The European Policy Centre held an event to discuss their analysis of the European Council summit. Antonio Missiroli, Director of Studies, backed Barrosso’s view that it had been “a summit of delivery” and said that it had “managed to shape and show a united EU front on all the main issues on the agenda and agree on a series of concrete coordinated steps.” Going further, Missiroli considered the role of crisis in galvanising the EU, “are now the real tests of the Union’s ability to act and react as one, both internally and externally.
The outward face of the summit
This phenomenon emerged quite dramatically during the French EU Presidency last year, immediately after the shock of the Irish No to Lisbon, and is hardly relenting now. Are crises, in other words, turning into the potential solidarités de fait – to be patiently built up and not taken for granted – that Jean Monnet considered the essence of the European integration process?”
If that is correct, then the Union’s future looks very rosy indeed, given the number of unavoidable crisis points in the next month alone.
The optimistic view was challenged by David Rennie, of the Economist, described the mood at the summit as “like a phony war, there was a lot of tension”, and said that “you wouldn’t want Barrosso as your gynaecologist if this was his delivery method”. For Rennie, after high level discussions with attendees, this summit was about financial regulation and Europe had to make some big decisions and the Council was not the body to make those decisions.
Preparing to deliver
According to Rennie, insiders were saying that the summit, politically, was about distrust between the camp led by France and Germany who wanted to use the meeting to launch a wave of financial regulation and this camp does not trust Britain, who they expect to defect to the US. Ultimately the summit was ‘phoney war’ skirmishing ahead of the G20.
THE LION AND THE LAMB
The British have a phrase to describe the turbulent weather of April, “in like a lion, out like a lamb”. By the end of the month there may be more than a few Europeans feeling sheepish, as the prospects for the summits look stormy, with the likelihood of a cold front moving in. And that was before the Czech government fell.
In what may be one of his final acts, Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek described Obama’s stimulus package as “the way to Hell”, which must cast doubt on British Ambassador to the U.S. Nigel Sheinwald’s earlier statement that “I don’t think there is any fundamental disagreement at all” between the EU and US. This contributed to a sense of chaos and many were wondering if Europe was capable of being able to play a meaningful part in the proceedings.
The European Council Summit in progress
Writing in the UK Guardian newspaper, Timothy Garton Ash writes that “Europe’s response to the biggest financial and economic crisis since the process of European integration began more than 50 years ago has been weak and divided” and states that “neither the Americans nor the Chinese see Europe as a single, coherent partner”. The NATO summit is not looking any better. Behind the scenes the summit is being organised by people in three locations and being held in two countries.
There are mutterings that the summit organisation is so poor that it is hampering the event being held at all! Constanze Steizenműller, Director, Berlin Office, German Marshall Fund of the US, described preparations as “a shambles”.
On the table are some difficult items that need addressing. Afghanistan, where Jamie Shea, Director of Policy Planning in the Private Office of the Secretary General, recently described NATO’s lack of direction, “I go to briefings where everything sounds good and I think we’re making progress, then I go to another one and everything sounds desperate” and Shea went on to outline what NATO needs to do, “We need to work out what our strategy is to be, what our aims are, what are we trying to do and how will we know when we’ve achieved it”.
In this atmosphere, it’s hard to see EU nations offering more troops, especially for aggressive actions. When the loved ones of bereaved soldiers ask “What did my son die for?” they deserve a better answer than “I haven’t a clue”. Especially after seven years of combat.
NATO’s credibility took a further hit when Wikileaks posted a series of their classified documents on Afghanistan on the internet. Apart from other issues, they revealed, for example, that Jordan was a secret member of ISAF and NATO didn’t want to admit that “ISAF forces are frequently fired at from inside Pakistan, very close to the border”. These documents were downloaded from the CENTCOM website and Wikileaks quickly decrypted them by discovering they were protected by the password ‘progress’.
PRAGUE SPRING
Then everyone trots off to Prague for the EU-US summit, overseen by whatever passes for a Czech government, where yet more thorny issues, such as the US missile shield are on the agenda. By the time all this is over, President Obama may not be seen on European soil for some time, for at the time of greatest crisis, the union is paralysed by a collapsing presidency, a stalled reform programme, a probable delay in forming a new Commission and parliamentary elections.
Obama’s recent gift to Gordon Brown of a set of Region 1 DVD’s may be seen as a signal that what plays in the US won’t play in Europe. At the summit pundits predict that Gordon Brown is expected to fall in with the White House, which leaves the EU where, exactly?
Published in New Europe
