Let’s forget for a minute the fact that the new president of the Europeans believes Turkey should never become a member. This is a big problem in and of itself but there are other more important problems with this selection. Here is how the very influential Financial Times heralded the EU’s “historic” decision: “The appointments on Thursday night of Herman Van Rompuy,” Belgium’s prime minister, as the EU’s first full-time president, and of Britain’s Baroness Catherine Ashton as its foreign policy chief leave the EU’s global role and image in the hands of two personalities with next to no experience of high-level international affairs. They are choices which appear to contradict the arguments that EU leaders have made for years about the importance of projecting Europe’s collective influence more effectively around the world.”This is not a new story. The union has consistently punched below its weight over the last two decades. The EU deserved this reputation for self-paralysis as it helplessly watched the bloody unraveling of Yugoslavia, where more than 150,000 people were killed in a vicious war. Only when Washington decided to intervene did the carnage stop. Such strategic irrelevance triggered considerable soul-searching within the EU. Member states came to the conclusion that they needed a constitution. After spending close to a decade writing a constitution, they managed to reject it thanks to the French and Dutch voters.
Finally, they came up with the brilliant idea of changing the name of the document from a “constitution” to the “Lisbon Treaty.” The logic and objectives of the Lisbon Treaty remained the same: to strengthen the EU’s cohesion and upgrade its global influence. Among the treaty’s main features were the creation of the full-time presidency, to replace the increasingly ineffective system of six-month rotating presidencies, and the appointment of a foreign policy czar with stronger powers and responsibilities.
As the Lisbon Treaty came to be adopted by all EU countries a new hope emerged: the EU would finally have more weight and unity in foreign affairs. But for this to happen, the new president needed to have name recognition and gravitas. Tony Blair’s name was often mentioned with such intentions. Others argued that another big name, the foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, would also be an excellent selection. Yet, as discussions of these arrangements proceeded, it became clear most governments preferred a low-profile, consensus-building chairman as president rather than a forceful, policy-setting chief executive. The selection of Mr. Van Rompuy and Lady Ashton reflect a number of disturbing factors about the EU. Perhaps the most important is the debilitating complexity and difficulty of finding “consensus” in a union with 27 member states. Almost unavoidably, such difficulty invites an addiction to constant compromise. There is a deliberate desire to steer away from big and divisive personalities. For instance, Tony Blair came to be seen as too controversial because of his support of the Iraq war.
The second lesson that emerged with the selection of Rompuy and Ashton is the fact the EU states are determined to maintain their national power. Simply put, the national governments don’t want to relinquish foreign policy power at the expense of a European federation. Finally, the third lesson is that the Lisbon Treaty has not changed anything. As Quentin Peel from the Financial Times righty argues: “The Lisbon treaty does not require political balance in the appointments, but it does insist that the three top EU jobs should reflect geographical and demographic balance: they must be shared between big and small states, and reflect both north and south. That already limited the field.”
Therefore there was strong resistance from smaller member states to the job going to one of the big members, such as France or the UK. Such a choice, they argued, would lead to “big-country domination of the Council, and diminish the role of the president of the European Commission.” In short, the EU will continue to be strategically irrelevant.
