Crisis windows and reversible empowerment in the EU’s common foreign and security policy

External crises have often been framed as moments of 'geopolitical awakening' for the European Union, yet what follows rarely lives up to that promise. Rapid coordination gives way to re-fragmentation and renewed national control. This paper conceptualises this pattern as reversible empowerment - the informal granting and withdrawal of operational autonomy to supranational actors within fixed institutional arrangements, distinct from formal, treaty-bound delegation. Drawing on the competence-control framework, I argue that external shocks temporarily raise the marginal value of EU-level competence, prompting member states to relax control constraints and empower the High Representative, the EEAS, and the Commission. Once immediate pressure subsides or distributional conflicts re-emerge, member states reassert control through veto exercise, bilateral activism, and procedural recalibration. Empirically, the paper employs process tracing and content analysis of 37 Foreign Affairs Council statements and 16 European Council conclusions (2022-2025). The findings show that CFSP is configured for reversible empowerment. Competence expands in acute phases of external crises and contracts as perceived urgency declines, though each cycle may leave institutional residue that shifts the baseline for subsequent episodes. Within protracted crises, new escalatory events trigger bounded mini-cycles of re-empowerment that do not reach prior peaks. Reversibility seems to be the system's equilibrium.