Rise, Fall and Regeneration: From CIA to EU

The rise of the CIA and its Cold War analytical successes provided Europe with a model of how a federal polity might conduct foreign intelligence. The shortcomings and recent decline of the CIA are instructive, too, and have the additional effect of adding urgency to the need for the European Union to develop its own intelligence capability. Lessons of possible relevance have to do with, inter alia, the advantages of centralization, the politicization of intelligence, the interaction of covert action with analysis, the phenomenon of competitive estimates, and the need for proactive parliamentary oversight. But the prospects for the development of EU foreign intelligence are for the time being blighted by nationalism, not least in the case of the British, and by the relative immaturity of EU constitutional arrangements.