The end of a pro-active Europe before it could even begin

By Hadleigh Roberts / @hadleighroberts

In an astounding act of collective self-harm, EU leaders have chosen the perfect partnership of mediocrity and disappointment to be their Council President and Foreign Affairs representative. The appointments managed to surprise and disappoint everybody in every country of every political persuasion. The Guardian and the Daily Mail’s front pages called it “the great EU stitch-up” and the French have been even more damning. The left-leaning Libération paper said you couldn’t get a simpler Belgian cliché than van Rompuy, while the former right-wing President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who drafted the original Constitution, said that “The Europeans have not picked a George Washington.”

Baroness Ashton has been equally dismissed for her lack of notoriety and experience, being called a “Labour apparatchik” chosen purely for convenience due to gender and political affiliation. Sarkozy and Merkel were uncompromising on the President, demanding someone from their own centre right group. Some say Brown negotiated Ashton’s position as a trade-off for Blair (which nobody believed) though a lot of the bargaining was conducted by Martin Shultz, Socialist Group President in the EU.

What these appointments really show, however, is a retreat into Fortress Europe. The ticket was sold on the basis that Europe would finally have a telephone number, that it could be a major player on the world stage, and that it could speak with one loud and clear voice. Though instead, the EU Leaders chose a chairman over a leader.

The choice marks a massive change in strategy for the EU. The widening process has finished with the transition of Eastern European countries, and van Rompuy is happy to keep Turkey out of the EU to satisfy his own Catholic view of Europe. The EU is no longer looking outwards and though the Benelux countries are still broadly Federalist, it is evidently impossible for Van Rompuy to launch any presidential attempts to push the EU in that direction. France and Germany both have their least federally-inclined heads of state for decades, and Britain has always been cool on the idea. The three combined form a blockade impenetrable by the president’s diminished stature.

It shows that the EU and the European nations are still not ready to take on the responsibility that comes with world power. By choosing a typically meek unknown politician from nowhere, Europe has chosen to become a typically meek arrangement of old, shrinking former empires.

The lack of initiative is pathological amongst European nations. The consequence is thus that we will continue to be left with a reactive Europe; it looks to the east with fear as Putin turns off the oil, starts wars where he likes and strangles what is left of Russian democracy, a tired Europe that can no longer keep up with the rising economic powerhouses of China and India.

We are left with a Europe that continues to look to the west and take its cues from America, as it has done for the last half-century. Europe never learns that the US President is a national leader with international power, and will always act in national interests over those of Europe and other nations.

The continent now has a small, gray character to match this group of small, grey nations. It is the end of a Europe that can stand up for itself and act independently before it even had the chance to see it.

Hadleigh blogs about European affairs at his site http://hadleighroberts.co.uk.