Herman van Awesome

In my previous post I have pointed out that on the 1st of July a perfect opportunity will present itself for the leaders of the European institutions to take up the reigns of Europe from national politicians. Are they up to the job, though? First of all let us consider the position of the European Council President.

Herman van Rompuy was appointed as the first President of the European Council under the Lisbon Treaty following weeks of speculation. The commentary of his appointment has been mixed, to put it mildly. Many saw him as ‘Mr Nobody’, some claimed he was too radical in his federalist views, while others thought he’d be toy for Merkel and Sarkozy to push their own ideals. Overall, people and commentators saw this appointment was a bad choice.

Over the six months of his presidency so far, van Rompuy has displayed a mixed political leadership. When dealing with the eurozone debt crisis and in particular Greece, he has been overshadowed by Angela Merkel who took charge and lead the way to stabilising the euro. One can, however, easily understand this as it Germany who are going to contribute the most to healing the debt crisis and so Merkel could have been expected to be this proactive. (She also managed to outshine bigger players such as the chairman of the IMF,Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or the Secretary General of the OECD, Angel Gurría.)

Next comes the Haitian earthquake crisis. Here, van Rompuy cannot be accused of not leading the way or being direct enough (as opposed to the EU Higher Representative for Foreign Affairs Cathrine Ashton). The European Council President has led the way by stating that the EU needs to prepare a unit of emergency humanitarian corps. These would be quickly deployed into areas that are destroyed by natural disasters instead of the prolong procedure that exists today. A noble and quite brilliant idea indeed. However, since the Haitian earthquake there has not been even a sign of this being implemented or even considered. Van Rompuy’s idea has simply been ignored by the European leaders.

So far a very poor track record for someone whom we expect to guide the European Union forward. However a turning point for van Rompuy came during the recent EU-Russia summit. During this summit, which dealt mostly with economic matter, van Rompuy showed great deal of leadership as he negotiated with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. The two looked exactly as they should, two counterparts, two presidents. However the most important aspect of this meeting was that van Rompuy was not afraid to open the agenda of human rights in Russia. This is the agenda that many try to avoid when talking to Medvedev. But there was no harsh reply from Russia, no swift remark that they would not talk about such things. Simply Medvedev agreed that there needs to be a lot of improvements done in that area.

When we look back at van Rompuy’s career as the European Council President is has steadily progressed. From ‘Mr Nobody’ we have someone who takes initiative and is regarded as a counterpart by world leaders. This is exactly the kind of person whom we can expect to lead the Union forward.

Time to Strike

On the 1st of July 2010 the European Presidency will travel from Spain to Belgium, a country which is just after elections, without a government and with some signs of a desperate desire not to be a single state anymore. This same Belgium, however, has all the potential to finally show that Europe has one phone line(paraphrasing the famous line of Henry Kissinger).

When the European Presidency was given to Spain on the 1st of January 2010, the Spanish administration was very well prepared. In fact they were over-prepared. The Spaniards were expecting to be given presidency of the EU under the Nice Treaty conditions, meaning that their Prime Minister would be the President of the European Council and their foreign affairs minister would be the High Representative of the EU for foreign affairs. Alas, quite unexpectedly quickly the Lisbon Treaty was finally fully ratified and entered into force one month before the Spanish presidency, resulting in an appointed President of the European Council and appointed High Representative. In order not to offend Spain and its preparation the EU gave Spanish presidency an ‘in-between’ status, resulting a collaborative presidency of Spain and the newly appointed European leaders.

In the case of Belgium situation is much different. As mentioned above the country is still to elect a new government and it seems it is also quite heavily involved in its own conflict of whether or not to split and cease to exist as a single country. This is the chance the the European leaders who wrote the Lisbon Treaty were waiting for. Belgium is quite simply not fit to preside over the European Union. Actually, I take that back. There is one Belgian who certainly should be fit to preside over the EU. His name is Hermon van Rompuy, the first ever appointed President of the European Council.

It is quite ironic that the former Belgian Prime Minister should fully take up the reigns of the European Union after electoral turmoil in his own country. However, irony or not it is an opportunity that cannot be missed. If van Rompuy isn’t seen pushing the EU forward by himself, as the holder of the one phone line to which any other world leader can call, then when the time comes for Hungary and its populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, they will insist to enjoy the same privileged as Spain did and show off Orban as the European leader, making any changes that Lisbon made in this regard useless.

Lets EUnite!

There has been relatively little coverage of the decision of Ministers for Finance of the EU to scrutinise each other’s budgets before the national parliaments get a chance to do so. This is pretty much, word for word, accepting the proposal of the European Commission that I have written about in my blog here.
It is quite extraordinary for this sort of decision warrant so little attention, especially after the Commission proposal gave rise to so much controversy all over Europe.
The fact that the media didn’t pay much attention to it should not mislead anyone, though. This agreement is commented by some as the first step towards real European unity (read European Governance). Now we will see the politician showing the budget over to their European counterparts who will examine it, not from the point of view of the given nation, but rather asking questions whether the fiscal policy shown in the budget is of benefit of the Union. Thus we can no longer take the budgets as instruments of national fiscal policy but rather just as one piece in the European one.
The implementation of such a revolutionary step is, however, questionable. Yet again the main ‘punishment’ for anyone who would behave economically irresponsible are sanctions. We can only wait and see whether these sanctions will actually be given out. As is well known the sanctions under the Maastricht treaty were never actually used, even though most of the countries did break the criteria under the treaty. One can only be hopeful that the sanctions will be used this time around.
There is hope that this scenario will be the case as countries such as France or Germany both speak of great austerity measures in order to balance their books and it is likely that they will make sure every other country will follow. This can be seen already in the case of Hungary where the new Prime Minister Viktor Orban wanted to spend his way out of recession, doubling the deficit agreed for the year. Straight away he was called to Brussels and changed his rhetoric to one of cuts immediately.
After the agreement from the Minister for Finance Europe is even more closer to unity. The message is we rise and fall together.

Israel changing Ashton

Amidst the huge international controversy that was created by the Israeli attack on the Free Gaza ships two days ago something new was born. That little something, so little indeed that it has not been picked up by the commentators, is the reactions of the European Union and its member states to the attack. The reaction that was uncommonly unilateral and without any delay.

For many years the European Union’s reaction to various incidents were usually divided up between individual member states. Thought the Single European Act did envisage a common foreign policy, the situation was that member states would meet, discuss the incident and the EU would then make a statement on the issue with each member state also commenting on the issue. Sometimes, and this was usually the case for the difficult and controversial issues, the EU would even allow its member states to make their own comments and statements with the EU not getting involved (this could be seen in the reaction to Kosovo).

The reaction to the Israeli attack has been quite different. Almost as soon as the White House made a press statement regarding it, the spokesperson for Cathrine Ashton also called in a press conference and expressed Baroness Ashton’s deep grief over the loss of lives and called for an independent investigation. Later on that day the Baroness herself repeated these words on behalf of the European Union and today during an EU-Russia summit Sergei Lavrov and Cathrine Ashton signed a joint statement condemning the attack. No Council of Ministers meeting, no lengthy negotiations.

One can read this as Baroness Ashton getting comfortable with her job half a year after her appointment.  It seems she is fueled by the success of her vision for the EU’s diplomatic service that is praised by the member states, the European Commission and the European Parliament. This fuel maybe allowed her to take the unorthodox step by simply stating the Brussels’ line as she is supposed to as the High Representative of the EU for foreign affairs (amongst other things).

This marks a change in the way the EU institutions are run, suddenly we have an official taking an EU stance without being controlled by the member states. In turn one can interpret the EU as no longer being a group of member states that with a name but rather a sovereign organisation with its own decision making.

What is striking about this, is that the member states themselves seem to be ok with this interpretation. No other nation has made its own press statement regarding the incident (maybe with the exception of Ireland, but that is acceptable as Irish citizens were directly involved). Germany, France, Italy…they all stayed silent and thus implicitly approved of the Brussels-based policy. True one can argue that Merkel has to worry about the German President resigning, that Berlusconi must rather try to concentrate on selling the austerity measures to the public or that Sarkozy is a die-hard eurofederalist, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of action all of the 27 member states.

The Israeli attack is tragic and condemnation worthy, but while the eyes of all the commentators are focused on Israel they are missing the great change in the way the European institutions are ran. A change that we can only hope will continue.