The manner of the birth of the new European presidency tells you everything that is wrong with it. Instantly it has provoked confusion, a satirical focus on personalities and rancour between nations large and small. Everyone is talking about who the president and foreign minister of this abstract entity will be, no one about how it will actually work.
Perhaps that is because, in their hearts, people know that it can’t. The EU is not a country and, far from “gaining weight globally by speaking with one voice”, acting as if it were could imperil many of its achievements to date.
I was a communist specialist at the Foreign Office when EU political co-operation first got under way in the 1970s. It proved a winner. Previously, the instinctive reaction of the French, the Germans and the British to an East-West problem had been how they could use it to score points off one another. Afterwards — notably in the Helsinki process, in which I took part — the Nine (as we then were) experimented successfully with the novel approach of facing the adversary together.
As principal private secretary to David Owen and Lord Carrington I later saw how intimate senior European foreign ministers had become, lunching and dining and above all breakfasting at international gatherings ad hoc and à la carte, or at discreet, unpublicised meetings.
Meanwhile, a web of contacts was forming between specialists and commissioners for foreign affairs in Brussels, anonymous folk for the most part, working to keep the Nine pointing in the same direction. In this way the habit of co-operation began growing human roots, with few illusions about how far the co-ordination of the foreign policies of sovereign nations could go.
Now these flexible, realistic procedures, which were to play an important role in the fall of the Berlin Wall, are to be rigidified in a search for superpower status, complete with unelected presidency and make-believe foreign ministry. At a time when the leap from nine to twenty-seven has already made consensus harder, gains in EU effectiveness are in danger of being squandered by overweening institutional change. Rather than a sober, bottom-up pragmatism, we shall now have top-down presumption and conceit.
One of two things must happen. Either the president and foreign minister will feel their oats and get ahead of community opinion, so that their pronouncements will be discounted by other nations. (Look at the galumphing remarks on an EU tax by the front-runner, the Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy.) Or they will be so nervous about offending the French, or the Latvians, or whomsoever, that they will restrict themselves to grandiose pieties, reducing the whole show to a sort of regional United Nations. Either way the new posts will be otiose.
Though not without consequence. Imagine the scope for overlap, overkill, sharpened national rivalries, bureaucratic turf wars and confusions, and the cost inflation that the expansion of content-free diplomatic stage-strutting will most certainly produce.
The rotating six-month presidency was a clumsy, ultra-democratic device, but the world knew it for what it was, and tempered expectations accordingly. Rotation was a necessary pretence. A presidency is for real.
A lot about it, though, will be bogus. Clarity about status is vital in diplomacy — hence fancy words like plenipotentiary — there being little incentive to negotiate with someone who lacks the power to deliver. Diplomats can seem ethereal souls, but they are the first to sense that they are dealing with someone who, as they would be unlikely to put it, is all fur coat and no knickers.
Think of the labyrinthine process of ratifying the Lisbon treaty itself, and you have a foretaste of day-to-day problems of co-ordination, such as ghosting a speech reflecting the views of 27 nations on the Middle East for our phantom president or foreign minister to deliver.
Behind the scenes there will be exploding bureaucracies — in both the quantitative and temperamental sense — as old and new EU foreign affairs structures collide. All this would seem to argue for powerful figures to pull everyone into line, but that too is a mirage. A big-name president trying to cut a dash in the world’s capitals in proportion to the 500 million sometimes notional Europeans he notionally represents would bring friction with other members, not to speak of his own ersatz foreign minister, by definition likely to be a foreigner to him or her.
Think of the egos, the status- seeking, the allowance-seeking, the pomposities and inflated titles, the supersized protocol department and the hurt national feelings when Mme Ferrero Rocher or Herr und Frau Mercedes Benz are unaccountably missing from the visiting president’s top table.
Diversity is all the rage in most European countries, yet in the EU we aspire to a pointless and perilous uniformity. Why not accept that on political co-operation, as in human affairs in general, we must do the best we can? Better to travel slowly and in hope than to crash, speeding towards an illusory destination.
The idea that all criticism of Brussels is anti-European is as valid as the notion that questioning immigration policy is racist. I have seen the EU in maddening mode, but also at its best. What is certain is that these deeply misguided reforms will stoke jingoistic sentiments in Britain, and perhaps elsewhere.
You can see Prime Minister’s Questions already. What is the cost to the taxpayer of a new tier of transnational diplomats lying abroad for their collective countries, notably the travel budget, the security arrangements, the accommodation, the banquets and the boarding-school fees? Not to mention the translation bill run up by a would-be global superpower that lacks a national language.
Finally there is the comic aspect. The EU is hugely sensitive about status, though careless, it appears, about its dignity. How does it expect the world to react to the sight of an unknown former politician of a medium-sized European country, let alone a Belgian or Luxemburger, junketing from capital to capital playing at being a global power? Seen that way, Ubu Roi and The Government Inspector aren’t in the same league.
George Walden is a former diplomat and Conservative MP. His latest book is China: A Wolf in the World?
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