What do you remember of last week’s European Council?  What images float before your mind’s eye? Which adjective would you choose to sum it up: memorable? historic? a lost opportunity perhaps? conflictual? satisfactory? routine?  Or maybe, despite the recession, the threat of climate change, development and turbulence among our mid-Eastern neighbours, a new European Parliament, you didn’t expect anything much from the principal annual gathering of the leaders of the EU’s member states?

Maybe you remember the farmers with their tractors on the Brussels boulevards?  Who, contrary to expectation (and in a lamentable precedent for every other campaign capable of mounting a street protest) found themselves generously written into the Council’s conclusions.

Maybe you remember a smiling Irish Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, who flew home to Dublin and his ravaged economy clutching the promise of a protocol.  Not only does the Lisbon treaty make no reference to upsetting the current status quo of Ireland’s tax and defence status but a protocol to the next EU Treaty will now confirm that it doesn’t.  How grown-up! A protocol!

Maybe you remember a smiling Gordon Brown, pleased that the British Government will no longer face picking up a hefty tab delivered by a European Regulator.  Or even Mr Barroso, smiling at his unanimous, even if less than whole-hearted, nomination (from a field of one) as President of the next European Commission.

If you bothered to read the Council’s conclusions you would find other bits and pieces but no real political meat – no sense of the stature of the enterprise – Europe facing great challenges, on the threshold of a new Parliament, a new Commission, a new institutional structure.

Instead one could be forgiven for imagining that no one in Europe had any political ambition left at all. That everyone had taken a sleeping pill after a good lunch and were content to doze through the current compendium of crises in the hope that by the time they woke up, President Obama would have sorted most of them out.

At the very least,  by the time they woke up it would be someone else’s Presidency, or a General Election would have intervened, or the Lisbon Referendum (regardless of result) would at least be over and that while asleep they could dream happily about fruity parties in Italian villas and political enemies mired deep in scandal for claiming the costs of moats and duck islands and bath plugs and pornographic films from public funds.

Nor is it just the European Council that seems to be asleep.  The European Parliament has  been elected for a fortnight and despite this being the age of electronic and instant communication has managed to do precious little in the interim.  The party groups are in disarray. There is still no  alternative candidate who might be presented should Mr Barroso’s appointment (as many MEPs wish) not be confirmed in a vote and the signs are that such disarray will persist when it comes to voting.

In the meantime, British Conservative MPs, having dumped their former partners in the European People Party (if the Socialists can split then so can we is the motto of the day),  and having secured the services of a motley collection of individuals and minor parties, have formed a new go-getting group dedicated to opposing the European construction.

In short at this crucial time the European Institutions give every appearance of having botoxed themselves into a paralysis that threatens to prevent any action that might generously and conceivably be described as leadership.

Where is the person – or persons – who,  from whatever political perspective and perhaps from opposing political perspectives,  can embrace the complexity of Europe’s challenges and opportunities and provide a coherent direction to which all can respond?

Ideas have to be tested democratically, of course, but at the moment with Europe facing major challenges on the economic and educational fronts, on the environmental and climate change fronts, on the front of the stability of its diverse societies and around its institutional problems, no-one seems capable of articulating a coherent political vision that resonates beyond the institutions themselves.

More worrying is the absence of those in the medium ranks of the European political hierarchy capable of spelling out such a vision.  No wonder the vision of the European construction has stalled and been replaced with one in which the motto of those in charge is ‘to keep what I have and to try to get more!’

To be fair to him there is one such leader who has a vision and knows how he would like Europe to evolve.  That is Nicolas Sarkozy.  He is not without criticism – at home and abroad.  A good deal of it seems to be justified. Nevertheless when he speaks about Europe – or about France – he articulates a coherent and convincing strategy rather than a series of barely connected sub-strategies. In other words, like Obama, he shows leadership as opposed to simply being the man in charge.

He is not at present a candidate for the European Presidency that the Lisbon Treaty (assuming it is ratified) will bring into being. Indeed who is?  But it is not hard to imagine how last week’s European Council might have been galvanised by a Sarkozy presidency.  A speech – addressed a least as much to citizens as to the European Institutions and behind the scenes some energy injected, some trappings of ceremony, something to give a sense of occasion, a sense of history, a sense of more than passive reaction to events.

“Europe must change too, he told the French Parliament on Monday. “It will not be able to function after the crisis as it did before … Europe must give itself the means to participate in the transformation of the world.”

Of course the European President should be tested democratically.  Which makes it so disgraceful that on the threshold of the second Irish referendum, and with the real prospect of the Lisbon Treaty finally entering force, no-one dare talk about potential Presidents of the Council, or Foreign Ministers – the two posts that the Treaty would create – for fear that individual names and the blatantly undemocratic way they will be foisted upon us might confirm the Irish in their opposition.

Tags: European Council, European Parliament, Lisbon Treaty, Mr Barroso, Nicolas Sarkozy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under EU. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.