Two cheers for Gordon Brown's speech
While wearing White Tails at the Lord Mayors' banquet this week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown still managed to show a little leg on his European policy. He called for a "Global Europe", a continent that is "outward looking, open, internationalist."
Based on a pamphlet issued by the Foreign Office in the run-up to last month's Lisbon Summit, the Prime Minister called for a union that could act on the "economic, security and environmental imperatives of globalisation."
Gone should be the days of institutional navel-gazing. In their place should be an EU as a foreign policy actor, able to "focus on the real issues that matter to people". What are these? In the words of the Foreign Office pamphlet "Global Europe": competitiveness, jobs, the environment, security.
The Prime Minister's rhetoric marks a not-so-subtle shift from his days at the Treasury, when newspaper headlines like "Brown tells EU to face reality" were more common. Always against what he once called "a doctrinaire isolationist stance", the Prime Minister then preferred to look at the EU's motor - calling for "changes to be competitive, job creating. . . .focused on growth" - rather than where the car was actually going.
Two cheers, then, for the Prime Minister's conversion: one because he is making a positive case for how the EU can amplify Member State policies and two because he is rightly focusing the debate on what should be the next stage of the Union's experiment - an outward-looking attempt at addressing the world's challenges, be their economic or security-based.
There is no occasion to give three cheers. For many of the obstacles to "Global Europe" remain and the Prime Minister's speech suggests that these have yet to be resolved. Two issues are key for the EU to become more outward-looking: a fine-tuned institutional set-up, including greater cooperation between the various EU bodies and a new EU Foreign Minister (albeit not in name), and continued enlargement eastwards and into the Balkans. Gordon Brown has yet to make an explicit and positive case for the Lisbon Treaty's new bureaucratic arrangements.
Perhaps most worryingly, nowhere in his speech does Prime Minister Brown mention the most successful EU policy to date and one that Britain can be proud of having championed: enlargement.
Enlargement remains the EU's most effective tool to engender political and economic change in candidate countries (Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey) and in the pre-candidate countries of the Western Balkans, while the eventual membership of these countries will make the Union's more open and competitive. The absence of enlargement in the Prime Minister's vision of "Global Europe" is worrying.
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Comments for this entry are closed.
Daniel, was a pleasure to meet you F2F in Berlin.
One year ago I posted Tony Blairs speech at the same event:
http://voyager.zaadz.com/blog/2006/11/a_banquet_and_after_dinner_speech
My feeling is that the distance from 2 Cheers to Three Cheers -for Merkel, Sarkozy et al. too - is a more profound understanding of the whole process for Europe``s transition into Future. Enlargement of EU and AND stronger role outwards demands an in depth intelligence of large scale global change.
Again I recommend consideration of ECFR for the aproach of Don Beck and Spiral Dynamics.Don Beck already worked with staff of Tony Blair and has decades of experience in facilitating global change. Check his homepage. See this article for overview:
Stages of Social Development
The Cultural Dynamics that Spark Violence,
Spread Prosperity, and Shape Globalization
Don Edward Beck, Ph. D.
http://www.humanemergence.org/essays/stages_of_social_development.htm
This year IHT, reporting about Gordon Brown, seems to witness some continuation of UK in concordance with EU:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/13/africa/britain.php
Very best, from Berlin,
Albert KLamt
Zwei Fragen:
1.) Ist eine ?bersetzung der englischsprachigen Experten-Meinungen ins Deutsche geplant?
2.) Wo verbergen Sie Ihren RSS-Feed?
Since Official Launch of ECFR at Nov 9 in Berlin there is some silence here.
Want to repeat some considerations from Alberto Masetti_Zannini, author of Globalab Blog, which he posted in October. With response from Mark Leonard.
http://globalab.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/ecfr-a-tale-of-premature-senescence/#comments
Adding:
How will ECFR concretely avoid simple duplication of conventional think tank procedures?
How to enlargen global conversations? Is Web 2.0 full spectrum in the pipeline? Webcast? Podcast?
How will the dialogue with voices of civil society be shaped? Fresh perspectives, thinking and Blueprint of action beyond the usual crowds of journalists, experts and politicians?
What kind of Public European Sphere is intended for next 10 years?
Very best, from Berlin
Albert KLamt
Daniel Korski, I have posted an article fairly critical of Gordon Brown’s view and your assessment on my blog.
Hi Ralf,
Thank you for your comments on your blog: http://grahnlaw.blogspot.com/. To everyone else, Ralk wrote the following in reaction to my commentary:
“I wonder. Is this indicative of the level of engagement, clarity of vision and concreteness of proposals the ECFR is going to expect from the European Union and the national leaders?
In that case establishing the new think-tank was a waste of energy and money.
Gordon Brown almost overlooking the European Union may not have come as much of a surprise, but the ECFR, too? Let us hope that more comprehensive European analyses and agendas are forthcoming.”
It’s great to see people like you, Ralf, following ECFR’s development so closely. I have to say, though, I don’t know what you expected from my commentary. Gordon Brown was making a broad-brushed argument about the UK’s role in the world and how he saw relations with the the EU. Missing from this was a strong case for enlargement, which otherwise features in the FCO’s pamphlet upon which the speech seemed largely based. he did, however, make a positive case for the EU, which is not always usual coming from a British Prime Minister.
ECFR obviously conducts the kind of in-depth analysis you seek. See for example our Russia report: .“http://www.ecfr.eu/content/entry/commentary_russia_power_audit/ But surely there is room for comments on key developments, speeches etc. that do not pretend to have all the answers….
Cheers
Daniel