The EU’s president and foreign minister are both duds. Eurosceptics should rejoice
What puzzles me is that my Eurosceptic friends are not dancing in the streets outside the Brussels Berlaymont. Those of us who still think that, for all its undoubted irritations, the European Union is fundamentally a good thing have been weeping into our Gueuze. The sceptics have won. Why aren’t they popping the champagne?
A couple of years ago sceptics feared (and Europhiles more ardent than I hoped) that the Lisbon Treaty would prove a slipway to federalism. After all, the Union would get a president and foreign minister. Brussels would throw open its doors in capitals across the world. The redoubtable Bill Cash had denounced the treaty as a constitution in all but name. David Cameron would soon be excoriated by Tory backbenchers for reneging on the promise of a referendum.
And now? Well, instead of mighty superstate, Europe is a pretty feeble mess. The single currency may yet fracture under the strain of the debt crises in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. A modest influx of immigrants in the wake of the Arab Spring has seen governments tear up the Schengen agreement on open borders and reimpose frontier controls.
Germany has preferred the company of Russia and China to that of Britain and France in opposing intervention in Libya. So much for a European foreign policy. Solidarity, that favourite word of the founding fathers, has been banished from the European lexicon. Sovereignty has taken its place.
The Union’s freshly minted president is a softly spoken and multilingual Belgian called Herman Van Rompuy. By all accounts, he is an intelligent and cultured politician. He winds down by writing Japanese haiku poems. As a former Belgian prime minister, he has had ample practice in reconciling the irreconcilable. Negotiating a truce between Flanders and Wallonia is a lot trickier than managing Silvio Berlusconi or mediating between Paris and Berlin.
The trouble is that Van Rompuy is all but invisible. True, summits of the 27 are said to much better organised affairs than during the days when the leaders had a new president every six months. Van Rompuy is assiduous in making sure all views are properly represented and is deft at writing communiqués to cover the worst of the cracks. But heir to Charlemagne? When Van Rompuy proposed flying to Berlin during a particularly dangerous moment for the single currency, Angela Merkel told him not to bother. The German chancellor was too busy.
Catherine Ashton has had an even rougher press. Britain’s former trade commissioner got the job because David Miliband turned it down (a decision, given the subsequent Labour leadership election, that he probably regrets). Ashton has never shaken off the second-choice tag.
Much of her time as the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs is spent dodging missiles fired from European capitals. The French have been particularly trigger-happy. Ashton, they mutter in the Elysée, doesn’t have presence. She is slow off the mark in jetting to the world’s trouble spots. She doesn’t speak French (though she has been taking lessons). Where, Paris demands, is Europe’s voice in the great debates about the re-ordering of the global system?
Some of the criticisms are fair. Holding the Belgian state together is a demanding business but it hardly puts Van Rompuy in the same league as Obama, Hu Jintao and Putin. Ashton is neither an experienced political operator nor a foreign policy expert. She has had precious little experience of the bureaucratic infighting that is the stuff of Brussels. Manuel Barroso, the Portuguese president of the Commission, makes her life a misery.
It’s tempting to say it would all have been different had the Union put Tony Blair in the presidency alongside a politician of the calibre of Miliband or, say, Germany’s Joschka Fischer in the foreign affairs role. And it would have been different. Had Blair been Van Rompuy, so to speak, he would have been forever shuttling between the Oval Office, the Great Hall of the People and the Kremlin. A Miliband or a Fischer wearing the foreign policy hat would have been first on the plane to Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi.
It would be a mistake, though, to confuse form with substance and presence with power. To say stronger personalities would have given Europe a higher profile is not to say they would have wielded real power. Van Rompuy and Ashton are a symptom as much as a cause. They are weak because EU governments wanted them to be weak.
The history of the past 60 years shows that Brussels has been strong when national governments have had powerful leaders. Think of Adenhauer and De Gaulle, Kohl and Mitterrand. These were leaders confident enough in their own authority to share power in Europe. Now consider Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. These are leaders too weak at home to contemplate handing authority to anyone else.
Germany was long the champion of what Eurocrats call the ‘community method’ — the channelling of decisions through European institutions to promote deeper integration. Kohl saw it as the way to bind Germany to Europe. Merkel has jettisoned such sentimentality. She has decided that business is better transacted directly between governments, bypassing Van Rompuy, Ashton, Barroso and the rest.
Two decades after unification, Germany has decided that it wants to be more like Eurosceptic Britain and Gaullist France — what my German friends call a ‘normal country’. The present generation have forgotten the war. They are impatient of the notion that history demands Germany should put the interests of Europe first. Why should the hard-working burghers of prosperous Bavaria pay for Greek, Irish or Portuguese profligacy? Why, for that matter, should they risk blood and treasure in Afghanistan or the Maghreb?
Read the mass-circulation Bild on the subject of the eurozone and national sovereignty and the Sun seems decidedly moderate. Germany has decided it is for Germany. If others want to be more like Germany, then fine; the eurozone will endure. If not, well, they can reclaim the drachma, the escudo, the lira and the franc. Those of us with the temerity to call ourselves pro-Europeans find all this rather worrying. But surely the sceptics should be cheering?