Manneken Pis
Should the EU give its top job to a 67-year-old who left office in the mid-1990s and speaks no English? With 2nd October set as the date for the second Irish vote on the Lisbon treaty, thoughts are turning to who should get the biggest job it creates, president of the European council—providing the Irish vote “yes” of course. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, once a fan of Tony Blair’s candidacy, is now thought to be backing Felipe González, socialist premier of Spain from 1982 to 1996.
Blair’s friends have not yet given up on Sarko and Tony has an ally in Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. But Spain’s premier José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is hostile to Blair and worse, the political atmosphere is terrible for him. A mini rebellion in the European parliament against José Manuel Barroso’s renomination as European commission—MEPs have refused to vote on his re-appointment until the autumn—has made the former British premier a more risky choice. The case against Barroso is that he is a fan of neo-liberal economic policies—the same kind championed by New Labour in Britain. Five years ago, Barroso got the job when Blair decided to veto the front-runner for the job of European commission president, the Belgian ex-prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt. One of the current troublemakers in the parliament is, by a nice irony, the very same Verhofstaft, who is now leader of the liberal group there. The parliament could vote down the next European commission if it didn’t like the political balance of appointments, including the choice of president of the council.
Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was never enthusiastic about Blair, wants a Franco-German agreement on a candidate for council president but González is a possible compromise. His European credentials are good and he fits one other potential qualification for the job: being no threat to anyone. “The leaders really don’t want a powerful president” said one EU diplomat. If Lisbon comes into effect, leaders will have to stomach the new president of the council doing the job they would have done when their country holds the remnants of the EU presidency.
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Charles Grant
In the multipolar world that is emerging, which powers will matter? The US and China, certainly. India, perhaps. Japan, Brazil and South Africa? Not yet. And what about the EU? Ten or even five years ago, the EU was a power on the rise. It was integrating economically, launching its own currency, expanding geographically and passing new treaties that would create stronger institutions. But now, although the EU is respected for its prosperity and political stability, it no longer looks like a power in the making. If anything it is slipping backwards.
On many of the world’s big security problems, the EU is close to irrelevant. Talk to Russian, Chinese or Indian policy-makers about the EU, and they are often withering. They view it as a trade bloc that had pretensions to power but has failed to realise them because it is divided and badly organised. Barack Obama began his presidency with great hopes of the EU but is learning fast about the limitations of its foreign and defence policy: few of its governments will send soldiers to the dangerous parts of Afghanistan, and some senior figures in Washington now worry about the EU’s ability to ensure stability in the Balkans or its eastern neighbourhood.
But does the EU’s unimpressive performance on hard security matter? Should not the 27 governments just focus on deepening the single market, while they pursue their own national foreign policies and count on Nato to keep the peace? The EU does need to improve its act because the world is changing in ways that may not suit it. It is not clear whether the new multipolar world will be multilateral—with everyone accepting international rules and institutions—or an arena in which the strong pursue their objectives through the assertion of military and economic might. The EU is instinctively multilateral, but the other big actors—the US, Russia, China, India and so on—can be unilateral or multilateral, depending on their perception of their interests. So the EU must try to persuade these powers that they can best achieve their national objectives through multilateral institutions. A weak EU will make that task harder.
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Manneken Pis
Could David Cameron kill the Lisbon Treaty?
Gordon Brown was always regarded with suspicion in Brussels and now he’s a lame-duck premier to boot. But he still has one thing going for him in Europe: he’s not David Cameron.
With a Conservative victory in the next British general election looking inevitable, pro-Europeans are beginning to worry about what it will mean for them. Some diehard integrationists in the European parliament believed that when it came down to it, Cameron would not pull his MEPs out of the centre-right bloc, the EPP-ED (European People’s party and European Democrats), in search of more Eurosceptic allies. Now he has done so, to the displeasure of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy.
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Jeffrey Henderson
Discuss this at Prospect’s blog, First Drafts
South Asia has been dominated by two military conflicts in past months: Pakistan pounding of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, and the obliteration of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Disturbing as these conflicts are, both may be dwarfed by a wider and more significant trend in the region—the rise of a newly assertive China.
At Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chinese companies are building a new port that could serve as a refuelling and docking facility for the Chinese navy as it extends its presence (presently confined to helping police pirate activities off the Horn of Africa) across the Indian Ocean. China has also provided much of the military hardware that underpinned the Sri Lankan victory.
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Anatol Lieven
On a recent, endlessly delayed rail journey to Oxford I passed a military train loaded with jeeps and armoured vehicles—pretty inadequate ones too, to judge by the news from Helmand. It reminded me that Britain will soon have two aircraft carriers of impressive bulk and uncertain purpose, at a cost of £4bn. Their purpose is mystifying. The US doesn’t need us to have them; it has far more, and far bigger ones too. If they are to allow Britain to fight independently, then where and against whom? Rumoured scenarios range from the highly unlikely (a military occupation of parts of Nigeria) to the ludicrous (a British war with China). Certainly, the two carriers will not help in Afghanistan—the last time I looked at a map it does not have a coast.
The new ships will be named the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. Given that no one seems clear how they will be paid for, or how we can afford the aircraft that sit on them, it might have been better to name them after their predecessor as the Royal Navy’s largest ship, HMS Vanguard. First designed at the start of the second world war to fight the Bismarck and Tirpitz, by the time it was finally commissioned the war had ended. It was scrapped ten years later.
Today’s carriers come from the same mixture of imperial nostalgia, blind attachment to the US alliance and failure to decide on strategic priorities. None of this mattered much in an era of economic growth, but it does when British funds are in short supply—as demonstrated by the agonised debate over whether to scrap our remaining order for £1bn Eurofighters. And if we do face a depression comparable to the 1930s, its effects are likely to throw up severe security challenges, which in turn means that Britain will have to ruthlessly prioritise its security commitments—or risk becoming irrelevant everywhere, and frittering away effort, money and lives on half-baked operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to which we can make no real contribution, and which stand no serious chance of success.
British military spending should be reduced by some 10 per cent to bring it in line with France (still leaving it far above Germany and other leading European states as a proportion of GDP). Much more importantly, however, it should be refocused away from irrelevant cold war-era projects like the Eurofighter and the Type 45 Destroyer, and from long-range expeditionary operations. Instead, the emphasis should be on the army’s ability to fight small wars on Europe’s periphery.
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Peter Baldwin
Talk about upending accepted certainties! While Europe is now in the hands of right-of-centre parties (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and David Cameron pacing restlessly in the wings), America has “gone socialist.” Nationalising the financial sector by the back door, considering massive subsidy of production industries, increasing state spending on healthcare and education, promising big investments in all manner of greenery, and limiting executive salaries: is Barack Obama beating Europe at its own game? “We are all socialists now,” Newsweek trumpeted in February, predicting that, “as entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.” General Jack D Ripper, Dr Strangelove’s nemesis, who fulminated against fluoridation of the water as another of communism’s nefarious advances, must be rotating in his Valhalla.
How quickly things change. It seems just a few months ago that the presidency of the younger Bush—unilaterally going to war, refusing to submit to international treaties, disparaging the seriousness of global ecological catastrophe—convinced bien pensant opinion that the gulf between the US and Europe was stark and growing ever wider. Indeed, old and well-worn mental ruts are hard to steer out of. It remains a staple of political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic that Europe and America are worlds apart. Everyone knows this.
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Manneken Pis
Socialism could make Blair EU president
In his ascent to the top, David Cameron has benefited a great deal from watching his foe Tony Blair. But now it looks as if Cameron may be doing Blair a favour in return, albeit accidentally. With growing expectations that the Irish will vote “yes” in an autumn referendum on the Lisbon treaty, Blair is back in contention for the job it creates: president of the European council. Before the Irish torpedoed the treaty last year, Blair had many opponents, mainly because of his part in the Iraq war.
Several things have brought him back into the running. The first is that in a post-Dubya world with Barack Obama wowing Europeans, Iraq and America are no longer toxic issues. The second is that the case for a big personality doing the job of president is more or less won. Last year, during France’s EU presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated the impact that could have during both the conflict in Georgia and the financial meltdown. Now the reverse has been shown too. The implosion of the Czech presidency of the EU culminated in the fall of the government in Prague and wild comments by the country’s prime minister, Mirek Topolánek. Speaking to the European parliament, he derided the US response to the economic crisis, underlining the fact that leaders from small countries sometimes find it hard to distinguish between national and international politics.
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Jo-Ann Mort
While February’s parliamentary elections in Israel signalled a move to the right by the Israeli population, the results have been tempered by the manoeuvring of incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By persuading the severely weakened Labor party (they came in fourth behind Likud, the centrist Kadima party headed by Tzipi Livni, and by a Russian-émigré dominated right wing party, Israel Beitenu) to join his government, Netanyahu has taken the right-wing gloss off of his party. But whether there is anything beneath the sheen, and indeed whether there is any real hope for the middle east peace process, could depend on outside forces.
This new government is a triumph for two men: Netanyahu and his incoming defence minister, Ehud Barak, who dramatically brought his Labour party back to government, even though it endured the worst electoral showing in the history of the state.
There’s a saying in Israel that a politician “doesn’t want to give up his Volvo”—the car usually offered to government ministers. In Labor’s case, this was certainly the reason for arguing their way back in. Barak and the older half of his party—ministers like “Fuad” Ben Eliezer and Matan Vilnai—are men who have nothing to do outside of government and see their roles as ministers as their own private full employment policy.
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Derek Brower
Russia’s annual gas row with Ukraine erupted again in December, shutting down exports for nearly two weeks. Brussels fretted, Moscow and Kiev swapped insults and their two state-controlled energy firms—Gazprom and Naftogaz—bickered, before reaching a compromise. (Russia wanted to raise Ukraine’s bill in line with European prices, while Ukraine wanted more money to transport the gas.) The dispute, more serious than its predecessor in 2006, will trigger yet more debate about Europe’s energy supplies. Three years of tough EU rhetoric, however, have yielded little progress. The EU’s flawed strategy—that market liberalisation will bring energy security—has been undone by energy companies careless of the continent’s broader long-term needs as they pursue short-term profits.
Gas is a particular flashpoint. It burns more cleanly than oil and coal, which is important for plans to slow global warming. Its power stations are also cheap, which energy companies like. This has pushed up demand: despite the recession European consumption will shoot up from 493bn cubic metres in 2010 to an estimated 625bn in 2030. Dwindling local reserves will see Europe’s gas imports almost double.
The EU is caught in a bind. It wants more gas in general, but less from Russia. One escape route could be importing more liquefied natural gas (LNG)—gas converted into liquid form so it can be shipped around the world. This is cheap, for the moment, but it needs expensive specialist terminals to receive it. And many of these are in the wrong places. Britain’s spare capacity, for instance, does little to help Bulgaria. Proposals to build new facilities normally stall because the sellers want guaranteed prices, while the buyers don’t have the money to build terminals without guarantees about supply. Energy companies, who do nicely out of a tight market, have little incentive to build new depots, so the LNG sails off to terminals that already exist, often in Asia. The result is typical of the market failures that should prompt the EU to rethink its liberal instincts.
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Manneken Pis
Have Europe and America swapped?
It has not been widely noticed but the Czech Republic takes over the EU presidency in January just at the time that Barack Obama is inaugurated in Washington. Vaclav Klaus, the Czech Republic president, is both a Euro and a climate change sceptic. So we can look forward to an intriguing role reversal, at least on the environment, as the man representing the supposedly progressive Europeans meets the leader of the supposedly reactionary Americans. Barack Obama has already pledged to invest $15bn a year in renewable energy, create 5m “green jobs” in the US and set a firm target for reducing emissions. Will the EU be able to keep up?
Yet the environment might be the exception. Now that liberal Europeans have got what they wanted with Obama’s election, some are starting to wonder if much is really going to change. One view is that, although George W Bush’s first term marked the high point of the neocons, Bush’s second term was rather different. In recent years European co-operation with Washington has improved and therefore the room for positive change is less than you might think. And, from what is known of Obama’s politics, there may be both opportunities and problems.
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