IT is not clear if the two political figures selected Friday to head up the European Union’s presidential and foreign ministerial roles have anything like the political weight that many thought necessary. Belgium’s Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy is clearly quite well known in his country but is largely unheard of outside. The British life peer and Labour Party supporter Baroness Catherine Ashton is not well known, even in her own country.
If the effective anonymity of this pair is coupled with the fact that they were chosen simply by the leaders of the 27 EU member states, then both their legitimacy and the very standing of the roles they have been given, must be called into question.
Enthusiasts for closer EU political as well as economic integration are reportedly furious that such low-profile candidates have been selected. The Lisbon Treaty was a constitutional deal in all but name. The “unionists” wanted leaders of substance (though certainly not someone like Tony Blair) and international reputation, who could press ahead with the agenda of forging ever-closer internal EU ties. Opponents of Lisbon indeed warned that once the quasi-constitutional document was nodded through by all 27 Parliaments, (except in Ireland where the voters had the opportunity to vote twice, until they gave the right answer) it would be full-steam ahead for a sovereign Europe with ever-diminishing powers for individual member states.
Perhaps this is precisely the reason that the first person to be picked to hold the highest paid Western political job is, certainly in international terms, a politician whose nonentity is only exceeded by that of his foreign policy colleague. With the constitutionally-enabling Lisbon Treaty safely under their belts, EU leaders probably saw no need to rush to prove their critics right, by choosing a president who would preach and push for an ever more united Europe. There will be time enough to appoint such a leader. And besides the EU president only serves for two and a half years. European heads of government all have too many pressing domestic economic problems at the moment, to be able to focus on any vaunting EU vision. Therefore they have cunningly chosen unknowns in the expectation that they will be uncontentious political lightweights.
There is, however, one clearly good thing about the selection of the EU’s first president. That is that he is not Tony Blair, the former British premier who gave his friend George W. Bush a sufficiently persuasive set of lies about WMD to precipitate the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Blair is soiled political goods, whose continuing role as the Quartet’s Middle East peace envoy is a joke. To have made him the EU’s first president under the Lisbon Treaty would have diminished the EU’s so-far little-used influence within the Quartet and more widely undermined the organization’s credibility.
One of Blair’s UK supporters said fatuously that the Europeans needed him, because he was a leader who would “stop the traffic”, clearly forgetting that any gory road wreck is equally capable of causing a tailback.
