The paper will investigate the role of experts and expertise within the European External Action Service (EEAS), the new EU diplomatic force. It will address questions about the recruitment, background, role and impact of experts in European foreign policymaking from the broader perspective of an information processing approach to public organizations. This will allow, inter alia, to look into the EEAS’ constitutive and operational politics of information and expertise. After all, political principals can and do fight among each other about the use, the composition, the mandate, and in/dependence of experts and groups thereof. And notwithstanding the formal rules and instructions that emerge from these constitutive politics of expertise, the actual organizing and maneuvering of experts by civil servants may well serve values and preferences that are first of all in line with those of the bureaucratic actors.
