Federica Mogherini will next week clock up one year in office as the European Union’s foreign policy chief. That anniversary looks insignificant beside the geo-political crisis that is unfolding in Syria, where the EU watches helplessly as Russian planes fly bombing missions to assist President Bashar al-Assad, just as earlier it watched ISIS/Daesh fighters spread from Iraqi to Syrian territory.

Add in the continuing conflict in eastern Ukraine, and an intensification of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and there seems scant reason for anyone to celebrate Mogherini’s anniversary.

Yet, behind the scenes, unheralded, this past year has seen something of a transformation of the EU’s foreign policy making machinery. At its simplest, the EU has moved on from the scars, both emotional and institutional, inflicted by Catherine Ashton, Mogherini’s predecessor as foreign policy chief.

Ashton was the first person to combine the role of foreign policy chief — answerable to the EU’s member states — with being a vice president of the European Commission. Combining the two roles was an innovation of the EU’s Lisbon treaty. The underlying theory was that foreign policy required greater co-ordination between the Council of the EU (embodying the will of the member states) and the Commission (which makes policy in related areas such as trade and development, and is a potential source of funds). In the same spirit, the Lisbon treaty also provided for the creation of the EEAS, which recruits its staff from the ranks of the national diplomatic services, the Commission departments and the secretariat of the Council.

So much for the theory. In practice, these institutional innovations aimed at greater coordination and cooperation were undermined by suspicion and distrust. As foreign policy chief, Ashton had some successes in the relationships that she forged outside the EU, most notably with Hillary Clinton, but inside the EU she proved neither collaborative nor collegiate.

The birth of the EEAS was always going to be difficult but it was unnecessarily complicated by turf wars and demarcation disputes with the European Commission, the Council, and the member states. Ashton’s relations with José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, other European commissioners, the member states’ foreign ministers, and Herman Van Rompuy, the European Council president, were poor and unproductive. As Ashton doubted the loyalties of those around her, much time and energy was wasted on fighting over appointments.

The birth of the EEAS was always going to be difficult... but it was unnecessarily complicated by turf wars and demarcation disputes.

But staff inside the institutions now testify to a much improved relationship between Mogherini, who was previously Italy’s foreign minister, Donald Tusk, who took over from Van Rompuy as president of the Council in December 2014, having previously been prime minister of Poland, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president, an ex-prime minister of Luxembourg. They say the tone has changed markedly. “There has been a definite shift,” says one. “It comes from the top,” says another.

Compared with what went before, perhaps the most marked contrast can been seen in the relationship between the EEAS and the European Council. Tusk and Mogherini are working in tandem in ways familiar to national administrations. Van Rompuy, who was the first person to hold the office of permanent president of the Council, was conspicuously absent from the field of foreign policy, even though the EU’s treaties dictate that it is the Council that sets the EU’s strategic objectives and guidelines for foreign and security policy and that the Council president ensures the external representation of the EU.

Van Rompuy was preoccupied, for most of his five years in office, with the eurozone’s problems. He did not work in tandem with Ashton, who seemed a reluctant attendee at EU summits. Late in his presidency, the Ukraine crisis broke, but swiftly escalated away from foreign ministers (Ashton’s level) to government leaders (Van Rompuy’s). Insiders say that Tusk is clearly both more interested in foreign policy than was Van Rompuy, and readier to take briefings from the EEAS.

The decision to appoint Mogherini, an Italian socialist, was controversial, because of her apparently soft line towards Russia on Ukraine. Tusk, from Poland’s center-right, takes a more uncompromising line. But despite these clear differences, the pair do seem to have developed, insiders report, a modus vivendi that is more productive than that between Ashton and Van Rompuy.

Ashton’s difficulties were further compounded by the readiness of Barroso, her boss as Commission president, to intervene in foreign policy matters (he was an ex-foreign minister as well as ex-prime minister). Juncker is a veteran on the international scene and clearly interested, but less interventionist. He travels less, happy to leave the shuttle diplomacy to Mogherini, or Frans Timmermans, the Commission’s first vice-president, who was previously foreign minister of the Netherlands.

Making peace with the Commission

The improved dynamics inside the Commission are not just about the relations between president and high representative. The group of commissioners involved in external relations — neighborhood and EU enlargement, trade, development, emergency and humanitarian aid, migration, energy and transport — meets monthly, with Mogherini in the chair.

The meetings involve more participation from other commissioners and are more productive than was the case under Ashton, whose relations with Stefan Füle (neighborhood and enlargement) were notoriously bad. Timmermans and Kristalina Georgieva (budget and personnel — and formerly commissioner for humanitarian aid) attend occasionally.

Juncker’s demand, at the outset of his Commission, that Mogherini should be based in the Commission headquarters rather than with the EEAS, which is where Ashton was, is symbolically important. In practical terms, it also matters that Timmermans has a good deal of influence on the Commission’s central department, the secretariat-general, which was the operations room for fighting turf wars. He has dispelled what one insider described as “deep pockets of suspicion” of the EEAS.

These changes were already under way when the migration crisis intensified this summer, but the peculiarities of that crisis have given further encouragement to the budding tendency towards co-operation and collaboration. In particular, the need to revive the EU’s relationship with Turkey, with the aim, as the emergency EU summit of September 23 put it, of “stemming and managing the migratory flows,” demanded a new level of inter-institutional co-ordination.

Meeting the challenge of Turkey

The issue of migration to Europe through Turkey defies simple compartmentalization. The main cause is a foreign policy issue — the war in Syria. Turkey itself is both a foreign policy (EEAS) issue, because it's located outside the EU, and a Commission policy, because it has been negotiating for EU membership (handled by the department for the neighborhood and enlargement). Migration is mainly handled by the Commission’s recently re-named department for migration and home affairs but spills over into other departments such as the department for humanitarian aid and civil protection and various EU agencies.

It is worth looking at the sequence of how talks with Turkey were handled between and within the EU institutions. In the second week of September, it was Tusk who took the initiative with a trip to Turkey (made against the advice of the EEAS). He had talks with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, and visited a refugee camp. Then, on the margins of the UN general assembly in New York, there was a meeting between Tusk and Ahmet Davutoğlu, the prime minister of Turkey, which also was attended by Timmermans and Mogherini.

In the wake of the instruction from the emergency summit of September 23, the Commission intensified its talks with Turkey. A visit by Erdoğan to Brussels was already planned for October 4-6, including talks with Tusk, Juncker and Mogherini, who also had a meeting with Feridun Sinirlioğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister.

On October 6, Simon Mordue, a director in the Commission’s department for neighborhood and enlargement negotiations, went to Turkey for two days of talks at the level of officials. Mordue was previously head of the private office of Füle, and before that worked for Gunther Verheugen, Füle’s predecessor as the commissioner for EU enlargement.

On October 8, Mogherini and Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, hosted a meeting of the EU’s various home affairs and foreign ministers with their counterparts from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and the Western Balkans, to discuss migration along the Eastern Mediterranean route.

Among the European commissioners, it had been agreed that it was Mogherini's job to look after the bigger diplomatic picture — the causes of the refugee flows, both in the Middle East and North Africa. Timmermans would do the legwork for Juncker, and was designated as the chief negotiator on the Commission side with Turkey. He joined the meetings of the group of foreign policy commissioners and drew together the strands of internal EU policy.

Timmermans was supposed to go to Ankara on October 8, but talks were put off because of the earthquake in Turkey on October 7. He went the following Wednesday (October 14), with Johannes Hahn, the commissioner for the neighborhood, Christian Danielsson, the Commission’s director-general for the neighborhood and enlargement, Mordue and other officials. The fruit of their negotiations on a draft action plan were then put to the ambassadors of the EU member states on October 15, the morning of the EU summit.

Since the summit, the talks have continued, with Matthias Ruete, the director-general for migration and home affairs, and Mordue returning to Ankara, as both sides flesh out the details of the action plan.

It may yet be that this action plan will come to nothing. Relations with Turkey are fraught with difficulty, both because of Turkey’s human rights record and because of the entrenched antipathy of Greece and Cyprus towards Turkey. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the cocktail of Turkey and migration have demanded unusual co-operation across institutions.

An outline of the diplomatic maneuvers gives some indication of the complexity of the institutional networks. Underneath, there are some fascinating coincidences. Stefano Manservisi, who heads the private office of Mogherini, was briefly the EU’s ambassador to Turkey. Before that, he was the Commission’s director-general for home affairs, and before that for development. He once headed the private office of the then-Commission president Romano Prodi. Some diplomats in the EEAS fear that he is subjugating it to the Commission. Others in the Commission accuse him of plundering Commission resources for the EEAS. But almost everyone agrees that as an operator, he is in a different league from Ashton’s head of office, James Morrison. “Manservisi is a pragmatist. He knows that for the EEAS to get things done, you need Commission instruments [for which, read money]”, says one in the Mogherini camp.

Danielsson was head of unit for negotiations with Turkey back in 2005-08, and after that was Sweden’s ambassador to the EU. So he too combines experience in more than one EU institution. It also helps that Tusk’s chief foreign policy adviser, Riina Konka, an Estonian diplomat, served in the EEAS. Another of his foreign policy team is Carl Hartzell, who was previously in Ashton’s cabinet.

Such personal connections provide no guarantee of smooth inter-institutional relations, but one should not lose sight of how small the EU’s diplomatic machinery still is: individuals can still make a big difference. Arguably of most importance is that Mogherini and Timmermans, two of the key players in improving relations between the EEAS and the Commission, give each other room to operate. Both are polyglot social democrat ex-foreign ministers, for whom Europe and foreign policy have been twin obsessions.

The cooperation between EU institutions should not be exaggerated. There are still points of friction. Juncker’s decision to call a Commission-hosted meeting of some government leaders last Sunday to discuss migration in the western Balkans certainly put noses out of joint in the European Council. (Officially Tusk was happy to attend and drew a distinction between its focus on operational decisions rather than policy direction.) The other commissioners around Mogherini and Timmermans — Hahn, Dimitris Avramopoulos, Christos Stylianides, have yet to demonstrate their value.

Nevertheless, the gaps between the EEAS and the Commission and the Council have undoubtedly narrowed. EU foreign policy making is not yet mature, but it is advancing from the temper tantrums of childhood to some kind of adolescence.

Tim King writes POLITICO's Brussels Sketch.