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Does European intelligence have a future?

Pending the decision on the nomination of the future President of the Situation Centre (Sitcen), it seemed interesting to get a better view of this European service that will celebrate its 10th anniversary. It is also the occasion to focus on the European intelligence and observe in which direction it has evolved since the Lisbon Treaty. The SitCen is now part of the European External Action Service (EEAS) under the leadership of Ms Ashton and brings together national experts to analyze intelligence assessments from the Member States (MS). For ages, intelligence has been crucial for decision takers: it helps them to reduce their uncertainty about a security policy problem or to draw conclusions about attributes of other actors/state of the world that are not directly observable.
With the creation of the EEAS, one of the goals of the European Union (EU) is to foster EU intelligence. However, according to many, while this sector will improve in significant ways, it is expected to remain decentralized and reactive, because of the MS sovereignty, and is unlikely to create any serious competition to NATO and other intelligence agencies in the near term. Actually, SitCen has to face a problem: the national officials decide what information they want to send to SitCen. In fact, despite the existence of encouraging factors for an increased cooperation, obstacles such as concerns over sovereignty, the fear of damaging privileged NATO relationships and institutional limitations are disturbing the creation of a supranational European intelligence authority. Our question is then the following: is European intelligence effective as it is now, should it evolve and how should it evolve in regard to national and international intelligence structures?

In order to understand the regain of interest concerning intelligence within the