Prime Minister Tony Blair ended his swansong appearance on the international stage on a high note on Saturday, helping clinch a deal for a new European Union treaty and trumpeting that Europe was turning Britain’s way.
And tributes flowed from his fellow EU leaders after a marathon summit in Brussels, which he said allowed the reforming bloc to ”move on” after two years of institutional inertia.
”I am sorry that Mr Blair is going; he has always been a man who sought compromise in Europe,” said French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who succeeded Blair’s long-time EU nemesis Jacques Chirac only last month.
Blair, who stands down next week, claimed his decade in power had seen a transformation of Britain’s role in Europe from the relationship left by Margaret Thatcher’s hardline handbagging.
Ironically, the outgoing British leader spent his last EU summit standing firm in defence of Britain’s ”red lines” on a new EU treaty to replace the bloc’s doomed Constitution.
Blair acknowledged that he would always defend Britain’s national interests — but he insisted that Britain was a ”constructive player in Europe” — and was also setting the free market agenda for the continent.
”Europe has changed. We have a commission president who is a reformer. We have got an enlarged EU with real allies for Britain today,” he told a pre-dawn press conference after the deal was clinched in all-night talks.
Blair’s relations with Europe over his 10 years in office have been uneven, to say the least.
They plummeted to an unprecedented low during the 2003 Iraq war crisis, when Britain led a pro-US bloc within the bloc, putting him at loggerheads with the EU’s traditional heavyweight states and almost splitting the bloc apart.
But Blair, who has long pressed his EU counterparts to enact free-market reforms, was widely praised by the central European newcomer states who joined the bloc in May 2004 and whose EU hopes he had championed for years.
More recently the arrival of new leaders in traditional EU heavyweights France and Germany — Sarkozy and Angela Merkel respectively — has also tipped the balance in Blair’s pro-reform favour.
”We have got a German chancellor and a French president who are in favour of the transatlantic alliance,” he said, in a pointed reference to relations between Europe and the United States, which soured seriously during over Iraq.
”There is a fantastic opportunity for this country [Britain] today,” he added.
Blair said Saturday’s EU treaty deal would finally allow the 27-nation bloc to get moving again, two years after it was plunged into an unprecedented crisis by French and Dutch voters’ rejection of its long-planned Constitution.
”The most important thing is that it allows us to move on to things that are ultimately far more important,” he said, citing issues like the economy, terrorism, immigration and climate change.
Above all Blair underlined how things had changed over the last decade, saying that when he took office in 1997 ”Britain was completely isolated in Europe. It had been years since we had put forward anything positive. In the 10 years that have followed we have led the way on economic reform, on defence policy, on [EU] enlargement,” he said.
And slamming Britain’s notorious eurosceptic lobby, he added: ”My position throughout the course of my time as prime minister has been to get out of this endless and destructive negativity, and realise that Britain has a lot to offer Europe. And Europe has a lot to offer Britain.”
”Tony Blair has contributed in a very valuable way to European cooperation,” said Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, adding: ”He’s really a pro-European.” – Sapa-AFP