Too many cooks

Certainly, there seems no other word than ‘self-indulgent' to describe the latest French campaign to undermine Catherine Ashton. It is wholly pointless - both because, on the immediate casus belli of whether the EU should have treated Haiti's suffering as an opportunity for grand-standing, Ashton was so obviously right and the Barniers and Lellouches so obviously wrong, and because no amount of sniping will alter the facts that she has the job, and has it for five years. Yet this, of course, is what the mischief is really about; it is a temper tantrum occasioned by French consciousness that they could perfectly well have secured the foreign affairs job for themselves, if they had not chosen to prioritise the internal market portfolio instead. Of course, this is scarcely Ashton's fault - but blaming someone else for the unwelcome consequences of one's own decisions is a very human trait. Alas, all sorts of bad behaviour is very human - and that does not make it any more attractive, or productive.

This French carping will make life more difficult for Ashton - but the aim of a stronger European role in the world is much more substantially damaged by the compulsion of Europe's national leaders to crowd into the kitchen regardless of the consequences for the culinary operation in hand. A prime example is the G20, where this obsessive European ‘presenteeism' has expanded the group to twenty-four - with one-third of the seats occupied by Europeans. Fine, if this strengthened Europe's voice in the group's discussions. But it has the opposite effect. Chairing the G20 in Pittsburgh last September President Obama, confronted with a sea of European faces, naturally gave the floor for each new agenda item not to any one of them, but to the Chinese.

Contrary, then, to the familiar dictum, there is actually weakness in numbers - as Europe's leaders again demonstrated in the disastrous finale to the climate change summit in Copenhagen. Climate change had been a success story for Europe - an unusual case of Europeans grasping the urgency of the issue ahead of others, and then making the necessary compromises within the EU to achieve a united policy and position. So why was Europe so completely marginalised in the Copenhagen end-game?

A picture is worth a thousand words, and we all saw the picture - of Barack Obama in the circle of chairs with five European national leaders (Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and the UK), plus President Barroso, plus a dozen sherpas and assorted aides. Did they all have to be there to contribute distinctive view-points to the discussion, or to defend specific interests? Not in the least. At this late and unhappy stage of proceedings, the issue was all too simple - a summit heading towards a conclusion involving neither binding constraints on national emissions nor even a globally-agreed temperature target. All those Europeans were there for no better reason than that each felt him or herself too important not to be.

OK, another all-too-human vanity display,but surely not a hanging offence? But consider. Barack Obama had just come from his meeting with the BRICs, at which the summit outcome was in practice fixed. It was a meeting he had simply gate-crashed, even providing his own chair when the Chinese tried to argue there was no seat for him. Meanwhile, all those indispensable Europeans congregated elsewhere: like a beetle on its back and incapable of righting itself, the inflated collective leadership of Europe could do nothing but wait to learn what outcome had been agreed by others.

The next day, the press in France and Britain (Germany too, no doubt) reflected carefully-briefed accounts of how the summit had been saved from total shipwreck by the extraordinary exertions of the relevant national leader. In truth, European lack of discipline had resulted in a wholly inadequate Copenhagen outcome being determined at a meeting at which no European was even present.

The stronger European foreign policy sought through the Lisbon Treaty requires a willingness on the part of Europe's national leaders to compromise on common policies - and then to allow Europe's designated representatives to take the lead in advocating and negotiating them. This will require self-discipline - some small check on the politician's natural tendency to jostle for a place in the lime-light, to posture for the national media, and to indulge in self-promotion through the denigration of others.

Is this really too much to ask of our national leaders? If it is, then we had better prepare ourselves, Lisbon or no Lisbon, for a deepening European twilight. 


This piece was first posted on Global Europe.