Posts Tagged protectionism

Poland has organised a get-together of central and eastern European member states at its diplomatic mission in Brussels on Sunday. It is to be a small informal conflab on the economic crisis before the big informal conflab on the economic crisis.

Every member state from the region is going. Except Slovenia. “We were not invited,” said a spokesperson sanguinely. Eurozone member Slovenia, which is not in recession and says it will not breach the 3 percent of GDP budget deficit ceiling of the euro stability pact, considers itself an economic cut above the rest of the region.

“There is no need for Slovenia to participate at the mini-summit. We, as an euro-group member, are actively involved in dealing with the crisis in the framework of EU,” Europe minister Mitja Gaspari said on Monday.

“The position of Slovenia in this framework is clearly defined, so we do not need other forms of cooperation, especially those that are not institutionally defined,” he continued.

The minister’s (sniffy) response makes an important point. The EU’s current high-level meeting spree is helping undermine the bloc’s unity towards this economic crisis.

The pre-G20 meeting Berlin last week was attended by a hotchpotch of member states – Germany, France, UK and Italy (all G7 countries); Spain and the Netherlands (there because they managed to squeeze their way into a G20 meeting late last year); the Czech Republic (by virtue of being the EU presidency country); Luxembourg (because its leader chairs the eurozone) and the European Commission.

Several other states grumbled about not being invited – although given the vagueness of the statements agreed after the meeting, it does not look like they missed much.

But splinter summits are not the way the EU should be doing things. Yet the European Commission is validating the practice by attending the Polish gathering on Sunday.

Meanwhile, EU diplomats say that France has not abandoned its idea of holding a high-level summit just for eurozone countries.

Poland has played down the significance of its Sunday gathering, saying it has regular meetings in this configuration and that originally the meeting had been planned for Warsaw and was only changed to Brussels for convenience. This is a somewhat disingenuous argument given the high-octane nature of discussion in the EU at the moment.

No misbehaving presidents?
In a probable boost for the gravitas and unity of both of Sunday’s summits however, the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, is not coming.

Klaus’ well-known eurosceptic views and staunch defence of more market deregulation is unlikely to have given rise to a conciliatory discussion around the table.

But who needs Klaus for a bit of controversy when the EU has Nicolas Sarkozy? The French president’s bullish and unrepentant defence of moves to protect this country’s car industry means the summit will anyway get off to a prickly start.