European Union selects president and foreign minister

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European Union selects president and foreign minister
By Stefan Steinberg
21 November 2009

Following deliberations at a special “working dinner” on Thursday, the
27 leaders of the European Union unanimously announced the names of
those appointed to the EU’s newly created posts of president and
foreign minister.

Following months of speculation about who would fill the posts, which
were established as part of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, the assembled
European heads of state selected two people little known around the
world and even within Europe itself.

Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy was picked as the first
president of the European Council, and Baroness Catherine Ashton,
Britain’s European commissioner in the EU, was chosen as the EU’s
foreign policy chief.

In many respects these are astonishing appointments. The 62-year-old
Van Rompuy is an economist who had worked at the Belgian central bank
in the early 1970s before taking over the leadership of the Flemish
Christian Democrat party from 1988 to 1993. He has been prime minister
of Belgium for only 11 months.

Van Rompuy’s language skills are appreciated by EU
bureaucrats—together with a number of European languages, he is
familiar with Japanese—but he has virtually no foreign policy
experience. One newspaper notes that his main excursion into
international politics was a dispute with Dutch authorities over the
dredging of the River Schelde.

Catherine Ashton is an unelected British politician who is barely
known in her own country. Ashton has never held a senior ministerial
post. Prior to entering the House of Lords as Baroness Ashton of
Upholland in 1999, she had run a local health authority in Britain.

In October last year, she took over the post of Britain’s European
commissioner from Peter Mandelson, who was commandeered back to
Britain to revive the fortunes of the ailing Labour Party. In the
position of EU commissioner, Ashton presided over a large bureaucracy
and was able to develop close links to leading European business
groups and lobbies. While Van Rompay has little foreign experience, it
is generally acknowledged that the EU’s new foreign policy chief has
none at all.

Even Ashton was taken aback by her nomination as foreign policy chief
and declared as late as Thursday morning she had known nothing about
her selection for the post. Expressing “slight surprise” at gaining
the job, Ashton acknowledged that she had not had time to prepare an
appropriate speech.

Van Rompuy only announced his availability for the post of president a
few days before his appointment.

The selection process for the EU’s top posts was thoroughly
undemocratic. In this respect, it was entirely in keeping with the
traditions of the European Union and its Lisbon Treaty.

It should be recalled that the Lisbon Treaty was introduced through
the back door by EU leaders as a replacement for the European
constitution, which had been voted down in a series of popular
referendums by the peoples of France and Holland.

A revamped constitution was renamed the Lisbon Treaty. It retained all
of the free market hallmarks of its predecessor and was imposed on
European electorates with the argument that it represented a step
towards greater democratisation of the EU and its bureaucracy in
Brussels. In fact, Thursday’s election reaffirmed the contempt of EU
leaders for the European electorate. In a Byzantine process that
excluded any external democratic input, the 27 EU leaders squabbled
amongst themselves behind closed doors over who should get what job.

Describing the process of selecting a president for the EU, one east
European diplomat told the British Daily Telegraph: “Trying to work
out who is going to be president of the EU Council is not dissimilar
to decoding who was in or out in the Kremlin in the 1970s. It seems
strange to many of us that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall
we have to dust off our Kremlinology skills here in Brussels.”

While a number of political commentators have complained that with
these appointments the EU “has missed an opportunity to boost its
standing on the global stage” (Der Spiegel), there were definite
political calculations involved in selecting two such colourless
bureaucrats for the leading EU posts.

Originally in the running for the post of EU president was former
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had been encouraged to stand
for the job in 2006 by French President Nikolas Sarkozy. Throughout
Europe, however, and particularly in Germany, Blair is regarded as a
politician in the pockets of the US. Since his departure as British
premier, Blair has concentrated on developing his own Blair
Foundation, which has heavy backing from US political and business
interests. Also in his role as Middle East envoy, Blair is regarded as
a front man for American interests.

In the wake of last year’s financial crisis, both Sarkozy and the
German government struck an aggressive tone against the US, declaring
the crisis to be one “made in America.” In a series of recent meetings
and summits, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was able to
persuade Sarkozy to abandon his support for Blair.

Other British candidates for the post of EU foreign affairs chief,
such as Peter Mandelson and Foreign Secretary David Miliband, dropped
out of the running, declaring their intention to concentrate on
domestic politics. Miliband is preparing his own campaign to take over
the leadership of the Labour Party following elections in 2010, which
are likely to end in disaster for the present Labour leader, Gordon Brown.

Germany had decided against putting up its own candidates for the two
EU jobs in order to ensure the country’s traditional claim to the top
position at the European Central Bank. At the same time, Germany,
France and Great Britain are in the process of putting forward
candidates for influential posts currently vacant in the powerful EU
executive, the European Commission.

In the event, the selection of Van Rompuy is first and foremost a
result of closer collaboration between the governments of France and
Germany. Van Rompuy will now chair the quarterly meetings of the
European Council, which bring together the heads of government, but is
expected to play a secondary role to José Manuel Barroso, who was
recently nominated for a second term as president of the European
Commission.

The principal factors involved in selecting a new EU president and
foreign affairs chief all revolved around national interests and
egoisms. The process was summed up in a commentary in the British
Financial Times. Under the headline “Supremacy of the Nation State
Wins Out,” the newspaper wrote: “When the Lisbon treaty (originally
the EU constitution) was first mooted in 2001 by the Belgian EU
presidency, it was seen as one last push by European federalists to
transfer power to Brussels, including national policies on tax and
foreign affairs.”

At Thursday’s dinner in Brussels, the Financial Times continues, “That
push was rebuffed… . Europe’s leaders asserted the supremacy of the
nation state: the new president and foreign policy chief would be the
servants, not the masters, of the national capitals.”

Protectionist and nationalist polices have been the core response of
all of the EU member states to last year’s finance crisis. The
nomination of political lightweights to the top jobs in the European
Union is aimed at creating favourable conditions for European states,
with France, Germany and Great Britain in the lead, to increasingly
pursue their own nationalist agendas.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/euro-n21.shtml

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