Brussels diary

With arguments raging in Brussels over who gets what out of the Lisbon treaty, the EU’s biggest beasts are showing how flexible they can be when power and profile is at stake. Take José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president and a man who is usually criticised in Brussels for doing the bidding of the EU’s big member states. Barroso’s vision of European construction, such as it is, has been built on the idea of inter-governmentalism—that is, the practice of checking any plan with the larger EU nations and adapting it accordingly before pushing it. Meanwhile, Herman van Rompuy, the new president of the European council, is a former prime minister of Belgium, which has traditionally supported the community method of integration under which the commission acts as the motor of European unity. But, with jobs and budgets at stake, ideology seems to have gone out of the window. Hence Barroso has been battling to keep foreign policy spending under the control of the commission, and himself. One of the supposed advantages of the Lisbon treaty was that it unified spending power and policymaking on foreign policy under the EU’s new high representative, Cathy Ashton, who represents the member states but is also a vice-president of the commission. But Ashton, whose offices are in the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters, is under pressure from Barroso to allow the commission to decide on development funding. The commission also wants a degree of control over staff appointments to the European external action service, the EU’s new diplomatic corps, prompting pressure on Ashton from member states to stand up to Barroso. While Van Rompuy is keeping a low profile in this dispute, he is engaged in a fairly naked power grab on economic policy and efforts to modernise the European economy by 2020. This, he says, should be under the control of heads of government who ought to meet regularly in Brussels in addition to their four annual summits. Economic policy co-ordination has traditionally been a matter for the commission and it still has a lot of control in the area. From the commission’s point of view, Van Rompuy’s plans run the risk of emasculating its precious “right of initiative” which has so far driven most big steps towards integration. If heads of government become the initiators of policy, that turns the commission into little more than a glorified secretariat, not something the founding fathers envisaged. But nor did they foresee the commission playing a big role on foreign policy. Whatever Lisbon might bring to the EU’s structures, hopes of it making them simpler and more comprehensible are dying a public death. Ashton fails to time travel But there is some good news in Brussels: Van Rompuy’s collected works of haiku—a form of Japanese poetry—are to be published shortly, not just in his native Flemish but in English, French and, bizarrely, in Latin too. Van Rompuy has not recently been using his poetic skills to fashion many memorable soundbites. Ashton, however, has found a catchphrase with which to hit back at her tormentors. Criticised for failing to attend an informal meeting of defence ministers because she was at the inauguration of the Ukrainian president, Ashton said her problem was that she had “yet to learn how to time travel.” The jibe was only partly successful because one of the best-known facts about the EU’s new foreign policy chief is that she is a keen Dr Who fan who was given a full-scale model Dalek for her fiftieth birthday. “Pity she didn’t get a Tardis,” said one Brussels wag. A job for Robert Cooper? There was some surprise in Brussels at the emergence of a German letter fuming at Britain’s “excessive” role in the EU’s new diplomatic corps. The oddity here is that, until the legal framework is agreed—the very earliest being the end of April—Cathy Ashton can’t appoint any diplomats, one reason why her first three months in office have been so error-strewn. Her only appointment—Poul Skytte Christoffersen as special adviser—has been well-received. Christoffersen is a Dane and veteran of the Brussels circuit. And he has a point to prove—in 1999 he was widely expected to become the most senior official in the council until Jacques Chirac, then French president, intervened to bag the job for France’s ambassador to the EU, Pierre de Boissieu. So why all this angst from Germany? The answer is that the war is already being fought for the top jobs. One key player is Robert Cooper, a former adviser to Tony Blair and one of the EU’s smartest foreign policy thinkers. Given his interest in the cerebral, rather than administrative, he is not tipped as secretary general of the new service. Berlin has a contender in Christoph Heusgen, aide to chancellor Angela Merkel, but this senior job is also being eyed by France, with the smooth and effective Pierre Vimont, another former ambassador to Brussels, being a prime candidate. Below this post will probably be one senior policy adviser position, for which Cooper seems eminently suited. But there is a rival in Helga Schmid, another senior council official, who just happens to be German.