/ 12 February 2010

EU’s genteel geriatocracy

Eu's Genteel Geriatocracy

As European leaders meet this week for the first European Union summit under Belgian premier Herman van Rompuy’s stewardship, Europe is slumped in a mood of gloom.

Van Rompuy, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and company are in charge of a Europe engulfed by a sense of defeatism and decline and exhausted by nine long years of trying to construct a new European regime.

The reasons are clear. Officials and diplomats agree that Europe suddenly seems to matter a lot less in the world. Additionally, its leaders appear unsure of how to tackle their single currency’s biggest crisis, particularly the Greek meltdown, and are engaged in petty power struggles over how to use the EU’s new rule book — the Lisbon Treaty.

Since EU leaders last met in Brussels before Christmas, the mood has soured. For the Europeans who claimed to lead the world on climate change, the Copenhagen summit was the game-changer, a moment when the global balance of power tilted and relegated the EU to the second division.

“In Copenhagen we saw that Europe doesn’t count,” said Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies. Said a senior European official: “[United States President Barack] Obama visited European leaders at a coffee break. But he negotiated with others.”

For 18 months UK foreign secretary David Miliband has been warning that Europe faces being sidelined in a “G2” world run by the US and China unless the EU steps up.

Miliband’s worst fears materialised when Obama held his press conference at the end of Copenhagen and deleted Europe from the script.

“If the G2 world was approaching, suddenly there it was,” said the diplomat. “A seminal and symbolic moment.”

On Thursday Van Rompuy was to hold a postmortem, asking his fellow leaders what went wrong and what to do about it. His rise is the product of the Lisbon Treaty, a wordier and more complex version of the ill-fated European Constitution binned because of voter rejection in France and Holland.

The treaty took effect in December and will supposedly cure Europe’s malaise by streamlining decision-taking, boosting common foreign policy and supplying strong and coherent leadership.

The new regime has started not with a bang but with a whimper. Instead of coherence there is confusion; instead of clear leadership, turf wars and rival presidents.

Obama announced last week he is too busy for a slated summit with the Europeans in Madrid in May.

The US state department insists one reason for Obama’s absence is that, under Lisbon, it was not clear who the US should deal with.

Washington-based academic Matthias Matthijs said the post-Lisbon fiasco over who is in charge may take a year to sort out. “They don’t have anyone to put on the world stage.”

That person is supposed to be Van Rompuy or Catherine Ashton, the new EU foreign policy chief also created by the Lisbon Treaty.

But no one apparently told the Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who took on the EU’s rotating six-month presidency last month, determined not to forfeit any of its privileges to Van Rompuy who, under the Lisbon terms, chairs all summits of EU leaders.

The Spanish government website bragged that the Obama summit in Madrid would be a highlight of its presidency, though it forgot to consult the Americans. And in the next four months the Spanish plan to host 10 EU summits with other parts of the world.

This appetite for summitry sits oddly with perceptions of European weakness. But it is of a piece with the European insistence on disproportionate attendance at big global pow-wows.

In the three G20 summits of the past 18 months over the financial crisis Europeans have taken up eight of the 20 places. There is one place each for the Americans and Chinese, whereas the Europeans were represented by the Germans, British, French and Italians, plus Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, plus whoever had the rotating EU presidency (the Swedes or Czechs). Then the Spanish and the Dutch, neither formal G20 members, clamoured for invitations and were given seats.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Antonio Missiroli of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. “There are too many Europeans.”

Amid this crowded field, leadership itself is at a premium.

Increasingly in Europe power lies in national capitals. Analysts complain that those national leaders are not up to the task of projecting power effectively on the world stage.

German Chancellor Merkel has been invisible since winning a second term last year. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi raises smirks. UK Prime Minister Brown is credited with trying hard on the world financial crisis but is considered a lame duck, while it is feared across the EU that British Tories David Cameron and William Hague, by contrast, will conspire to subvert rather than project European leadership in favour of the “special relationship” with the US.

The sole figure to command respect for his political will is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

Gunter Verheugen, Germany’s exiting European commissioner, painted a picture this week of tired strategic division, confusion and hesitancy. “There’s no idea of where they’re going,” he told Der Spiegel. “There’s no agreement on what the EU borders should look like one day or on how to define our role in the world. We want the Americans to take us seriously as partners. But we need to work on our capacity for partnership — The Americans expect more global engagement from us, but we’re not ready for that.”

On Afghanistan or Iran, say senior diplomats, the Europeans are at odds and almost certain to frustrate any hopes in Washington of common, tough and risky policies.

The backdrop to Brussels’s black mood is economic. The fallout from the banking collapse in the form of colossal public debt levels and budget deficits is tying the hands of governments. The short-term troubles are coupled with the longer-term scenario of shrinking and ageing populations, a Europe condemned to genteel and geriatric decline while emerging economies boom. —