Luxembourg
A sleeping sickness is sweeping the chancelleries of Europe. This Monday, in the space of a single day, Italy and France became the latest nations to succumb to the symptoms of this nasty disease — headaches, confusion, and finally a descent into paralysed slumber.
As this article goes to press, the Italian election results are still being disputed by all sides. But one thing is already clear. Tony Blair will never again enjoy the strong backing of his ally, holiday host and fellow tanning enthusiast, Silvio Berlusconi.
The Italian billionaire — a staunch, if improbable, ally for Mr Blair in Europe and Iraq — has either lost his job, or kept it by a margin so tiny that he has lost his mandate to rule with any hint of boldness. Romano Prodi is so confident that on Tuesday he claimed victory: ‘We can govern for five years,’ he said. ‘The law allows it though we will have to work hard.’ Put bluntly, Italy is back in its old role as the bad joke of European politics: a large, wealthy, founding nation of the EU that always, somehow, ‘punches below its weight’, as Foreign Office mandarins like to murmur.
In France, meanwhile, President Jacques Chirac’s decision to give in to street protesters and scrap a flagship youth employment law was tantamount to abdication — a signal that nothing more can be expected from his exhausted administration. France will effectively be leaderless between now and the presidential elections in May next year.
It is a prospect that straightforwardly appals the ruling EU establishment, who face yet more uncertainty and drift for a Europe already frozen with fear in the face of globalisation and the threat from China, India and other rising economic powers. By chance, Monday saw EU foreign ministers summoned to a formal meeting in Luxembourg. Between weighty debates on Hamas and Iran, the ministers and mandarins spent the day sprinting back to their national delegation offices to watch CNN and the BBC bring news from Paris and Rome. The agonies in Italy left one senior European Commission official unfazed. Not so France. ‘France’s weakness leaves us all twiddling our thumbs, when we need to be getting on with things,’ he said.
The prospect of weakness in Paris and Rome is a more complex matter, seen from a narrowly British perspective. Given that Berlusconi’s Italy has been an ally for Britain in recent years, sending troops to Iraq, standing up for the transatlantic pact, and taking a sceptical view of moves towards a European superstate, you might imagine that London was longing for Italy to remain in the hands of ‘Il Cavaliere’, and grow stronger still. Not quite. At the European level, a weak Italy rather suits Britain. As long as Italy is consumed with its own domestic troubles, it leaves the way clear for three nations — France, Germany and the UK — to fight it out as the undisputed ‘big beasts’ of Brussels.
In Italy, a confirmed win for Romano Prodi, the centre-Left opposition candidate and former Eurocrat, would not be great news for Mr Blair. The Prime Minister backed Mr Prodi for the post of president of the European Commission in 1999, only to lose patience with the plodding economics professor as he failed to bring reform to Brussels. Mr Prodi’s instincts could not be more Old Europe. A natural ally for France and Germany as Commission chief, he nagged Britain, publicly, to join the single currency, and called for the EU to have its own army. He was not just a strong backer of the EU constitution. He tried — unsuccessfully — to limit the ability of individual governments to veto the treaty.
Mr Berlusconi’s great genius, from a British perspective, was not just that he was a natural Eurosceptic, certainly by Italian standards. It was more that he was bored by Europe, and the po-faced business of haggling over Portuguese fish subsidies or wrangling with Denmark over defence procurement opt-outs. In December 2003, thanks to the EU’s system of rotating presidencies, Italy’s PM found himself in the chair at a key meeting on the constitution. A working lunch loomed, and Il Cavaliere stared mournfully round the table at his fellow leaders, all briefed and ready to fight their corners on EU voting weights. ‘Let’s talk about football and women,’ Mr Berlusconi announced, turning to the then German chancellor, Herr Schröder. ‘Gerhard, you’ve been married four times, why don’t you start?’
Only rarely has Italy played a decisive role in the EU. The last time it happened it was disastrous for Britain. The year was 1990, and the Italian prime minister was Giulio Andreotti. Handbagged and humiliated once too often by Margaret Thatcher, little Signor Andreotti and his aides plotted their revenge. At a Rome summit, called to discuss a timetable for economic and monetary union, Italy helped France and Germany pull off a brutal ambush. As the votes were called, Mrs Thatcher found herself outnumbered, by 11 countries to one.
The prospect of European isolation did not appear to abash Mrs Thatcher, who returned to the House of Commons booming the battle-cry ‘No, no, no’. But it was too much to bear for Sir Geoffrey Howe, whose resignation as deputy prime minister triggered her downfall.
Mrs Thatcher may have got off lightly with a resignation, of course — in 2002 Signor Andreotti was convicted of close ties to the Mafia (a murder conviction was overturned on appeal).
The prospect of a weak France is equally complex for Britain. A certain joy, it is true, fills the heart of all free-born Englishmen at the sight of a French government on the ropes. But in Luxembourg, in the corridors of EU power, there was consensus that Britain and France need each other, like it or not. In the wings of the Luxembourg meeting, as early exit-polls signalled a clear lead for Mr Prodi, a senior French diplomat offered a polite welcome, saying, ‘Mr Prodi’s Europe sentiments are well known to us.’ The same high French official was much more keen to talk about Mr Blair. He said, ‘A Europe of 25 nations is a Europe that is extremely difficult to manage. Without a strong British presence, the Council becomes this amorphous mass, so it is extremely important for us that Mr Blair should remain a strong European leader.’
An overmighty France is a bad thing. But, buffeted by street protests and bullied by the mob, a weak France is quite incapable of gritting its teeth and accepting change. I discussed the paradox with a ‘senior EU diplomat’, as he asked to be called in print. He conceded that the French elite shared much of the neuralgia, paranoia and irrationality of the French street.
‘We deal with the French elite come what may; I find it hard to imagine a political configuration in France that revolutionises the way the French elite sees the world,’ he explained. ‘In the long run, it’s easier to do business with a strong French leader, because you know where you stand. It’s always easier to deal with people who feel in control.’
In other words, Europe’s haughty elite is bad. But when protesters across the Continent are demanding that they be shielded from any hint of change or reform, a mighty street may just be worse.
David Rennie is a contributing editor of The Spectator and Europe correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.