Catherine Ashton

Catherine Ashton (born March 20, 1956, Upholland, Lancashire, England) British politician who served as leader of the House of Lords (2007–08), European Union (EU) trade commissioner (2008–09), and high representative for foreign affairs and security policy for the EU (2009–14).

Ashton studied economics at Bedford College (now part of Royal Holloway, University of London) and earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1977. Upon graduating, she worked as a secretary for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament before taking a job in management consultancy in 1979. From 1983 to 1989 Ashton was a director of Business in the Community, an organization that encouraged corporate responsibility and facilitated partnerships between the public and private sectors. She spent the 1990s working as a policy adviser, and in 1998 she was tapped to head the Hertfordshire health authority. The following year she was awarded a Labour life peerage by Prime Minister Tony Blair, and she entered the House of Lords as Baroness Ashton of Upholland, of St. Albans in the county of Hertfordshire.

Throughout her parliamentary career, she focused on education and human rights issues. She served as a junior education minister (2001–04), and in 2002 she assumed leadership of the early-childhood-development initiative Sure Start. In 2004 Ashton switched portfolios, becoming a junior minister for constitutional affairs. She was admitted to the Privy Council in May 2006, and later that year she was recognized as politician of the year by the gay and lesbian rights group Stonewall for her efforts to promote equality. In 2007 Ashton served briefly as a junior justice minister before being promoted to leader of the House of Lords by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. In that role she was instrumental in easing the passage of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty through the upper house. The following year she was appointed to the European Commission as trade commissioner. Although Ashton lacked the name recognition of her predecessor, Peter Mandelson, she earned the admiration of the commission’s president, José Manuel Barroso, for her efficiency.

With the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in November 2009, European leaders were faced with the task of filling the newly created roles of president of the European Council and high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. After support for the presidential candidacy of former prime minister Tony Blair flagged in the face of French and German opposition, Barroso and Brown championed Ashton for the high representative office. Upon taking office in December, she became one of the most powerful women in the world, acting as the voice of the EU in all matters of foreign policy.

Ashton faced criticism in the early days of her tenure as she worked to define her role within the larger EU bureaucracy, especially in relation to Barroso and the European Commission. Her detractors also found fault with what they saw as her slow response to the events of the Arab Spring in 2010–11. The European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic division, was created in 2011, and Euroskeptic politicians and foreign service professionals alike questioned the organization’s goals as well as Ashton’s leadership of it. Over time, however, Ashton proved to be quietly effective at representing the sometimes-competing goals of the EU’s 28 members, although her aversion to the media meant that her successes were not as widely heralded as they could have been. She brokered two years of talks between the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo that concluded in 2013 with a historic agreement normalizing relations between those countries. She also facilitated multiparty negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear program; her personal participation in those discussions was seen as so critical that she was asked to continue coordinating them after the expiration of her term in 2014.

Perhaps Ashton’s greatest challenge was the crisis in Ukraine, which was precipitated in February 2014 when Pres. Viktor Yanukovych’s security forces fired on pro-Western protesters in Kiev, killing scores. After Yanukovych fled to Russia, Ukraine’s interim government worked to strengthen ties with the EU, but the country’s European trajectory was complicated by Russia’s forcible annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea in March. The following month, gunmen with Russian equipment, but whose uniforms lacked insignia, seized government buildings in southeastern Ukraine, sparking a conflict that would claim more than 4,000 lives by the year’s end. Ashton worked to coordinate successive rounds of economic sanctions against Russia, which she accused of conducting a campaign of “direct aggression” in Ukraine. When Ashton’s term concluded in November 2014, a shaky truce was in effect in eastern Ukraine, and the Russian economy was in a tailspin, partially as a result of the Western sanctions regime.

In 2017 Ashton became the first female chancellor of the University of Warwick.