics reminds of those times before plenipotentiary was a diplomatic norm.
This paper aims to asses the role that the EEAS has played in global crises since the Lisbon Treaty with reference to the diplomatic legacy of the Congress of Vienna. The Arab uprisings were the first important foreign policy challenge for the EEAS which came to being only in January 2011 and it failed this test mostly because of the lack of cooridnation and fully authorized officials. What the EU has learned from this failure will reflect on the refugee crisis on its dealings with the refugee crisis in Mediterranean.
