July 24, 2008
With friends like these
José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president who wants to be reappointed next year to a second five-year term, has in recent days received two important but somewhat curious endorsements. The first was from Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who has been sharply and publicly at odds with Barroso over the European Central Bank’s policies and over the European Commission’s handling of world trade negotiations.
The second was from Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister. The areas of potential or actual conflict between Italy and the EU are numerous to list here. But among them are Italian state aid to the near-bankrupt airline Alitalia, a rubbish collection crisis in Naples, and the treatment - or mistreatment - of Italy’s gypsy population.
To these one might add a warning from Berlusconi, issued on the eve of a summit of EU leaders in Brussels last month, about the European Commission. “We must no longer see public remarks by commissioners who create a lot of trouble for ministers [at national level],” he declared.
Barroso puts up with this needling from the likes of Berlusconi and Sarkozy because, if he wants the EU’s 27 government leaders to re-select him next year, he really has no choice. At the European Parliament there have been mutterings, even among the centre-right political forces to which Barroso belongs, that the former Portuguese prime minister should not be a shoo-in for reappointment.
Some legislators hold Barroso partly responsible for the two treaty crises that have dominated his term of office - the collapse of the EU constitutional treaty after the French and Dutch referendums of 2005, and the debacle of Ireland’s rejection last month of the Lisbon treaty.
Such accusations seem wildly unfair, but that’s politics for you. Barroso’s unofficial re-election campaign began to wobble after the Irish vote, but with the timely expressions of support from Sarkozy and Berlusconi it’s back on track - though at a political price we cannot yet know or calculate.
Neither Berlusconi nor Sarkozy it seems understand the way the EU works.
The Commission and the individual Commissioners are not accountable to heads of state, nor even, in reality, to their President. They have collegiate responsibility to their colleague Commissioners. The Commission was set up as a deliberately non-democratic group to provide ideas, proposals and potential new directives. Heads of state hate this freedom of action.
As to Barroso - he has had a “free run” since his election since, with each addition of new member states, there has had to be a shuffling of Commissioners (this would have shanged under the Lisbon Treaty). Thus, Barroso has been able to appear ‘front of stage’ more often. I would have preferred Pascal Lamy for President, but I know he’s both busy elsewhere and the FT don’t like him!
Posted by: Derek Tunnicliffe | July 24th, 2008 at 6:23 pm | Report this commentHow can the European Union ever be understood by ordinary EU citizens, when sources like this august blog lay the treaty crisis at the doorstep of the Commission President?
Treaty amendments are negotiated between the member states; that is why we speak about intergovernmental conferences.
The amending treaties are signed by the national governments, and they propose ratification to their national parliaments.
The selfsame national governments have chosen to make unanimous agreement on the contents and ratification by all member states requirements for entry into force, vastly reducing the chances of any treaty reform ever being put into practice in a union of 27 (given the vagaries of national politics and the frequent demands for qualified majorities).
Posted by: Ralf Grahn | July 25th, 2008 at 2:12 am | Report this commentQuite right, Ralf. That’s another thing (in my opinion the most important one of them all) that the Irish need to add to their catalogue of additions, alterations, amendments, opt-outs etc, that they should require to be in the revised Lisbon Treaty as their price for finally agreeing to it. That’s if they can be persuaded to do so - but hopefully they will continue saying “No!”
But if Ireland finally consents to the anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty, then the Irish should insist that there is an escape clause in the revised treaty for countries who disagree with a particular EU measure, proposal, directive, regulation, decision etc (astonishingly, there were 3255 of these imposed on member states in 2007 - according to the UK’s Houses of Parliament Library!). This escape clause would allow one, or a few, countries to say “No! We, or our people, don’t want to do that”. And in a genuinely democratic EU, that should be OK! So let’s see the Irish stand up for the rest of us against the die-hard centralists in the EU, to ensure democracy is not the main casualty of all the EU’s constant byzantine policy-making & plotting.
Posted by: Black Tom Strafford | July 26th, 2008 at 1:14 pm | Report this commentBlack Tom:”the Irish should insist that there is an escape clause in the revised treaty for countries who disagree with a particular EU measure”
Actually this already exists, it just works the other way round. If only a few countries want to implement a certain policy they can use the so called process of “enhanced cooperation” and move forward anyway. This is currently in the making with regard to divorce laws.
Posted by: rz | July 26th, 2008 at 5:48 pm | Report this commentAlarming though it is, the role of EU president has no Job Specification - it all seems to be a question of who’s available and whose face ‘fits’ with the major players (ie those that can exert some muscle over the smaller states).
In his latest book/essay “Europe: Malade de la Démocratie”, Philippe Riès offers some ideas of what a Job Specification might look like (my ‘free’ translation):
The President should be a talented administrator, capable of managing a (not very large) bureaucracy working on a vast and complex range of topics.
S/he must be able to harness the team of Commissioners (who work in a collegiate system), whose personalities and ideas are not necessarily compatible. (The Commission has to take an EU-wide, long-term view, which may not accord with that of individual memeber states).
The President is not the head of a Government: rather the Chief Mechanic. His/her job is to keep the “triangle” of Commission, Counsel and Parliament functioning with the minimum of friction. This includes caring for the smaller states whilst respecting the power of the larger.
(Riès quoted from Pascal Lamy).
The President’s training and background should contain a solid economic base and a real talent for communication.
Philippe Riès has many other ideas for putting Europe to rights: well worthy of consideration but unlikely to get much support from, eg, France! Still, the book is a good read.
Posted by: Derek Tunnicliffe | July 28th, 2008 at 1:57 pm | Report this commentBarosso has far to much power, and this will increase when the constitution is forced upon us. He should not be allowed to stand for the position again until he has faced the corruption charges, in Portugal, still hanging over him, as a commissioner he is immune to prosecution. He has of course attempted to give every commissioner, past and present lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, but presently needs to be re-elected to be the actual man running the corrupt democratically deficient eu.
Posted by: Barry Davies | July 28th, 2008 at 2:38 pm | Report this comment