The European Union is holding its collective breath going into Thursday, when a conclave of the heads of its 27 member-states is expected to decide once and for all on the first ever European president.
Those outside Europe can be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. Doesn’t Europe already have a president, they might well ask? Indeed, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has been much in the news lately. As the head of government for Sweden, the member state that currently holds the European Union presidency under a six-month rotating system, it has been Reinfeldt’s unenviable job to cajole Europe’s leaders to agree on a candidate for the new president.
But isn’t there also another president lurking within Brussels’ baffling layers of bureaucracy? Who exactly is Jose Manuel Barroso? The answer is that Barroso is President of the European Commission, the EU’s executive, while what is being discussed so heatedly at the moment is the candidate for an entirely new post, that of the President of the European Council.
This is a job created by the bloc’s Lisbon Treaty, a set of proposed changes to the EU’s rule book, finally ratified in early November after a tortuous years-long process. The new presidency will be a 30-month-long fulltime job, replacing the current six-month rotating system, whereby the head of government of the member-state holding the EU presidency, doubles as the fleeting and largely symbolic European president.
The new post has been widely touted as the key to Europe’s ambitions to have greater clout as a global geo-strategic player. At the moment, countries like India tend to give Brussels short-shrift because Europe does not speak with one voice on foreign policy issues.
With a full-time president, Europe hopes to have solved the famous, if misattributed, question supposedly posed by Henry Kissinger: “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”
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But to the outside observer, both the convoluted passage of the Lisbon Treaty itself and now the equally drawn-out selection procedure for the candidate reveals a sclerotic system, unable to act decisively in its own interests as a result of the burden of coalition politics.
Watching Europe’s leaders struggle and fail to come up with a name for a post expected to define and represent the “new” face of the EU to the world, echoes of the political process in India are ever-present. For two weeks now, the EU’s political circus has had observers of every ideological persuasion united in bemoaning a process that seems to boil down to an undignified hotchpotch of horse-trading and identity politics, rather than meritocracy.
The candidate, it is increasingly clear, will not straightforwardly be the best person for the job, but merely the one that offends all the parties concerned the least. The issues at stake include regional representation, gender and political affiliation.
Along with the job of the president, Lisbon also provides for another new post, of the High Representative of Foreign Affairs. In essence, a foreign minister with beefed-up powers.
It is therefore desired that the two posts strike a balance. If the President is a man from one of the EU’s larger, richer countries and on the conservative end of politics, then the High Representative must ideally be a woman, from a smaller, poorer country on the Left.
Striking this kind of balance is proving to be tough. For a while, it looked as though a breakthrough would be achieved when Belgian Premier Herman Van Rompuy and Britain’s charismatic Foreign Secretary David Miliband were being touted as the favoured combination for the jobs of President and High Representative, respectively. The feminists were not happy, but it seemed to be a compromise most could live with.
Then, last week, Miliband ruled himself out, sayingt he preferred to stay in national politics, leading to a collapse of this particular solution.
Commentators bemoan the fact that the names now in contention for the post are as inspiring as “cold porridge”.
With former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, once a favourite for President, more or less out of the race given his controversial support of the US-led war on Iraq, the majority of the other names in contention, Mr. Van Rompuy included, need to be accompanied by a description such as the “former Finnish this” or “Belgian that”.
Some argue that this in itself is not a bad thing. Lisbon leaves the definition of the president’s role ambiguous. There is, thus, debate over whether the president is primarily meant to be an inspirational figure and the international face of the EU or whether she, or he as is looking more likely, is to play the role of consensus builder and chief administrator within the bloc; or both; or alternatively.
Van Rompuy, a gentle, unassuming writer of Japanese-style, haiku poetry is very much in the consensus-builder mould. But given that he is from the Centre-Right, his election is now threatened by the fact that in Mr Miliband’s absence, there are few qualified candidates from the Left for the post of High Representative.
The chronic indecision that has characterised the selection procedure for Europe’s new posts points to the fact that it will take a lot more than a president to give the EU its desired place at the high table of geo-political power-play.
Rather than embodying the “single phone number”, Europe’s new president will in fact be one more cook in an already crowded kitchen. For whether his culinary skills will be up to much, we will have to wait for Thursday’s results.
But unless there is a last-minute rabbit pulled out of Europe’s hat, Brussels may need to mull over the allegorical implications of a Van Rompuy haiku titled ‘Hair’:
‘Hair blows in the wind After years there is still wind Sadly no more hair.’