Posts Tagged ‘European President’
No, no, no, no, no!
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on November 17th, 2009
No, no, no, no, no, no! Has it really come to this? Is the selection of the two highest representatives of the European Union to be reduced to some shabby horse-trading to find a lowest common denominator? Is the appointment of those who will now lead the Union into discussions with prime ministers and presidents across the world to be done in a way that would make even eighteenth century leaders wince?
Consider: at a special summit this coming Thursday evening – which may drag on into the next day – the leaders of the 27 member states of the EU will sit down to appoint their semi-permanent President. Whoever is chosen will find themselves the focus of world media attention, whether the appointee (or anyone else) likes it or not.
They will also consider who should be the Union’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy – another post (in effect the Union’s Secretary of State) whose holder will be key in securing the EU’s position in negotiations with other states across the globe.
Member States will also appoint a Secretary-General of the European Council – a lesser post and one not in the international limelight – but nevertheless one with considerable influence. These three positions will be considered jointly, as some sort of ‘team.’
Don’t underestimate the potential capacity of whoever is appointed to these posts to influence the development of the Union internally and to project its interests across the world. On their shoulders will depend in large part whether the Union continues in its present status of economic giant and political pygmy, or whether at last it begins to exert real influence over the issues that matter to Europeans – climate change, human rights, democracy, terrorism, international development, a secure world order – in an otherwise new bipolar world of the USA and China.
To the world outside whoever is chosen will embody the European ideal. Like it or not, the President and the High Representative will become, in media eyes, Europe’s ‘shop window,’ even if they are not so regarded by Europe’s own citizens.
So let us look at how the Union is proposing to appoint these two key representatives. The process appears to break every possible rule in the book. And ‘appoint’ it is. Despite their political nature, any element of direct democracy – even consultative – is ruled out.
There isn’t even a clear understanding of what the jobs entail. In the case of the High Representative various internal duties have been laid down, but his or her role on the world stage and relationship with the President of the Council has not been thought through. Besides with one foot in the Commission and the other in the Council the High Representative will serve two masters – always a recipe for chaos.
The Presidency is equally blighted. Some states want a low-key, backroom ‘fixer.’ Others want someone who can take a rightful place beside Presidents Obama and Hu.
An immediate fault line thus runs right through the selection process between those who want actors who will promote the EU across the world and those who want people who are focused downwards and inwards.
So member states will meet on Thursday to make appointments to positions whose fundamental requirements have not yet been determined. At best this is a recipe for a complete impasse. At worst for appointing someone who represents the lowest common denominator.
One might as well pick names randomly out of a hat. Indeed the process is worse than that. Names picked out of a hat would presumably not be subject to veto by a member state with an axe to grind.
And veto they will – even the best candidates will be vetoed if they do not fit with other members of ‘the team,’ according to an arbitrary set of complex political criteria.
We are thus not looking to find the best people for the job, but for a slate, artificially ‘balanced’ between left-wing and right-wing; between large countries and small; between old member states and new; between male and female; between charismatic candidates and non-charismatic candidates and between federalists and inter-governmentalists.
Nor do we want, apparently, candidates with political ‘baggage’ (like being from a country not in the euro) even if this is completely irrelevant when it comes to doing the job.
Moreover, tradition dictates that candidates should not declare themselves. This makes the whole process appear even more arcane and secretive. Former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga (herself a candiadate for the Presidency) likened the process to embracing a ‘Soviet style contempt for the public.’
And she is right. The Swedish Presidency running this bizarre appointment process knows that we lecture less happier lands on good governance – on correct appointment procedures. We send in consultants. We try to ensure appointments on merit – or else, if they are political appointments, by free and fair election.
Yet at the heart of what Newsweek Magazine last week called ‘The Modest Superpower’ we are about to make three highly important political appointments, which we have yet to define properly, without a whiff of democracy and via an appointment process designed to make it impossible to select the best man or woman for the job on merit alone. Worse, all will be wheeled and dealed behind closed doors. What a shameful and disgraceful position to find ourselves in!
So what can be done? Despite knowing about these appointments, literally for years, no attempt has been made to ascertain precisely what we want from these roles. Nor has any real attention been given to the selection process. That is an indictment both of member states and European Institutions. We may be a modest superpower but at the moment we have much to be modest about.
Why rush these appointments? Would it not be better to take a little longer and to get them right?
What needs to be done? First, reach agreement as to what the roles should entail and how the incumbents should relate to each other. Secondly, have declared candidates, prepared to offer a manifesto. Thirdly, there has to be an element of democracy involved – a consultative on-line referendum, perhaps. Not ideal and not of course binding, but something to give a guide. And fourthly, the final decision should be confirmed (as it will be for the High Representative) by the European Parliament. Let’s not rush this.
Hallowe’en Reflections
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on November 3rd, 2009
Last Saturday – Hallowe’en – I was having dinner with some friends at the elegant house of my French neighbour. We started with slim slivers of chorizo sausage – she has always been extraordinarily fond of Spain, so much so that she learned Spanish at the age of 12 and wrote up all her school notes in it. At least it stopped others from copying her homework, she used to say.
The chorizo was followed by what she called ‘Bat Soup.’ And so may it have been, for the liquid was thick and black. The sort of thing one imagines Macbeth’s witches may have kept in their cauldrons. But this had been through a blender and so was richly smooth and tasty. I suspect it was made with lentils rather than bats, but anyway it was just the thing to keep out the dark and blowy autumnal weather through which the local children struggled with their pumpkin lanterns and pointed hats, trick-or-treating on the street outside.
After a suitable ‘pause’ we turned our attentions to some excellent organic chicken; but I won’t go on with the culinary delights of the French table. I mention the chicken and the lentils; they will do for a starter. They have an interest beyond the gastronomic as we shall see.
Not surprisingly, this being the Saturday after the ending of the European Council – which seems to have ended with even less substantial agreement than European Councils traditionally end with these days – our dinner-table talk turned quickly from ghosts and ghouls to the European Union and what my mother-in-law would have called its ‘doings.’ Specifically, we turned to who should not occupy the post that is – as I predicted it would be – now called ‘President of Europe,’ at least in the public imagination.
Richard Laming makes an interesting point in his excellent Federal Union blog (29 October) – contrasting the general lack of public interest – even at times among the political parties – in the (indirectly) elected President of the European Commission with the rather greater public interest in who might eventually take the Chair (the presidency) of the European Council.
This post is created by the (still unsigned) Lisbon Treaty and is in the gift of the 27 member state governments who, at the time of asking, continue to be rather at sea over what they want the person appointed actually to do. They would be more comfortable, I suspect, choosing someone to put on a plinth than having to make a difficult decision about a job that inevitably (if it is to be done usefully) will involve some measure of their being coerced.
This defining of the job, you might have thought, should really come before getting down to the business of assessing candidates. Phrases about carts and horses spring to mind. Do you, or do you not want someone to stop the traffic?
One of the informal (but nevertheless significant) conclusions of last week’s European Council is that Tony Blair is now out of the race. Barring a resurrection from the dead worthy of Hallowe’en itself I cannot see a revival of his chances. He does excite strong personal anathema (I was the only one to defend him last Saturday) though why any British person would rather have a non-Briton appointed to such a post, I find hard to fathom. Would France try to exclude one of its own, I wonder?
The popular press complains endlessly about how ‘Brussels’ forces us to eat straight cucumbers and bent bananas and do strange things with olive oil. Why then when the bookies odds-on favourite for the job is (or at least was) a Briton and a winner of three elections to boot we should turn against him quite so furiously is a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie. Still popular outcry is a form of faux-democracy, I suppose.
Real democracy (even in some indirect form) in connection with these Lisbon posts is of course ruled out. The member states would never countenance undermining the stature of their own elected heads. But in the absence of democracy, surely we owe it to the taxpayers of Europe to secure, on merit, the best available person for the job.
Blair may be out of the running but the discussion remains about – in the occupational psychologist’s phrase – ‘fitting the job to the man (or woman)’ - choosing someone and then seeing what they can do – rather than on ‘fitting the man to the job’ – that is deciding what skills the ‘President of Europe’ requires and then appointing the best candidate on merit – regardless of gender, party allegiance or anything else.
The tragedy of the present proposals is that they offer neither merit nor democracy – a formula that may have an all too predictable outcome.
Look at the recent European Council. Its conclusions are a forest of loose ends, particularly over climate change. In a field where Europe could once claim unity and leadership, we risk becoming a fractious – and leaderless – also-ran.
Moreover, given that we are little more than a month away from the potentially world-changing Copenhagen climate conference, the European Union needed to be able to demonstrate its coherence by reaching agreement both on its contributions to developing world assistance – the ‘burden’ - and on how that burden was to be shared internally. It failed.
But need it have failed? It is far from impossible to imagine that a charismatic and authoritative President of the Council could have brought events to a happier and more determined set of conclusions and carried the result through to Copenhagen. I continue to believe that Blair, for instance, could have secured a better result. But what is passed is passed. The important thing now is to recognise the actual job to be done: a big, heavyweight job if Europe is not to be eclipsed.
Any President will also need to be persuasive far beyond the Council. For instance new reports of the threat posed by intensive livestock production (one report suggests that, with its ancillary activities, livestock rearing now generates 51 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions) suggest we shall need persuading to end our growing dependency on corn-fed meat, switching to foodstuffs and rearing systems that place less of a load on the environment.
Like chicken and lentils, perhaps? And slice that chorizo extra fine, please.
Only Side Windows in Spaceship Berlaymont
Posted by: Peter Sain ley Berry in EU on July 7th, 2009
It is 40 years since I watched the first moon landing live, or almost live, on a black and white television one fine summer morning. Neil Armstrong stepped down from ‘Eagle,’ the lunar module, and through the crackles of space and the confines of his helmet pronounced those words about ‘a giant leap for mankind’ that have resonated ever since.
As the first man on the moon Neil Armstrong subsequently became a celebrity and absurdly fashionable to the extent that hairs from his head would sell for $50. Unlike that of subsequent moon men, whose accomplishment was promptly forgotten to the extent that no-one now even remembers their names, Armstrong’s celebrity status became oppressive. To survive, he elected to become a recluse.
In this he followed his boyhood hero – the pioneer Charles Lindbergh – the first man to fly from New York to Paris. Lindbergh succeeded just hours after his French competitors, Nungesser and Coli, had disappeared into the fastness of the Atlantic Ocean. For some unfathomable reason the two Frenchmen chose to make the trip westwards – from Paris to New York – thereby flying against the prevailing winds. They didn’t make it.
Lindbergh might have had a rather more comfortable future had L’Oiseau Blanc, the French aeroplane, not been overcome by ice or had not birds perhaps flown into the engine. The remains of Nungesser and Coli’s craft are thought to lie near the French Laurentian islands of St Pierre-et-Miquelon, well known for their freezing fogs and where a search is currently continuing. So near, so far.
Still unaware of their fate, Lindbergh took off from a muddy field outside New York, hauling the single-engined flying fuel tank that was the ‘Spirit of St Louis’ into the air and setting course along the Great Circle route for Paris, which destination (up the Seine, twice around the Eiffel tower and then look for the lights of Le Bourget) he finally achieved, despite problems with ice, with falling asleep, and getting so lost that he had to ask directions out of the window while circling an Irish trawler.
Like Armstrong, he had no idea that his biggest problem would not be the flight (in 1927 Paris must have seemed as distant as the moon) but the ensuing celebrity. Enjoyable at first, it later became crushing. Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped for ransom and later killed. The man himself became a recluse, devising elaborate routines to keep himself hidden from public view; routines that were later copied and imitated by Armstrong.
Strangely enough, another instance connects the two men. Neither the ‘Spirit of St Louis’ nor ‘Eagle,’ the first piloted craft to land upon the moon, possessed front facing windows, something considered vital in most vehicles.
In the case of ‘Spirit of St Louis’ the triangular space where the windscreen might have been was taken by yet another fuel tank. And in the lunar module? Well – I won’t do all the work for my readers.
So when a computer course proved faulty and with just a few seconds of fuel remaining, Armstrong had to land manually, he could only steer the craft by looking out of a passenger window. Lindbergh did have a species of periscope but mostly he had to turn crab-wise to get a bearing.
Should any readers have followed me thus far they may well be asking what any of this has to do with the European political scene. Well, it is simply this: hearing again about the moon landings and the side windows made me think that this seemed an apt analogy for how Europe’s political leadership struggles to guide the European construction.
Whereas Lindbergh and Armstrong could, to a certain extent, turn sideways to see what lay before them, our European leaders seem incapable of doing the same thing. As a result they constantly run head-on into problems which they have not perceived, but which are clear to anyone outside Spaceship Berlaymont.
Looking through the side windows, our leaders see only what is passing. They are therefore given to projecting their plans into the future as if it were a blank space. Moreover, since the configuration of their craft does not actually permit them to view the terrain ahead, they perceive it as they would like it to be, rather than as it actually is. It is, sadly, the common fault of visionaries.
This in part explains why European leaders have been taken aback by successive democratic ‘shocks:’ in Ireland twice, in France (almost twice if you count the whiskered Maastricht result) in Denmark and in the Netherlands. It explains why confidence in the European leadership is at such a low ebb and why, despite great efforts, interest in and turnout for the European Parliament elections is pathetic given their potential importance.
Looking out of the side windows today the focus is all on the Lisbon Treaty and the second Irish referendum. It is not on the future – on what is likely to happen when Lisbon is in place. The Irish, shocked by the recession that has ravaged their buoyant economy, will probably be cowed into voting ‘yes’ this second time round. But would they be voting ‘yes’ had their been no recession?
Isn’t the real problem which, with their front vision occluded, European leaders cannot see, the fact that ordinary people have no control over the direction in which they are being taken? Over what is being done in their name?
And now, in this already febrile consensus, Europeans will find they have foist upon them, in sudden and grotesque manner, a new college of European Commissioners, a new Foreign Minister – in effect a European Secretary of State – new Presidents of the European Parliament, of the European Commission, and a President of the European Council who will doubtless become the grandest panjandrum of them all, a European President seated beside Obama, Medvedev and Hu in global councils.
We are probably but a few months from all this but, with few exceptions, the runners in this glittering race are hidden away from public view: no names, no policies, no programmes.
All will be selected behind closed doors in a stitch-up between countries and between parties.
This, I predict, will cause trouble ahead – it is our moon rushing up to meet us. But as they look through their side windows, it is one our leaders are still failing to see.
Photograph is courtesy of NASA
