Brussels blog

I was fortunate enough to speak with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Tuesday about how the European Union is going about the task of choosing its first full-time president and its next foreign policy high representative.

The longer our conversation progressed, the more I realised how damaging to editorial standards, not to mention the people’s understanding of politics and government, are the competitive pressures on modern news organisations to be ahead of the rest of the pack.  For this particular EU story has, over the past few weeks, produced a cornucopia of nonsense as every broadcaster and newspaper has fallen over its rivals in a fruitless and fundamentally misguided attempt to show that it, and it alone, has got the lowdown.

Reinfeldt is co-ordinating the process of picking the president and foreign policy supremo, because Sweden holds the EU’s rotating presidency.  He told me that, although he had spoken informally with “a few leaders of large countries in the middle of last week”, he had not even started his formal consultations with his 26 fellow EU leaders until Monday.  So much for all the gossip before then.

Reinfeldt said he had managed to speak with 25 of the other leaders in the course of Monday and Tuesday, and he planned to speak with the 26th on Wednesday morning (it wasn’t entirely clear to me when he had consulted himself).  During this whole time, he had not once asked anyone if he or she was available as a candidate.

After he had completed his first round of consulations, he planned to start a second round on Thursday, with the aim of crafting the multiple political compromises needed to ensure that the choices can be formalised at a meeting of EU leaders over dinner in Brussels on November 19.

All of this illustrates that the selection process is much more delicate, and rather less advanced, than has been presented in the media up to now.  In particular, Reinfeldt made the important point to me that picking the foreign policy high representative and picking the first full-time president are not the same thing.  The presidency is a job wholly in the gift of the EU’s 27 national leaders, but the foreign policy position is not.

On the contrary, because its holder will serve as a European Commission vice-president, he or she must be acceptable to Commission president José Manuel Barroso and to the European Parliament.  Indeed, the parliament will conduct hearings soon into Barroso’s new Commission team, and it could in theory cause enough trouble to force the withdrawal of the foreign policy nominee.

At this point I can hear newsrooms around Europe echoing to the sound of editors asserting the media’s right to pointless speculation as a pillar of a free society, to be defended to the death – or at least as far as one’s lawsuit budget stretches.  But the more I listen to them, the more empty and self-righteous such arguments seem.

It would be better to show a little humility and paraphrase Winston Churchill:  “No one pretends that the modern media are perfect or all-wise.  Indeed, it has been said that the modern media are the worst form of all, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”