Monthly Archives: June 2009

McCreevy feeds a junkie’s Lisbon treaty habit

June 30, 2009 1:39 pm by Tony Barber

I was in Stockholm this morning when the happy news arrived that Germany’s constitutional court had given the green light in principle to the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. I call the news “happy” not because I am biased in favour of Lisbon, but because it meant that for once the task of writing about the treaty fell to someone else at the Financial Times (on this occasion, my Berlin-based colleague Bertrand Benoit).

The EU’s masochistic efforts at institutional reform, encapsulated in the Lisbon treaty, were one of the first things I wrote about when I arrived in Brussels in 2007. Two years later, I find that the subject refuses to go away, seeping into my daily work like a sewage leak in a cellar (a domestic problem familiar to house-dwellers in low-lying Brussels). All the more maddening is the knowledge that almost no one in the outside world cares one stale fig about the treaty.

Still, like a junkie, I sometimes find the temptation to take one more sniff of the Lisbon glue irresistible. Today is one of those days, and I blame Charlie McCreevy, Ireland’s EU commissioner. After an EU summit on June 18-19, the Irish government announced that it would go ahead with a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty (Irish voters rejected it in a referendum in June 2008). With impeccable timing, McCreevy proceeded to offer his opinion that “95 per cent” of the EU’s member-states would have voted No if they’d been given the chance in referendums of their own.

McCreevy was, of course, the hero who boldly stated before Ireland’s first referendum that he hadn’t read the Lisbon treaty and, what’s more, he doubted that any sane person would do so. Anti-Lisbon campaigners exploited his remarks to the full. Now McCreevy seems to be saying that EU leaders are forcing the Lisbon treaty into law against the will of the overwhelming majority of the EU’s 27 countries.

On the face of it, this is a pretty astonishing statement. But will it make the slightest difference to the outcome of the second Irish referendum? I haven’t yet tested the views of my fellow-sufferers in the Lisbon junkie network, but if I did, I reckon 95 per cent would say it won’t.

Tags: European Union, Germany, Ireland, Lisbon Treaty, referendums
Posted in EU Commission | Permalink

News round-up: Sweden’s turn

June 30, 2009 1:03 pm by Stanley Pignal

Sweden takes over the six-month rotating EU presidency tomorrow, but already its Prime minister is tending to official business, asking for a swift end to the Barroso re-appointment parlour game. “If there is not another candidate, what are we waiting for?”, European Voice reports Frederik Reinfeldt as saying.

No last-minute announcements from the outgoing Czechs, meaning a hodge-podge of news today. Wonky fruit and veg is set to reappear on supermarket shelves from July 1st after years of being banished for cosmetic reasons, says the Telegraph. And the days of travelling with a tangled mess of different mobile phone chargers could be over by next year after the EU pushed equipment makers towards a single model.

Posted in EU | Permalink

Spanish-Belgian squabble puts EU foreign policy in a poor light

June 29, 2009 10:45 am by Tony Barber

The last time that a dispute between Madrid and Brussels seized the international spotlight was in 1568 – and boy, was it big. That was when the Spanish rulers of the Low Countries sparked the 80-year-long Dutch Revolt by executing Counts Egmont and Horne on the Grand’ Place of what is today the Belgian capital.

This month, another quarrel between Spain and Belgium broke out. Admittedly, it’s less serious, and for the moment it’s stayed behind closed doors. But in the interests of transparency, and because the squabble tells you rather a lot about the way the European Union operates, I shall share the details with you.

Karel De Gucht, Belgium’s foreign minister, has written an indignant letter to Miguel Angel Moratinos, his Spanish counterpart, complaining about a stitch-up at an EU operation known as the Union for the Mediterranean. The UfM is a pet project of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, aimed at reinvigorating relations between the 27-nation EU and its North African and Middle Eastern neighbours.

When they launched the UfM last year, the EU and its neighbours agreed that it should have a co-presidency, with one EU country and one non-EU country sharing the post. First up were France and Egypt. No problem there. But it was never officially spelled out who should represent the EU after France. Belgium, which will hold the EU’s six-month rotating presidency in the second half of 2010, thought that under EU rules it would be a logical choice.

So, not surprisingly, De Gucht was most unhappy to discover, from a letter that Moratinos had written to his French and Egyptian colleagues, that Spain and France appeared to have reached a private deal without telling anyone else in the EU (or, at least, without telling Belgium). Under this arrangement, France was to hold the job for two years and then hand over the reins to Spain, which would hold it for the following two years.

No doubt Moratinos thinks Spain is entitled to have the UfM’s co-presidency because it will hold the EU presidency in the first half of 2010. But for two years? The polite language of European diplomacy can scarcely hide De Gucht’s displeasure. “I confess that I was really amazed,” he writes in his letter to Moratinos, arguing that the Franco-Spanish deal violates fundamental EU rules that set out how the bloc must be represented on the world stage.

This incident reveals many things about the EU. It reveals how trivial squabbles constantly interfere with the efficient conduct of a common EU foreign policy. It reveals how big EU countries (France and Spain) think they have the right to push around small ones (Belgium). It reveals an EU obsession with process rather than substance.

And, lastly, it reveals how, all too often, EU governments look like mice fighting over a piece of cheese, while outside Europe the world is full of large, fierce cats.

Tags: Belgium, EU foreign policy, European Union, Sarkozy, Spain, Union for the Mediterranean
Posted in Foreign policy | Permalink

Turkey’s EU membership bid crawls a tiny step forward

June 25, 2009 3:37 pm by Tony Barber

Next Tuesday, Turkey’s bid to join the European Union will creep forward one more inch. The EU and Turkey will open formal talks on taxation, one of the 35 “chapters”, or policy areas, that a candidate for EU membership must complete before joining the bloc.

Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s chief EU negotiator, is pleased but, unsurprisingly, not overwhelmed. After the taxation talks start, only 11 of Turkey’s 35 chapters will be open. The EU froze another eight chapters in December 2006 in retaliation for Turkey’s refusal to open its ports and airports to vessels and aircraft from the Greek Cypriot-controlled government of Cyprus.

Visiting Brussels on Thursday, Bagis made it plain that he strongly favoured EU membership. “I believe that the European Union is the grandest peace project in human history, and the crown of this peace project will be Turkey’s accession,” he told me and some other Brussels-based reporters over lunch.

But entry into the EU is indisputably a long way off. Bagis recognised that Turkey would not complete all 35 chapters by 2014. Even then, there would be huge question marks over the readiness of countries such as France, Germany and the Netherlands to approve Turkish membership. Western European political parties opposed to Turkey’s accession performed strongly in the recent European Parliament elections.

Bagis made one particularly interesting point. He said he foresaw three possible scenarios in the event that Turkey were to close all 35 chapters: a) Turkey immediately joins the EU; b) Turkey, like Spain and the UK in the 1960s, is vetoed but perseveres with its application and eventually succeeds in joining; or c) Turks, like Norwegians in 1972 and 1994, turn down the chance of EU membership in a referendum, even though their country meets all the entry criteria.

Bagis says that EU membership is a goal that can unite all Turks – civilian leaders and the military, northern Turks and southern Turks, Turks and ethnic Kurds, and so on. But what if, thanks to western European opposition, Turkish society’s faith in the possibility of EU membership diminishes to the point where the goal itself no longer seems to matter?

Tags: Cyprus, Egemen Bagis, European Union, Kurds, Turkey
Posted in Enlargement | Permalink

The sheepish smile of Sweden’s EU presidency website

June 24, 2009 12:22 pm by Tony Barber

Sweden’s European Union presidency hasn’t even started yet, but people in Brussels are already saying that the Swedish presidency website is the most impressive that any EU country has so far come up with. Its homepage is clean, simple and intelligently presented, and the entire site is nice and easy to navigate.

I particularly like the section “The EU in our daily lives”, which is a slideshow of 15 photographs that attempt to explain how EU laws and activities shape so much of everyday European life. It kicks off with a snapshot of a rather lugubrious-looking dog and the caption: “Dogs and cats travelling within the EU must have their own pet passports.”

Then we get an abrupt introduction to some of the grimmer realities of modern Europe. “Custody disputes between parents from different EU countries must be settled in the child’s home country,” warns the caption to Snapshot Number 2. “Abused women can receive help from women’s shelters, funded by the EU,” declares the caption to Snapshot Number 5.

A lighter note is struck with Snapshot Number 9 – “Chocolates must consist of one-quarter pure chocolate” – and consumer-friendly policies are highlighted in Snapshot Number 13 – “The EU has set a cap on mobile phone rates when travelling abroad”.

But without doubt my favourite picture is the initially mystifying Snapshot Number 7, which depicts a black-eared sheep with something yellow stuck on its right ear. Underneath we read: “Gute sheep (gutefår) graze on Gotland thanks to EU funding for farmers.”

Gute sheep are a breed of horned sheep native to Gotland, the largest island in the Baltic sea, just off Sweden’s south-east coast. They were once in danger of extinction but now, supported by groups such as the Gute Sheep Society of Sweden, and backed by EU funds, they are well protected.

But what’s the subtle message here? That the Common Agricultural Policy isn’t such a waste of money, after all?

Tags: Brussels, Common Agricultural Policy, sheep, Sweden
Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink

Brussels 2009 – the same as London 1641 or Versailles 1789?

June 23, 2009 9:34 am by Tony Barber

Is José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president in trouble? Probably not. But the jury is still out on whether he will secure formal approval from the European Parliament as early as mid-July. If he does not, it will be difficult to dispel the clouds of doubt that will linger over his future for two months or more.

Such uncertainty is hardly what the European Union needs at a moment when its banking system faces hundreds of billions of euros in losses this year and next, and when Germany and France, the eurozone’s two biggest economies, appear utterly at odds over when and how to rebalance their public finances.

The EU’s 27 national leaders decided unanimously at a Brussels summit last week to support Barroso’s reappointment. It was not a legally binding decision. They could, in theory, change it if there were massive resistance in the European Parliament.

But that’s certainly not Plan A. Leaders such as Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, which is about to assume the EU’s rotating presidency, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel want the European Parliament to hold a vote next month to confirm Barroso for a second five-year term.

Barroso’s centre-right allies, known as the EPP, are the legislature’s largest political group. They are happy enough to hold an early vote. But they control only 264 of the assembly’s 736 seats. Three other groups – the socialists, centrist liberals and Greens – say they would prefer to delay the Barroso vote until September or October.

Barroso correctly sees that he must win an absolute majority – 369 votes or more – if he is not to suffer serious political injury. If we assume that he will pick up every single EPP vote, where is he going to get the other 105 votes from? He knows it would be fatal to turn for backing to the far-right, nationalist and anti-EU fringe elements in the legislature.

Barroso can probably count on three sources of support. First, there is the new conservative, “anti-federalist” group led by the UK Tories. It has 55 members (or even, as of Tuesday, 56 – a politician from Lithuania’s Polish minority appears interested in joining). Secondly, up to half of the 80-strong liberal group in the European Parliament can surely be coaxed into supporting Barroso. Finally, there are even some socialists – especially in Barroso’s native Portugal as well as Spain and the UK – who are inclined to back him. All told, that should see Barroso over the 369-vote mark.

But this is not the whole story, because even some of these parliamentarians may object to holding the vote in mid-July. In the end, this whole saga is less about Barroso’s leadership qualities than it is about the European Parliament’s desire to assert itself as one of the EU’s most powerful institutions.

“Brussels 2009″ doesn’t have quite the ring of 1641 in the English House of Commons, or 1789 in Versailles. But the situation contains some interesting dramatic potential, that’s for sure.

Tags: Barroso, Elections 2009, EU Parliament, European Union, Merkel, Sarkozy, Sweden
Posted in EU Parliament | Permalink

Power politics and surrealism mark Russia’s approach to WTO

June 22, 2009 2:13 pm by Tony Barber

Two weeks ago, Russia announced that it intended to join the World Trade Organisation not on its own but as part of a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was a classic Russian initiative, combining brutal power politics with a healthy dose of surrealism.

For at the time of the announcement, Moscow was in the middle of a trade war with its two neighbours, banning imports of Belarusan dairy products and Kazakh meat. Russia was also in the process of freezing a $500m credit for Belarus, which in turn was imposing new customs controls on Russian goods. Acrimonious disputes of this nature do not usually precede the establishment of friendly arrangements such as customs unions.

Still, it has been all too clear during the nine-year rule of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and ex-president, that Moscow expects its ex-Soviet neighbours to do its bidding in such matters. Where Russia’s national security and economic interests are concerned, there is no room for objections from countries that were ruled directly from the Kremlin as recently as the late 1980s.

That said, were there any deeper motives behind Russia’s announcement? After all, Russia was probably within months of gaining WTO membership, and its bid had the support of the US and the European Union. One Russian economic analyst suggests that Russian government experts conducted an updated cost-benefit analysis of WTO membership and concluded that there were no clear-cut economic advantages to being in rather than out.

This argument may carry particular weight in Moscow in the present harsh global economic climate. It might be more difficult to protect Russian industries from foreign competition, or alleged foreign dumping, or both, if Russia were already a member of the body that supervises world trade. Meanwhile, WTO rules do not for the most part cover oil and gas, which together with weapons are Russia’s main exports.

All these arguments are sound enough. But one other factor I would mention is that Russia, generally speaking, does not warm to genuinely multilateral bodies such as the WTO. As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform think-tank argued in a thoughtful paper last week, Russia enjoys being one of the five permanent United Nations Security Council members, because that confers uniquely privileged status as well as the right to veto anything it dislikes. Russia also is happy with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a group that includes the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and is dominated by Russia and China.

But Russia has its difficulties with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), whose peace monitors in Georgia will probably have to leave soon, after it proved impossible to meet Russia’s demand that the pro-Russian region of South Ossetia be treated as an independent state. Like the OSCE, the WTO tries to operates by consensus rather than as a concert of the big powers. And for the moment, it doesn’t seem that such standards of behaviour suit Russia.

Tags: Belarus, Russia, Trade, World Trade Organisation
Posted in Foreign policy, Trade | Permalink

EU enlargement falls victim to Slovenia-Croatia talks breakdown

June 19, 2009 11:32 am by Tony Barber

So exciting are European Union summits that they sometimes distract attention from developments that, though perhaps less eye-catching, tell you a lot more about what’s going on in the EU. For example, the latest two-day summit is concentrating on financial regulation, guarantees for Ireland’s sovereignty so that it can hold another referendum on the EU’s Lisbon treaty, and the nomination of José Manuel Barroso for a second term as European Commission president.

But a more interesting story was the breakdown on Thursday of EU-mediated talks between Slovenia and Croatia over their bilateral maritime border dispute. This makes it virtually certain that Croatia will not complete its EU accession negotiations by the end of this year – the goal that Barroso and Croatia’s government had originally set themselves.

Croatia has been an official candidate for EU membership since 2005. The slow pace of its accession talks is sending a very poor signal to the populations of other Balkan countries, such as Albania, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Serbia. They instinctively see their future in the EU, with its implicit promises of prosperity and security.

But with Croatia’s negotiations gummed up, they are starting to wonder when they will ever get their opportunity to join. This has serious implications for the stability of the region, which was devastated by war and economic dislocation in the 1990s and is now suffering the impact of the world financial crisis and recession.

Slovenia started blocking Croatia’s accession talks last December in what looked like a blatant attempt to exploit the fact that it was already an EU member to triumph in the border dispute. Most other EU countries were unhappy with Slovenia’s tactics. Six months later, however, nothing much has changed.

Why have Slovenia’s EU partners not put Ljubljana under more pressure to find a solution? One answer is that certain countries – one thinks of France, Germany and the Netherlands – are not especially enthusiastic about enlarging the EU at the moment. At the very least, they want the Lisbon treaty to come into force before the EU admits any new members.

Given the uncertainty over the Lisbon treaty, it would seem that Slovenia has every incentive not to speed up the resolution of its border dispute with Croatia. And so it is that EU enlargement – one of the bloc’s policies that has been shown to work very effectively over the past 30 years – falls by the wayside. Not very clever.

Tags: Balkans, Croatia, Enlargement, European Union, Slovenia, Turkey
Posted in Enlargement, Foreign policy | Permalink

Klaus the destroyer takes aim – again – at the Lisbon treaty

June 18, 2009 1:52 pm by Tony Barber

Hello, hello, hello, what’s this, then? Another attempt by Czech President Vaclav Klaus to derail the European Union’s Lisbon treaty? Surely not! Let’s take a closer look. Oh, my God, yes, it’s true. And how could we ever have doubted it? Because the thing about Klaus is that if it looks like pork and dumplings, and it smells like pork and dumplings, and it tastes like pork and dumplings, then you can bet your life that it definitely is pork and dumplings.

The Czech Republic’s six-month EU presidency comes to an end on June 30. This date once looked likely to mark Klaus’s departure from the EU stage. Instead, it now appears certain that Klaus – who delights in being one of the least liked EU leaders of all time - will press on with his campaign to sabotage the Lisbon treaty.

The story so far: Irish voters rejected the treaty last June, but latest opinion polls indicate that they will reverse their verdict in a second referendum, expected in October. In order to hold this referendum, however, the Irish government needs legal guarantees of its national sovereignty in the fields of taxation, military neutrality and right-to-life policies.

Ireland will receive these guarantees from its EU partners at the Brussels summit that opens on Thursday. But the cunning Klaus says that the guarantees amount to new legal arrangements that, under the Czech constitution, will require ratification by the Czech parliament.

Now, the Czech parliament finally ratified the Lisbon treaty last month after an agonising political struggle that contributed to the previous government’s downfall in March. It would seem crazy for the parliament to go through this painful process a second time. Sure enough, Jan Fischer, the new Czech prime minister, disputes Klaus’s interpretation of the constitution and says there is no need for parliamentary approval of the Irish guarantees.

But Fischer is a non-party, caretaker premier who won’t be in office a few months from now, because the Czech Republic is to hold a general election. Klaus, by contrast, will still be up there in Prague Castle – the perfect place for him, if you remember the mysterious castle in Franz Kafka’s novel of the same name. And let us not forget, Klaus still hasn’t completed the Czech Republic’s formal ratification of the Lisbon treaty by adding his presidential signature to parliament’s approval of it in May.

So what is Klaus’s game? Is he toying with the idea of delaying Czech ratification of the Lisbon treaty for so long that eventually a eurosceptic Tory government comes to power in the UK and holds a British referendum that produces a clear No to the treaty, thereby killing it forever? It no longer looks like such a wild theory.

Tags: Czech Republic, EU summits, European Union, Lisbon Treaty, Vaclav Klaus
Posted in EU | Permalink

EU lawmakers slip up on a Barroso banana skin

June 17, 2009 1:30 pm by Tony Barber

Back in 1970 or so, there was a children’s Saturday morning TV show called “The Banana Splits”, in which some ludicrous character or other would frantically splutter “Hold the bus!” – always too late, for the bus would proceed on its way regardless. It is an irresistible temptation to compare the four Banana Splits of 40 years ago - Bingo, Fleegle, Drooper and Snorky – with certain members of today’s European Parliament.

For while the legislators are busy spluttering “Stop Barroso!”, they are saying it much too late. José Manuel Barroso is proceeding on his way to reappointment as European Commission president. In fact, the entire episode threatens to show the European Union in the worst possible light, after EU-wide elections to the European Parliament that, with their record low turnout, were themselves not exactly a ringing endorsement of the way the EU conducts its business.

Barroso is the only declared candidate for the Commission presidency, and he has the support of national political leaders across the political spectrum – centre-right, centre and centre-left. True, he is not seen as the most inspiring or visionary of Commission presidents. But that is, in a sense, exactly the quality that many national leaders are looking for – and the job is in their gift, subject to the parliament’s approval.

If socialist, liberal or Green politicians in the European Parliament wanted to prevent Barroso from getting a second term, they should have fought this battle before the elections to the assembly. Each should have rallied behind a candidate of their choice. But they did not. The socialists were too divided even to come up with a candidate of their own. The opportunity was lost. It was their own fault.

Now the socialists and Greens have the nerve to suggest that the EU’s national leaders would in some way be guilty of treating the parliament with disdain, if they were to nominate Barroso at the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday and then pass on his name to the parliament for approval. But in truth, this is precisely the procedure set out under EU rules.

All that the average European citizen cares about is having a Commission president in office who gets on with his job. Squabbling and muscle-flexing among European Parliament politicians who, like the Banana Splits, have missed the bus is not of the slightest interest to anyone – except perhaps the EU’s critics, who will gleefully point out that the newly elected legislators appear to have learnt no lessons whatsoever from the recent election campaign.

Tags: Barroso, Elections 2009, EU Parliament
Posted in EU Commission, EU Parliament | Permalink