What does 2010 hold in store for the European Union? With people in Brussels only just drifting back to work after a couple of weeks of snow, sub-zero temperatures and seasonally adjusted flu, it seems too brutal to plunge straight into topics such as the “2020 Strategy“, the “Reflection Group“ and other elusively named EU initiatives of which we are certain to hear more as the year moves on.
What one can say is that the EU ended 2009 feeling rather more pleased with itself than perhaps it had expected 12 months previously. Despite suffering the most severe economic contraction in its history, the EU avoided a meltdown of its financial sector, stuck fairly well to its rules on fair competition and free trade, and even witnessed a return to growth in certain countries.
Of course, survival came at a heavy price. The sharp increase in budget deficits and public debts incurred as a result of the crisis has not only wiped out all progress achieved on Europe’s fiscal front since the euro’s launch in 1999. It has also prompted concern about the ability and willingness of the hardest-hit countries, such as Greece, Ireland and Spain, to make the sacrifices in living standards and adjustments to public policy that will be necessary to stay in the same monetary union as Germany. And the fiscal condition of the UK is truly terrible.
The EU can take pride in having modestly advanced its enlargement process in 2009. This was never going to be easy in a year of such harsh economic conditions. But in the end there was progress to report for a clutch of aspirant countries, notably Albania, Croatia, Iceland, Montenegro and Serbia. Against that, one has to state bluntly that it was a bad year for EU attempts to stabilise Bosnia-Herzegovina. This could return to haunt the EU in 2010.
Then there was final approval of the Lisbon treaty – a matter of almost total indifference to the non-European world, but a cause dear to the hearts of EU policymakers, who had battled valiantly for almost a decade to change some of the rules governing the way the EU goes about its business. Nothing spoke more eloquently of the importance of this formidably obscure document than the relief on everyone’s faces after Irish voters said Yes to the treaty in October, and after Czech President Vaclav Klaus dropped his objections to it a few weeks later. The Lisbon rules won’t transform the EU, but there is – for the moment – a collective will to make them work for the general interest.
What about the bad omens of 2009? If one was Bosnia, another was the EU’s inability to achieve much in the grey zone of former Soviet states that divides the bloc from Russia and is increasingly turning into an area of political and economic rivalry. The EU’s optimistically named Eastern Partnership took off in May, but its credibility was undermined by a lack of funding and by the absence of most of Europe’s top leaders at the Prague launch event. In 2010 Ukraine, which holds a landmark presidential election on January 17, willl be the key country to watch.
Probably the most worrisome omen was the dénouement of the Copenhagen world conference on climate change, when the EU found itself abruptly frozen out as a handful of other states, led by the US and China, tried to frame the final compromises. As Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, told me a few days later: “We’ve been taught some lessons about the realities of the so-called multipolar world.”
Quite so. If I were to hazard one prediction about 2010, it is that Europe will receive one or two more lessons on the same subject.
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on