FORMER UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (“the Winston Churchill of our Times,” as he was known in the Bush White House) is not going to be the first president of the European Union. And Iceland isn’t going to join the EU either.
This sort of story only gets traction in the summer holidays, when all the movers and shakers are away at the cottage/villa/yacht and there is very little real news to hold the ads apart. Yet somehow or other, something resembling news must be inserted between the ads.
Iceland, we are told, is going to join the European Union, and it’s also going to start using the “single currency,” the euro. Indeed, the Icelandic Parliament, the Althing, has just voted to start the negotiations, and the EU says it would be happy to have the big island as its 28th member — or 29th or 30th or 31st, depending on whether Croatia and/or Macedonia and/or Albania make it into the EU first.
Don’t believe it. The Icelanders want to join the EU now because the country is dead broke, the Icelandic krona is worth less than the Lower Slobbovian gugulev, and they are very scared for the future. When there’s only 320,000 of you and the bottom falls out of your economy, the shelter of big, seemingly solid institutions like the EU and the euro has an irresistible appeal.
It has been a fast, steep fall for the Icelanders, who were among the most prosperous people in the world only one year ago. Hardly any of them wanted to join the EU, suspecting that its member countries only wanted access to Icelandic waters so they could vacuum up all their fish. Besides, Icelandic banks, which had practically taken over the economy, were among the most profitable in the world.
It was the banks that caused Iceland’s downfall. The country radically deregulated its banking system some years ago, and the small, previously humble Icelandic banks suddenly became major international players. With government backing, they grew rapidly until they were 10 times the size of the real economy, yet all of the Icelandic bank directors together had a total of about 25 minutes of international banking experience.
The island had become a giant hedge fund sitting in the middle of the North Atlantic, and when the bubble burst last October it promptly morphed into a soup kitchen. The currency collapsed, unemployment soared, and the government fell. The new government, headed by Social Democratic Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, saw no other option than to seek shelter within the EU.
BUT Arni Thor Sigurdsson, chair of Iceland’s parliamentary committee handling EU issues, reckons that the entry negotiations will take at least four years. Then, probably in 2013, there will have to be a referendum. By that time the world economy will have recovered and Icelanders will have regained their usual confidence — or at least, enough of it to reject membership in the EU, whose only plausible motive for wanting them to join is to steal their fish. So it won’t happen.
Then there’s Tony Blair, who was prime minister of Britain for 10 years before his Labour colleagues finally got him out in mid-2007. He was only 54 when he finally left office, and the make-work job they found him afterward as “Middle East envoy” of the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the EU, and the United Nations) doesn’t really fill his time. So why not president of the EU?
WELL, for one thing, the job doesn’t exist yet. It will come into existence if and when the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, which can only happen if Ireland votes “yes” in a second referendum in October. (The Irish voted “no” in their first referendum in mid-2008, but opinion polls suggest that they have changed their minds.) Even if the Irish vote “yes”, however, the Poles and the Czechs also have to ratify it. Both the Czech and Polish parliaments have approved the Lisbon Treaty, but both presidents dislike it and have not yet signed it. If one of them stalls until there is an election in the United Kingdom and the Conservatives take power, the latter would then hold a British referendum on the treaty, and the British might reject it.
It would therefore be a bit premature for any of the candidates for EU president to give up their day jobs. Blair has not even admitted that he is a candidate. As an ally explained: “He wants it, but he does not want to be humiliated by failing to get it.” He should stick with that position, because he’s not going to get it.
It is only six years since Tony Blair illegally invaded Iraq, siding with George W. Bush and against most of the other large EU states. The British public ultimately turned against his war, but most of his Western European neighbors were against it from the start. A significant number even thinks of him as an unindicted war criminal. The EU frequently shoots itself in the foot, but it won’t discredit its new presidency from the start by putting Blair in the job. He will be left to roam the speakers’ circuit in the United States, advise Wall Street bank J.P. Morgan, and putter about in the Middle East.
