Brussels diary

Young Miliband versus the true believers
December 20, 2001

Miliband versus the old lags

There were a few eyebrows raised when David Miliband, the youthful former head of Tony Blair's policy unit, was nominated by the Brits to an advisory group on the future of the EU, set up by Guy Verhofstadt, Belgium's prime minister. Miliband's colleagues are all about twice his age and read like a catalogue of "great Europeans"-Jacques Delors, Giuliano Amato, the former prime minister of Italy, Jean-Luc Dehaene, former prime minister of Belgium, Bronislaw Geremek, one-time foreign minister of Poland. Miliband himself has admitted that at the group photo, he felt a bit like Zelig, the Woody Allen nebisch who has a habit of intruding into historic scenes. It's certainly the case that Verhofstadt probably expected the British to offer him somebody like Roy Jenkins-former commission president-but Jenkins was too likely to sign up to something embarrassing to Blair. The Belgians pressed for Peter Mandelson, charmingly ignorant of the extent to which he is now "damaged goods" in Britain. Frankly, nobody had heard of Miliband-which seemed a pretty unpromising start. In fact, reports suggest it has gone surprisingly well. Verhofstadt is very taken with Miliband-regarding him as intelligent and confident without being brash. Miliband, for his part, is trying to push a Blairite message-that the EU should concentrate on "delivery" and downgrade this constitutional malarkey. Like most Brits, Miliband is not a great believer in the existence of a "European demos." This has placed him at odds with Delors, Amato and Verhofstadt who are true believers-wanting, among other things, Europe-wide elections for the commission president. Still, intellectual differences do not appear to have crimped the Verhofstadt-Miliband relationship. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, Verhofstadt visited schools in South Shields in Miliband's constituency. If his belief in the existence of a pan-European political consciousness can survive that, it can probably survive anything.

Test your knowledge of the EU

As a reader of this column, you may fancy yourself as a bit of a Europe expert. OK sucker, if you know so much, answer the following questions: what is the difference between the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of First Instance? What is the difference between the community method and its bitter enemy, inter-governmentalism? And what are, respectively, the first, second and third pillars; CFSP; the Tampere process; the Lisbon process; the Luxembourg compromise; QMV; variable geometry; re-enforced co-operation; co-decision; conciliation; the Antici notes. If you got all of that right-congratulations and I suggest you move to Brussels where you will find many like-minded souls. If you got a few of those questions wrong, may I politely suggest that you are ill-equipped to participate in the debate on the future of Europe. This is not a joke. All of the above phrases and concepts are central to how the EU operates. They were jotted down by your correspondent during one of the those long seminars on the future of Europe which are used to wile away winter afternoons in Brussels. One of the few points on which the participants agreed was that it was crucial that the great debate should move beyond arid institutional questions and focus on issues of real concern to Europeans. They then spent three hours lobbing jargon at each other.

Europe's introverted elite

Europe's obsession with process can be comic. But as the war in Afghanistan continues, it also seems rather depressing. It is no exaggeration to say that the main concern of the various Eurocrats is how the war is affecting the pecking order between the European capitals, between the capitals and Brussels, and between the various European institutions. Your correspondent has just spent an hour with a very senior European foreign policy bod, whose main concern was to stress how many important people he had spoken to on the phone that day. He seemed surprised to be dragged into real-world questions about what is going to happen in the war, but then offered the following insights. Intelligence co-operation with the Saudis is "catastrophically bad"; Somalia is moving up the radar screens as another failed state ready to blow; there is still an almighty battle going on in Washington for control of foreign policy with Donald Rumsfeld and the "attack Iraq" school gaining ground.

Now back to the important question-the pecking order. It is widely believed in Brussels that Tony Blair's war on terrorism is all an artful cover for his real aim-to seize the political leadership of Europe. Of course, this is 90 per cent bullshit. On the other hand, it probably has occurred to Blair that the war effort might do a bit of collateral good by underlining Britain's centrality to EU policymaking, just as the launch of euro notes and coins raises the question of whether Britain is being marginalised. But has the botched attempt to dine ?  trois with Schr?der and Chirac blown his chances of breaking into the Franco-German partnership? The truth is that the emergence of a new "big three" was never likely to extend beyond military matters. One German diplomat asked if the Blair/Schr?der/Chirac meeting heralded a new partnership responded: "let's see what happens when we try to write a constitution together."