Franco-German froideur
Imagine a world of Eurosceptic Germans and Frenchmen; where Iberians, Scandinavians and Brits set the EU agenda; where the European commission takes orders from the council (and obeys them) and where dirigisme is everywhere in retreat. Now stop imagining. We may be there already.
The Lisbon summit outcome was one symptom. But the Franco-German political scelerosis is a cause; and the recent turbulence around President Prodi an unfortunate side-effect. If Europe keeps going the way it has over the first few months of the 21st century, British Tories could even run out of things to complain about.
Only now are the consequences of the closing of the Giscard/Schmidt, Mitterrand/Kohl epochs manifesting themselves in the Euro-body politic. While lip-service is still paid in Paris and Berlin to the "special relationship," its decline is having dramatic effects. France and Germany will still act together when one of the duo is in a corner. But the icy relationship between Schr?der and Jospin means that they seem incapable of maintaining their 40-year hegemony over Europe's agenda.
"The Franco-German relationship is now entirely defensive," one commissioner acknowledged last month. "They are incapable of initiating anything."
Paradoxically, this is in part because both trade under the socialist banner, whereas the great Franco-German double acts of the past have always allied leaders of left and right. "France talks left and acts right," commented another old hand. "Germany does the opposite."
Both Jospin and Schr?der preside over parties of the left unhappily riven with schisms between the modernisers and the old guard. Jospin-as manifested in his recent cave-in to the unions on pension reform-prefers a Lafontainiste pose. His only triumph in Lisbon was to ensure that the state-owned dinosaurs-the EDF electricity utility and SNCF are protected from the rush towards privatisation. Schr?der's gut instincts, on the other hand, are Blairite. His rescue of an ailing German construction company and limp-wristed defence of Mannesmann were driven by union-power, not personal inclination.
Hence the old Franco-German dynamo has ground to a halt. And, hence, the British/Portuguese/Spanish triumph in Lisbon.
German right turns Eurosceptic
The explosion of criticism of Romano Prodi in the German press is another manifestation of the seismic shifts now underway in Brussels. And while the attacks on the commission president in Der Spiegel and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung were exaggerated (and arguably downright malicious), the fact that they appeared at all is remarkable.
Such adjectives are not commonly used in relation to the FAZ, a newspaper drier than August in the Sahara. Its rush of blood to the head can arguably be blamed on Schr?der himself.
"The chancellor must realise that he made a fatal mistake by refusing to give the CDU/CSU a commissioner's seat," one insider commented. "The German right is now off the leash on Europe in general and the commission in particular for the first time since the foundation of the Common Market."
France, too, is no longer the loyalist it once was when the commission was viewed as a provincial agency of Paris. A clear sign of this came during the Lisbon summit from a famous Brussels Machiavelli, Pierre de Boissieu, once the French ambassador to the EU and now Javier Solana's number two in the loftily-named Office of the High Representative-the council of ministers' Mr Foreign Affairs. Apparently, the heads of government were just about to agree a new division of responsibility for the Balkans whereby Solana and Chris Patten, the external relations commissioner, would divide supervision of the troubled region between them. At that point, De Boissieu whispered into President Chirac's ear. Within moments, Frère Jacques intervened to insist that Solana would "lead manage" the dossier -consigning Patten to bag carrier. France's growing hostility to commission power-a historic development-was duly noted by all. The damage is most serious, however, in the commission itself where Prodi is increasingly seen as presiding over a vertiginous decline.
Tower of Babel
It seems almost childish to attribute part of Prodi's communication problem to something as simple as language. But the language wars are beginning to have a material impact on all aspects of Euro life in a way they never used to when everyone in Brussels at least pretended to regard French as, well, the lingua franca. The president has genuine difficulty in speaking French and is less than completely comfortable in English. Schr?der and Jospin, meanwhile, have no language in common. Prime Minister Aznar, a growing force in Brussels, conspires with Tony Blair in English as does Senhor Guterres.
And when the commission president called his unprecedented crisis meeting of the commission following the FAZ revelations-sending all the interpreters out of the room-the subsequent discussion was in English. Only commissioners Busquin and Barnier spoke in French. It is not recorded whether they were understood. When poor Ricardo Levy, Prodi's spokesman, tried to report back to the press in Italian, he was all but howled down by the ravening mob.
Manhattan bankers
To round off what has been a bad month for Europe's founding father nations, the latest Eurostat figures show that the wealth per capita in London is now gauged at 229 (against a European average of 100), with runner-up Hamburg way behind at 198, and Paris at just 156. The land of M. Chauvin can comfort itself with the thought that this refers only to inner London-home of the Manhattan banker. Outer London, where the English live, is not on the map.
