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!


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