LONDON, 9 December 2005 — For European Union enthusiasts who advocate a strong, competitive and united continent, these are dark days — and getting darker as the nights draw in and the clock ticks toward a showdown EU summit in Brussels on Dec. 15. For Europhiles everywhere, this is the winter of their discontent.
The immediate cause of their gloom is the intense, unedifying wrangle over the EU’s 2007-13 budget. Tony Blair, approaching the end of Britain’s disappointing six-month presidency, has spent the past few frantic days trying to persuade new East European member states to take a cut in their funding. This they are understandably loath to do.
Quite why Blair is being so beastly to countries whose accession he loudly championed is a bit of a mystery, especially to them. But to cut a long and complicated story short, it is (at least in the British view) the result of France’s refusal to accept fundamental reform of the protectionist Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which gobbles up 40 percent of EU funds. This in turn is part of a bigger problem, namely the global uncompetitiveness of Eurozone economies.
The budget dispute is expected to go down to the wire; and there is a strong possibility that no agreement at all will be reached on Dec. 15. That could adversely affect the World Trade Organization’s concurrent meeting in Hong Kong and attempts to secure fairer trading conditions for developing nations.
The failure of the new EU constitution, defeated in referendums held in France and the Netherlands last summer, was perhaps Europe’s most spectacular reverse. Not only has the EU failed to change its institutions to accommodate enlargement politically. If it fails to agree a budget, or severely cuts regional aid to Eastern Europe, the union will have failed to finance enlargement, too. Little wonder the new members are fed up.
A string of other failures has also seriously sapped the spirit, energy and ambition of the EU in the past 12 months. One is the dangerous stalemate surrounding the nuclear negotiations with Iran that are led by the EU “troika”, Germany, Britain and France. This joint approach was supposed to demonstrate how a joint EU foreign policy could work and how European diplomatic methods were preferable to those of the US.
Sadly, all that the negotiations have shown so far is that the Europeans appear incapable of delivering a deal. Sooner or later, Iran is going to be referred to the UN Security Council for possible punitive action — which is what the Bush administration suggested should happen all along.
The EU has suffered setbacks in its attempts to build bridges to the Arab world. Last month ‘s Euromed conference in Barcelona with North African and Middle Eastern states was a flop that no amount of spin could disguise. The EU remains a largely impotent bystander in the Israel-Palestine conflict, symbolized by its deployment of observers along the Gaza-Egypt border.
In Afghanistan, another supposed showcase for joint EU foreign, development and security policies, the Brussels brigade is floundering, according to a new report by the independent International Crisis Group. That could be a big problem next year as EU nations within NATO are called upon to perform a broader stabilization role.
To cap it all, the current row over the way the CIA allegedly used European airfields and possibly European prison facilities to abduct, detain and transport terrorist suspects to third countries has exposed EU states to accusations of covert, craven subservience to Washington. The rendition scandal has left Europe’s governments looking compromised by and complicit in the Bush administration’s no-holds-barred approach to its “war on terror”. And the affair, which is far from finished, has left the European Commission furiously demanding answers from EU states who seem determined not to give any.
