Archive for December, 2009

Keep your hands off my new commission was president Jose Manuel Barroso’s message during his third question hour in parliament on Tuesday.

Austrian Socialist deputy Hannes Swoboda wanted to know if Barroso was “in principle” ready to accept that commissioners’ portfolios could be swapped if MEPs deemed it necessary during hearings in January.

As if Barroso was going to voluntarily let that genie out of the bottle again.  “We should concentrate more on matters of policy (and) of substance,” he sniffed before reminding the (near-empty) chamber that after five years he’s in a safe enough position to judge how to internally organise the commission.

But it was a curiously anemic exchange. Martin Schulz, leader of the Socialists and always good for a fight – whether one is warranted or not – sat slumped in his chair.

The topic de jour – the 2020 economic strategy – did make an appearance and in Barroso’s case always in the same sentence as “full ownership.” This is shorthand for making it painful for member states not to hold to their strategic promises. Alas, this appears more difficult than actually drawing up the strategy itself. There should be ways of “measuring progress” said Barroso vaguely at one stage.

If any member state held a Minaret-building referendum, à la Suisse, asked far-right MEP Marine Le Pen at one point, would the result be recognized by the EU? That’s a hypothetical question, said Mr Barroso dismissively. No it’s not, she replied.

There followed a brief grammar lesson.

“My French may not be as good as yours,” began Barroso - a sentence construction which always indicates the user believes the opposite – “If you use the word ‘if’, that’s a hypothetical question.”

And the rules of the game remain something of a mystery.  Please tell me you can see that I want to ask a question so I can stop jumping around, begged a deputy in the middle of the debate. At one point, the blue card – which people can hold up in order to spontaneously contribute a word – could not be used “because it is a discussion between two people,” said EP chief Jerzy Buzek, apparently trying to make things clearer.

He pleaded (twice), futilely as it turned out, for MEPs to consider whether two questions really can be answered in one minute. “Don’t give two questions in two minutes. Which (question of yours) do you prefer?” The deputy concerned evidently considered both his questions to be gems.

Buzek might also have referred to lengthy or dramatic introductions to questions – perhaps next time. “Even in the dark days of recession, you can dream of utopia,” began one MEP breathlessly.

One hour a month of skating over a multitude of topics is apparently not enough however. MEPs want more face-time with the commission president. At the end of the session, a British MEP reminded Barroso that he has a “huge salary.” Surely one that merited at least 30 more minutes of question time, he queried rather belligerently.

There was a small pause to let that one sink in.

“Mr President Barroso is smiling very politely. But we have to see about that,” said Buzek. Actually, it was Buzek who was being polite at that particular juncture. You couldn’t see Barroso for the dust.

By Diego Lopez Garrido’s reckoning, the Spanish EU presidency is going to summit its way into the Guinness Book of Records.

Spain’s loquacious Secretary of State for EU affairs says there will be up to ten summits during the country’s six month spin at the helm of the European Union. These include bilateral meetings with Russia, Pakistan, Mexico, Canada, the US, Morocco (the first ever), Latin American countries and Mediterranean countries.

“We are going to enter the ‘Guinness book of summits’ with nine or ten summits. We will be a very, very external presidency”, he said before an audience at the European Policy Centre on Tuesday.

Spain’s presidency, beginning 1 January, will be a curiosity in the arcane world of EU institutional goings-on. It will be the first under the new Lisbon Treaty, and, as such, gets to (begin to) write the template for those that follow.

At stake is proving that the new system will lead to both internal and external coherency – not a given under the new Lisbon set-up.

The rotating presidency runs the day-to-day affairs of the EU while the new permanent president represents the EU abroad in CFSP issues and chairs the regular EU leader meetings – but there are plenty of grey areas. Including the natural, but not writable-into-a-treaty, idea that national politicians enjoy the limelight, and will generally gravitate towards it if given an opening.

Detailed procedural rules have been drawn up to stage manage the system, but as with so much it will come down to the personalities involved. Working in the new system’s favour is that fact that it has the mild-mannered Herman Van Rompuy as its first permanent president and Spain (ie not France or the UK or Germany) as its first presidency country.

So far, Madrid has trod the careful line of underlining that it will be a “loyal” presidency country that will not seek to compete with the new presidency and foreign policy posts and pointing out that it does not wish to be sidelined either.

The summits will throw up some potentially interesting political choreography in this respect.

If held in the third country, then the EU will be represented by Van Rompuy, top diplomat Catherine Ashton and commission president Barroso. But if held in the presidency country ( And Spain would like to host the EU-US summit, says Lopez Garrido) the national prime minister will also have a role. “[Prime minister Zapatero] will also be a part of the meeting in some way,” said an EU official. “We’ll have to see what Spain makes of it.”

Another little wrinkle that may need to be sorted out in the coming months is EU representation at G20 meetings. Commission president Barroso will attend, but should Van Rompuy? He represents the EU in CFSP issues only, so it’s not clear, say diplomats.

Can the approach to an EU referendum taken in one national context be transferred to another? At face value, the answer would be no. Citizens of one member state are a product of the political and social mores of that country, shaped by the economic climes and the political context of the moment, and where they perceive their country to be/or ought to be in Europe.

So from that point of view, ‘How to win an EU referendum’ was a rather ambitious title for a debate on Monday at the Centre for European Policy Studies.

But EU expert Prof. Brigid Laffan, principal of University College Dublin and chair of Ireland for Europe, a pro-treaty group that campaigned strongly in Ireland’s second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, suggests there are general lessons that can be learned for others with referendums in the offing (possibly Iceland on EU membership or Denmark on one or all of their opt-outs at some stage down the line). Ireland, of course, has had four EU referendums in this decade alone.

Chief among the lessons is that governments, ready and able to fight political battles, are not able to effectively deal with referendums and that the centre – as opposed to extreme left and right – is the hardest section of the electorate to get enthused.

To counteract these factors, says the Irish academic, there must be mobilisation beyond political parties to the civil society, while the government of the day has to move quickly to both frame the main message and how it is delivered.

Prof. Laffan detailed all the different measures she and her team took to help turn the No of 2008 to a Yes this year.

They met the editors of newspapers to discuss the Lisbon Treaty referendum,  they pulled up state broadcaster RTE when it made any factual mistakes, they confronted archbishops whose flocks might be led astray by the “Catholic right,” they tried to “elevate the context” by moving it beyond a vote on the government and linking a Yes vote to cultural figures in Irish society, such as the Poet Seamus Heaney.  The message was tailored – sometimes it was a person standing outside schools – as was the messenger: cultural icons to businessmen and sports personalities.

“We’re talking about marketing; who shouts the loudest. In a referendum situation, the actual text [of the treaty] is irrelevant,” remarked Hugo Brady of the Centre for European Reform during the debate. By his clear-eyed account, the Irish are not necessarily any more pro-European after having voted for the Lisbon Treaty, nor are they, as was claimed by relieved Irish politicians after the October 3 vote, now the most well-educated about the EU.

An after-vote assessment  survey published in November showed that the while 15 percent found the yes side convincing in 2008 (when the government was widely seen to have been overtaken by a vigorous No camp faced by Declan Ganley of Libertas), this figure jumped to 67 percent in 2009. In 2008, the reverse was true. Some 67 percent found the No side convincing last year, a figure that dropped to 18 percent this year.

However, the same survey also showed that the economic context helped swing the vote, with anxious Irish voters hit badly by the fallout-out from the financial crisis. Nearly one in four people voted Yes for economic reasons, the biggest change in grounds for a Yes vote given when compared to Lisbon 1. And this although the Lisbon Treaty, per se, is not going to create jobs.

Well, as I said, there is a limit to how much  can be extrapolated from one national context and used in another. However, it was an interesting overview, if only to show the below-the-radar slog work that went into turning the vote around.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Michel Barnier will single-handedly be able to bring the City of London to its knees and sink Britain’s economy while he’s at it.

That he will be able to propose and then get legislation on to the member states’ statute books all by himself. And that this is just what he intends to do once he gets his hands on the internal market portfolio early next year.

Paris’ European Commissioner nominee is just that – a nominee to be a European Commissioner. Not France’s commissioner. Not Sarkozy himself. Barnier will be part of a legislative apparatus that includes the parliament and member states.

Yes, Nicolas Sarkozy’s comments about the English being the biggest “losers” in the commission line-up are unnecessarily provocative.

But they say more about the French president, who has a track-record of intemperate comments, than about Barnier’s future intentions on financial regulation. They also are as much about playing to the national gallery and have been reported in French newspapers as such.

Paris and London do have strong – fundamental even – differences over financial regulation. And these will continue to be played out over the coming months – regardless of who takes up the internal market portfolio. The current uproar, written up to the hilt in  some British papers, accords Barnier too much power. The forum for the battles will be among MEPs and council of ministers.

As for the man himself, already in conciliatory mode (I am not an ideologue” he said Wednesday. “Everybody needs to calm down.”), he proved to be a ‘European’ Commissioner when he handled the regional portfolio under Romano Prodi. Let’s wait and see what he does on the job this time round.

I am not sure there was any foreign policy stone left unturned in the highly anticipated Q&A session between MEPs and the new EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, this morning.

Over two hours, member of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee managed to include questions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Arctic, Russia, energy security, neighbourhood policy, Eastern partnership, transatlantic relations, central America, Africa, Sri Lanka, China, human rights, the Balkans, Cuba, development, the Middle East and the Honduras elections.

It’s a range that could have tripped any seasoned foreign policy expert. But Ashton – one and a half days into her new role – emerged mostly unscathed, largely by virtue of claiming (legitimately) that she did not have time to respond.

In one sequence, she had, by my count, at least 13 questions to answer in her allotted five minutes.

The high tally of that particular round was thanks to British Conservative MEP Charles Tannock who expressed concern about her “qualifications” for the job and then went on, apparently in an effort to underline his point, to ask questions on Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine, the Atalanta mission and the EU-Columbia free trade agreement.

Only one MEP, the Finn Heidi Hautela, limited herself to one question for the new top diplomat.

Aside from simple time constraints, Ashton also carefully avoided detailed answers on virtually all questions. She pointed out, reasonably enough, that she needs to give a “considered opinion” after getting properly briefed and not a “gut reaction.”

She was oddly quiet on the external action service though – an issue where she does have a proper say.

How it is set up, where it sits, its staff and budget questions were obviously going to be brought up by MEPs, who are itching to have democratic oversight and control over the new body. Around six different deputies raised the issue but she only answered – that she had not yet decided- when pressed by the committee chairman.

There was some grumbling that her answers were evasive or not detailed. “That telephone number is now yours,” said one MEP, referring to the Kissinger conundrum, and pressing her to answer on whether she recognized the election in Honduras.

“I was very concerned that you haven’t been able to answer many questions” said another and urged more details in January, when her formal hearing as vice-president of the commission will take place.

But she played a bit of music for MEPs’ ears by pledging to come to the chamber frequently, saying she is willing to be held to account by them and asking them to help her get her job right. They will also be likely pleased to hear that her office will be in the European Commission – symbolically an important decision.

Ashton showed her steely side by putting Tannock in place on why she was chosen (“The answer is that 27 heads of government invited me to. I may not be your choice but I appear to be theirs”). And blind-sided another British Conservative who asked her to resign if the Conservatives come to power next year and seek a fresh mandate because she was “an afterthought.”

“Can I say your leader was one of the first to congratulate me. I do not think he is seeking my resignation,” she retorted.

It wasn’t a polished performance but it was quietly confident.