Lavengro in Spain

Denis McShane on St Tony

Yesterday I went to the dentist. As I sat in the waiting room I picked up a news magazine and found myself reading an article by Denis McShane. McShane is a British Labour MP, a hack who is trundled out every so often to write propaganda articles in newspapers that make the party look EU-friendly. That is a hard job for anyone of course. The article that I saw was a hagiography of Tony Blair; it had been reprinted and translated from Newsweek, where it was published on 2 November. I have found the original here. It contains some fascinating nuggets.

Like his mentor Bill Clinton, tony [sic] Blair is poised to become the comeback kid of his generation … Europe's 27 prime ministers, presidents, and chancellors will soon have to pick a person to speak in their name. And the odds favor Blair.

Well, we all make mistakes sometimes, but we don't all go overboard for lost causes quite so spectacularly.

Gordon Brown (privately) and Silvio Berlusconi (publicly) are vigorously pushing Blair forward,

With friends like that, how can he lose?

A Stop Blair Web site has already collected 38,000 signatures, and Britain's Tories are leading the charge to block him.

Does this mean that Britain's Tories are running the Stop Blair web site? If so, it is untrue. Does it mean that the Stop Blair web site is uninfluential? That is also untrue. What on earth does it mean?

This Conservative opposition is somewhat surprising, for when Blair's name was first floated this summer, party leader David Cameron let it be known he was comfortable with the prospect.

I can find no reference for this barefaced surprising statement. There is no doubt that after the summer Cameron was doing all he could to oppose Blair’s candidature. A further point: Blair's name was not first floated this summer; it was floated in the Guardian on 2 February 2008.

Like-minded European leaders, such as the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, also support him.

Merkel never allowed the slightest hint of her preference to be made public but it is hard to see any reason why she should have wanted Blair. Sarkozy seems to have changed his mind several times, but in the end he didn’t support Blair. (At the crucial meeting it seems he, and he alone, supported Juncker. A vote could have been forced leaving him isolated but they chose to agree unanimously on Van Rompuy. Here in French.)

Blair's right-wing, Europhobic opposition has found strange bedfellows on Europe's anti-American left, which cannot forgive him for being one of the architects of the Iraq War.

That is true, and not only of the anti-American left. Illegal warmonging is not widely approved of in Europe.

Europe’s socialists also resent him for winning three elections by explicitly rejecting Old Labour's socialist statist shibboleths—principles to which many other left-wing parties remain loyal.

In Spain and Germany there are separate Social Democrat (social market) and Socialist (statist) parties. (Confusingly, the Spanish socialist party PSOE is Social Democrat and the Portuguese Socialist Party is Conservative) The parties that make up the Socialist group in the European Parliament are the Social Democrats. The statist Socialists (IU in Spain, Die Linke in Germany) are different. In France the left is in a state of introspective chaos that makes Labour look like a happy band of brothers, and in Italy the left simply can’t get its act together despite Berlusconi.

Rounding out the anti-Tony coalition are old European grandees like former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who craves the post for himself

Perhaps he does, perhaps he doesn’t, but I don’t believe it either way just because a British Labour MP tells me so.

and Romano Prodi, Italy's ex–prime minister and ex-president of the EU Commission.

and, by the way, the ex-leader of the Italian Social Democrats.

These two have begun huffing and puffing that Blair shouldn't be allowed to be president because Britain doesn't even use the euro or participate in the Schengen zone, which allows EU citizens to drive across frontiers without passport checks.

These two and a few hundred million others think it unacceptable that a man from a country that is semi-detached from the EU, a man who did nothing to advance the cause of the EU when he was PM, should become the President.

Blair also did the EU a favor by never holding a referendum on the euro in the United Kingdom, for, as in Sweden, that vote would have resulted in a resounding no, and such outcomes have set back the cause of European integration in the past.

Let me try to put the world right way up again! Blair came to Downing St as a pro-European prime minister. He could have made the case for joining the euro and engaging more closely with the EU. He did not do so because instead he chose to sell himself and his country to Rupert Murdoch and George Bush respectively. Yet according to McShane we are supposed to be grateful to him, for not having even made the attempt to advance the EU in the UK!

Britain does perform modest checks on EU citizens at its airports

Like anyone else entering the UK, passport details of EU citizens are scanned at airports and recorded in a data base. The atmosphere in which these ‘modest checks’ are performed is similar to that of the border crossing to East Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s. I know what I am saying and I mean it literally.

If he seemed to spurn the Union in trivial ways,

Such as trivially supporting Bush’s war in Iraq against the rest of the EU, and proposing enlargement with the sole aim of weakening the Union.

it's worth pointing out that Britain under him was the second-biggest net contributor to the EU budget—no small matter.

And did it moan and want to pay less! And did it do its best to stop any money going to finance the enlargement that it had proposed so fervently! It certainly didn't work out that through amicable engagement that budget contribution could have given it a huge amount of influence.

Other names are being kicked about, but those candidates all have drawbacks: they either also signed on to the Iraq invasion,

Who is that, Mr McShane? Aznar did but he is no longer in office. Berlusconi did but he is out of things. But what is meant by ‘signing on to the Iraq invasion’? Aznar certainly backed it personally but Spanish troops did not join the initial invasion; they only went after the UN had legitimised the occupation. Berlusconi backed out in the end too. Barroso, who hosted the Azores meeting, is now the President of the Commission.

or they're now on the Kremlin's payroll

Who is that, Mr McShane?

or they lack Blair's fluent French, which counts for a lot in Southern Europe.

Jean-Claude Juncker, a candidate from Luxembourg, also obviously speaks French. As does the man who eventually got the job. Van Rompuy also speaks Dutch, English and German. The usefulness of French in southern Europe is still valid, but it is rapidly giving way to English. German is useful in dealing with eastern Europe. The ability of the President to speak French counts for more in Paris than in southern Europe!

Blair offers a big advantage: he'll bring with him the vision thing that Europe often lacks. Limiting himself to just a few major interventions a year, Blair could speak for Europe at a global level.

A part-time President?

He could use the post as a bully pulpit

We don’t like bullies in the EU, however popular they may be in the UK. The English word bullying is used in Spanish to describe the phenomenon in schools.

and help the EU regain the enthusiasm that was generated 25 years ago when Jacques Delors worked with Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand to create the single market, launch the euro, and thus transform the old, cozy European Economic Community into something bigger and much more meaningful.

Blair did nothing about the euro. He did everything he could to stop the EU from working efficiently in 2005 (see here) – not to mention in 2003, and the best that can be said about the British presidency in 2006 is that it didn't do any actual harm.

The biggest question is probably for Blair himself: does he really want to quit the lecture circuit, where he can currently earn $100,000 for a single speech? Or his job trying to promote economic development for the Palestinians? The answer is likely yes. Blair has spent his whole life in public service, turning down more lucrative options as a young man to spend years in opposition before finally winning power.

What a choice! My heart bleeds for him.

Now openly a Catholic, he also seems impelled by a moral sense of duty, even if his particular choices sometimes outrage other moralists.

Such as the then Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope, who both opposed the invasion of Iraq.

His passion for Europe also informed his time in office, even if he never managed to sell the EU to the British public.

Of course he didn’t manage to do it. He didn’t try to do it!

Meanwhile, Blair has watched his friend Bill Clinton fade into policy irrelevance after stepping down.

A not unknown fate for American ex-presidents, I think.

Now Blair has a rare chance to avoid that fate, and he seems sure to take it—so long as European leaders cooperate by thinking big instead of acting small. To make the job work, Europe's elected leaders are also going to have to share the limelight. But if anyone can persuade them to, it's President Blair.

Angela, Nicolas, José-Luis, Donald, Gordon, Silvio. Come on there. Stop skulking and hiding backstage. Get out in the limelight!

EU appointments – the dust settles

Last year’s European Parliament elections were won by the Christian Democrats, the EPP becoming the largest group. It was also the case that most of the 27 EU countries had prime ministers from the right. It was thus obvious, clear and well-known to anyone who took the trouble to be informed about such things – by reading a European newspaper for example – that the first permanent President of the European Council would come from that group. This is not only power politics. If you have a committee of 27 people divided into different factions and not owing their positions to the chairman of that committee, it makes sense for the chairman to be from the dominant faction; it makes it easier for the committee to work. It was also expected that the Socialists would get the number two post of High Representative.

Such dealing is the stuff of European politics, at national level as well as in the EU. That this was not clear to people in Britain says a number of things: that the British people don’t know what is going on in Europe or how things are done there is, after 35 years of British membership, a terrible indictment of the country’s media and politicians, who have failed to explain this. Rather, it would be if those media themselves understood the situation. They don’t: ‘Barring unforeseen accidents or a last-minute stealth candidate, the spanking new job of “president of Europe” looks to be Tony Blair's for the asking.’ The Guardian 8-10-09. (Compare: ‘Blair will not become the President of Europe.’ This blog 12-3-2008). The Independent is no better. Twice today (here and here) it claims, apparently quite genuinely, that its campaign against Blair was ‘wot won it’. The Stop Blair petition, run by European Tribune for more than a year, got 45,000 signatures; but a European popular initiative counts as nought in comparison with a British newspaper. And what about the politicians? How on earth did the British Government get itself into the position of supporting the candidature of a man who never had the ghost of a chance? Did they act against the advice of their diplomatic advisors, or did those advisors themselves not understand the situation? The Conservatives too have a lesson to learn – though they won’t. It is that having left the EPP they lost the chance of making any input at all on the choice of the new President.

There is a significant cultural difference here. The UK has a confrontational political system in which two parties slug it out without quarter and leave the rest of the country’s political opinion nowhere. It is said that this leads to strong government, though people rarely ask whether the strength of a government is a measure of its goodness or its efficiency, let alone its democratic legitimacy. Things happen quickly: a new government has to be in place within hours of the election result being known and inter-party negotiations are a sign of delay and weakness. Worst of all, they represent a watering down of the ideological principles that drive the country’s endless class war.

In Europe it is different. The desire for consensus, to involve as much of the electorate as possible in government, means that the cake has to be divided and if you don’t get the lion’s share, or even any share, this time round, you can be sure your time will come in the end. This is a hugely important principle. It may be the antithesis of the British way of doing things but it is the European way: after 35 years the UK should have worked out how things are done and accepted the need to adapt accordingly. Why did they back Blair so strongly and so stubbornly when, apart from his coming from the wrong side politically, his record as the PM who did nothing pro-European and who participated in the Iraq war were further enormous factors against him? Heaven knows. They never had a chance of getting him in. It developed to the stage that they kept him in the running so as to force a concession by withdrawing him in favour of Miliband, and when that failed they had to change tack to Hoon or Ashton; but that can hardly have been the original strategy. What is abundantly clear is that people in Britain just don’t understand how the EU works. It is equally clear that they will have to learn if they wish to be taken seriously as anything more than nationalist bullies and blackmailers. The country is strong enough to get its own way when it wants, but every time it does so it demeans itself in the eyes of the other member states.

A French-German stitch-up, they say. In a sense it was (and Reinfeldt, who was nominally responsible for making the recommendation, thought that he was presented with a fait accompli), but it is a fact that the Franco-German alliance is still what drives the EU. Quite apart from the historical reasons for this alliance existing, a simple look at a map shows that these two countries dominate the European peninsula physically and in terms of population. As long as we have a Europe of nation states, which is what the Eurosceptics have forced on us, those two countries will be powerful. On the flanks Spain and Poland, which are smaller in size and population, also exert influence. The UK, which could be influential, rules itself out of everything serious except military affairs, but has the curious delusion that it is a country that is at the heart of Europe and should be taken seriously.

What about the resulting appointments and the way in which they were made? First of all it may be useful to look at the job description of the President of the Council:

The President of the European Council:

(a) shall chair it and drive forward its work;

(b) shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council in cooperation with the President of the Commission, and on the basis of the work of the General Affairs Council;

(c) shall endeavour to facilitate cohesion and consensus within the European Council;

(d) shall present a report to the European Parliament after each of the meetings of the European Council.

The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy, without prejudice to the powers of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

The President of the European Council shall not hold a national office.

The President has no executive powers. Countries in Europe do not elect their prime ministers so it is hard to see why the Chairman of this Council should be elected. Herman Van Rompuy seems to be a pretty good choice; he is a political fixer, who can keep the show on the road. That is what is required. It is said that Sarkozy, Merkel and Barroso didn’t want a strong figure who would overshadow them. There may be something in that, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the nature of the post militates against the appointment of a superstar.

The appointment of Cathy Ashton as High Representative is interesting. It was for the Socialists to make the appointment (the Liberals, by the way, get their cut of EU power by appointing commissioners). It was clear that there was a desire for a large number of women on the Commission, and the High Representative is also its Vice-President. So, after much British bellowing about the need for superstars to run the Union, the UK has given us someone that hardly anyone had heard of till Thursday. Her lack of recognition does not in itself count against her. I understand that she has done a good job as Trade Commissioner in the last year – a post that has a strong international aspect. It has been suggested that the UK has always been against the EU having its own foreign policy and now it has the chance to make sure that it doesn’t get one that works. On the other hand, it is said that with a Brit running the EU’s foreign policy the FCO will have to toe the line rather more. We will see.

I am not at all convinced, by the way, that traffic-stopping superstars are better than unknown people as political appointments. Most prominent politicians are controversial. That controversy gives the journalists and bloggers something to write about, which is why they want more of such people, but it is not to my mind any indication of competence or efficiency. And you don’t know how things will turn out. Here’s a story. At the beginning of January 2002 John Lichfield, the Independent’s man in Paris, wrote of how a bank machine in Paris failed to give him euro notes at 00.20 on 1 January, the day the new physical currency came into circulation. In fact the introduction of the notes and coins was a spectacular success, as the euro itself has proved to be. Today John Lichfield, the Independent’s man in Paris, writes, ‘Limp waves of polite puzzlement circled the globe yesterday as leaders adjusted to the news that the much ballyhooed EU President would be a mild-mannered, competent manager rather than a charismatic new “face” for Europe.’ Let’s wait and see what happens, shall we?

Finally, there is one aspect of all this that I have not seen mentioned anywhere. The last week has been for the European Council and the Commission. Soon, the Parliament will meet. So far it has said nothing because it has not had the chance to do so, but we can be certain that it will. It has to approve the Commissioners and can now sack them individually rather than sacking the whole Commission en bloc, as was the case under Nice. It also has greater power than ever before and we can expect to hear quite a lot from it. It is not like a national parliament – and the Eurosceptics who bleat and moan about the democratic deficit are the very people who have ensured that its powers are limited – but it will have power. We will hear a lot about the European Parliament in the future – much more than in the past. At least, those of us who read European newspapers will.

Brian Barder has an interesting piece on this theme on his Ephems blog.

Flags

The Royal Navy decided they really had to have some target practice near Gibraltar. They had the brilliant idea of using a buoy with the Spanish colours as a target. The British ambassador was summoned to the Spanish foreign ministry to explain. He admitted that the target was "similar" to the Spanish flag.

The BBC illustrates this story with something …

… that is similar to ….

 

… the Spanish flag.

What the BBC has got is, in fact, the pre-democratic Francoist flag. I suppose that it’s just an honest mistake and not an indication of how the UK intends to run Europe’s foreign policy.

Spot the difference

BBC headline:

Ashton: 'I am best person for EU foreign job'

BBC article text (my emphasis):

Lady Ashton told the BBC that … she will show she is "the best person for the job" … "I will make sure I represent our values across the world, and I will endeavour to do in my own way the best that I can," she said.

Now, there is a world of difference between saying that she will show that she is the best person for  the job, and that she is the best person, especially when she later says that she will endeavour to do the best that she can. The headline, which I assume is not quoted verbatim despite the quote marks, makes her out to be vain and arrogant, which is not supported by the following text. I do not suppose that that is the BBC’s intention. I just put it down to their typically sloppy journalistic practice.

Meanwhile, in the blue corner:

The Tories said they would work with Baroness Ashton and Mr van Rompuy, "in the British national interest".

Read: Provided this Labour traitor and this froggy foreigner with the funny name do what we tell them, we’ll put up with them.

And Sovereignty Bill Hague picks up his straw man and takes him off stage:

Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said: "I am very pleased that those of us across Europe who said that the president should be a chairman, not a chief, have won the argument."

Our external representation

For several weeks now the UK has been lecturing us through megaphones about the need for the EU’s international representation to be in the hands of a ‘big hitter, someone who can ‘stop the traffic in Beijing’. Well, now that the presidency of the Council is quite reasonably in the hands of a consensus-minded Belgian fixer (and if you can govern Belgium, you can do anything), who do we have from the UK for the post of High Representative? Ladies and gentleman, I give you (cue trumpets) …

Baroness Wotsername of Thing.

The feeling is that the UK was going to bully its way into something. The High Representative counts as the country’s commissioner (only one per country under Lisbon) and the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had to be kept away from the economic portfolios at all costs.

Blair is out

I said all along (since 12 March 2008 – sic) that Blair had no chance for President of the Council.

Making a drama out of it

Le Monde is reporting definitely that Van Rompuy and Ashton are the ones, timed 18.48 CET. No-one else is being definite. The BBC is making a drama out of things:

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has dropped out of the race to be European Council President - just as EU leaders meet to decide who to appoint. … A UK government spokesman revealed the dramatic twist in the British position.

Dramatic – my foot! This is exactly what everyone expected the Brits to do all along.

What a country!

The Tory Party in La Vanguardia:

Norfolk .. two hours from London … another planet … political dinosaurs … Victorian morality … prehistory … Norfolk cavemen … turnip Talibans … ‘Not interested in Mrs Truss’s private life … found out about her extramarital affairs through the newspapers’ … David Cameron … modern St George … defending his lady and modernity …

La Vanguardia is the newspaper par excellence of the Catalan middle class, who are traditionally staunch Anglophiles.

The Labour Party in El País:

London paralyses the election of the new European leaders

Brown’s insistence on Blair’s candidature blocks the appointments. Germany and France will present a common proposal today

ANDREU MISSÉ - Brussels - 19/11/2009

Gordon Brown’s insistence on maintaining Tony Blair’s candidature for the presidency of the EU, in spite of the widespread rejection that it has given rise to, is blocking the appointments of the leaders of the Union. The agreement reached between the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, for the Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy to be the first President of the European Union has conflicted with the resistance of the British Prime Minister in favour of his predecessor.

…

Brown’s stubbornness is seen in Brussels in terms of political negotiation, looking most of all at what he can obtain in compensation if his candidate is not successful. British diplomacy is well known in the EU for its skill in this kind of negotiation. Up to now it has been thought that if the UK didn’t get the job for Blair, it could be compensated with by the post of High Representative for its Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, despite his repeated denials of interest. In the last resort London could be compensated with one of the three economic commissionerships (Economic and Monetary Affairs, Internal Market and Competition), which have been increasing in importance.

Selected readers’ comments on the El País web site:

They should stop being the dog in the manger: Either they play a full part in Europe or they go. Anyway, Blair is a war criminal who broke the Nuremberg VI principle and lied to his own parliament. Now that he’s converted to Catholicism, he can go and pray an ‘Our Father’ for every death in Iraq - that’ll keep him busy for a few years.

They know there’ll never be a British president, they only want, once again, to put a spoke in the wheel of achieving a federal European state; they are the US’s Trojan horse" in the EEC.

It would be really strange for a Brit to be the first president of the European (dis)union. I don’t know what name Freud would give to such a comical circumstance, a mixture of irony and death wish.

From M. Thatcher’s "I want my money back" to Blair taking Bush’s side in his ‘little war’, and with a quick look over recent times in British politics we only see a clear distancing, even a contempt for "old Europe" and the clear determination, based on blackmail, to get the biggest bit of the pie.

It’s the old story of the British Isles, their goal is simple: to prevent a strong Europe, because they think that would be a danger for the Isles. The tactic for achieving that is even simpler: throwing spanners in the works to stop the machine working, and if that doesn’t work, joining the group so as to stop, or at least hold back the process from the inside. Look at their history and you’ll see it’s true. Good day to all.

When the British joined the Common Market, they didn’t read its basis constitutional principles. These set out that the project aspired to achieve an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe. The utilitarian view of Europe clashes with that of those who truly believe in the spirit of the project. Blair, never! I couldn’t care about the rest, though I wonder about the worth of Mr D'Alema whose incompetence has contributed more than anyone else to the present weakness of the Italian left, indirectly strengthening Berlusconi’s regime.

Now that the Lisbon Treaty has been ratified, the door must be opened for the United Kingdom to leave the EU and stop undermining it from within. What a bunch of villains!

Mr Brown is the clown of European politics and we all know it! Look how prosperous the UK was ten years ago and look at it now. Mr Tony Blair really ought to be blamed, though he did a better job than this useless Brown. If what the Brits want is trade agreements, they should stick to that and leave the decisions about politics to the real members.

Tony Blair, the man who turned his back on the European Union and the UNO to start an illegal war with his personal friend George Bush? The British PM who has been interviewed most by the police of his own country? The man behind scandals like the death of Dr Kelly or the illegal trade in aristocratic titles to finance his political party, the one involved in a trillion-euro bribe to Saudi Arabia to buy arms? What madness. It’s like proposing a paedophile to manage a nursery!

If Mr Blair is finally appointed President of the Union, nothing less, I think that would be the time for the people to get out on the streets, like the demonstrations against the criminal war in Iraq.

Someone’s noticed

John Lichfield in the Independent:

…

The EU is not giving itself a single "president" but adding a third to the two which already exist. The presidents of the Commission and European Parliament will now be joined by a "president of the European Council".

The European Council is the official name for the twice yearly (at least) summits of EU heads of state or government. The new man or woman will preside over these summits, prepare their agenda and, according to the Lisbon Treaty, "drive forward" their work. He or she will have no executive role and no decision-making power. The day-to-day running of the EU will still be in the hands of the president of the European Commission. The job is, in a sense, a super-speakership. Some Philes still hope, and Phobes still fear, that it might develop into a true, directly-elected European presidency. Other Philes see it as a trap – a regression towards the more inter-governmental, loosely co-operative kind of Europe which Phobe-haunted Britain has favoured for more than half a century.

…

Speaking English

It seems clear that the High Representative should speak reasonable English. Where does this leave Massimo D’Alema?

According to Javier Solana in today’s El País:

‘I have no doubt that he would be a great representative for the European Union. And he speaks English. Not like Shakespeare I would say – but then neither do I.’

According to an anonymous, and therefore dubiously existent, ‘EU minister’ in the FT blog:

“He has Italian waiter’s French and not much English,”

I personally have no knowledge of the level of D’Alema’s English. But I do know that it ill becomes the Brits to be rude about other people’s language skills (see here).