TWO days from the summit that should choose the European Union’s most senior representatives to the outside world, it is far from clear that most EU governments want to think, hard, about the outside world at all. In 48 hours from now we could be about to anoint a Van Rompuy-D’Alema ticket, a Schüssel-Diamontopolou slate, or a Balkenende-Plassnik team. At which point an awful lot of people will turn around and say: a decade of institutional wrangling for that?
To a growing extent, I feel it is a shame that the discussion about global ambition has become bogged down in a discussion about the only world leader on the list of potential candidates, ie, Tony Blair. The fact that people have such strong feelings about Mr Blair has meant there has not been sufficient scrutiny of some of the more general arguments being advanced against him.
Talk to defenders of the modest “chairman” type president of the European Council, and you will hear an unholy alliance of reasons to aim as low as possible, when it comes to the EU as a global actor. From the federalist camp, and their cousins in places like Germany who believe in deeper economic integration, there is a clear desire to limit the clout of the European Council, in order to preserve the power of the European Commission and the European Parliament. There is a navel-gazing quality that is pretty startling: talk of the European Council’s job being to reach consensus about important things like agricultural spending, tougher regulations on banks or fighting illegal migration. In other words, domestic EU work, not great power foreign policy. They have been joined by people like the British Conservative opposition, who are labouring under the mistaken belief that a modest council president will lead to a modest EU (as I have written before).
Here is a big reason why: a lot of member countries of the EU simply do not do foreign policy. They have policies to do with their neighbours, ties to the odd ex-colony, but not foreign policies. They cannot imagine what it would be like to be an active player in a global crisis, and through a mixture of everything from pacifism to inertia, appear to feel it is naïve and vulgar to believe that you can ever affect the course of global events.
It is hard to convey to outsiders the narcissistic parochialism of Brussels at the moment. There is a sense that whoever is chosen on Thursday night, it will be a big moment for the world as the EU's new institutional arrangements are given their first figureheads.
The world is not waiting for the appointment of the EU's first double hatted foreign policy representative. The world is busy, and is dimly aware that Europe has finished with its latest treaty and is about to appoint some new top figures. The world will check who those new figures are, and if they appear credible and impressive, will take note. If they are unknown figures, appointed after hours of horse-trading dominated by considerations about balancing north and south, gender, left and right, big and small, new and old, central and peripheral etc, the world will shrug and walk away.
A sort of circular reasoning grips many of my colleagues in the Brussels press corps, lots of whom still yearn for the Luxembourg prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, to get the post of president of the council. The reasoning seems to go as follows: Europe needs to become much more integrated politically and economically to become a major world power. Mr Juncker has a long, unrivalled track record of promoting the economic and political integration of Europe, therefore if he is chosen, Europe stands the best chance of becoming a major power. That reasoning is flawed.
Try waking Barack Obama up in the middle of the night, because Jean-Claude Juncker is on the line. Imagine a crisis: perhaps Israel is 36 hours away from bombing Iran. With a heavy-hitting, charismatic president of the council, there might be a chance that “Europe” could work the phones between Washington, Beijing and Moscow, to put together a set of sanctions on Iran (a petrol embargo, say), tough enough to stall Israeli action. Is that a job for Mr Balkenende, Ms Diamontopolou or Ms Plassnik? No.
So what is going to happen on Thursday night? I no longer have a clue. Or rather, I am no longer confident in anyone’s predictions, though I hear a lot of predictions from people actively engaged in these discussions. That is because if it were going to be a straightforward discussion, we would know that by now. The summit is arguably a week late, which indicates that the Swedes who are hosting the meeting are really struggling to reach a consensus on names. Diplomats are talking about the meeting going until dawn on Friday, or quite possibly ending without a result, forcing leaders to come back in December. Once you get to 3am in an EU contest, all the serious candidates thought of so far could be dead on the carpet, leaving a complete surprise to come through the middle.
