How many days can a Spanish kite stay in the air? About four, to judge from the speed with which Germany and the UK have shot down a proposal from José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, to introduce binding mechanisms to enforce economic reform in the European Union.
The short lifespan of Zapatero’s brainwave, which he unveiled last Thursday in Madrid, is hardly surprising. Not that it’s an especially bad idea – in principle. Deep in their hearts, most European policymakers know the EU would benefit from closer fiscal and economic policy co-ordination, particularly in the eurozone. They also know that the lesson from the EU’s ill-starred Lisbon agenda, which notoriously set out – and failed - to turn the bloc into the world’s most competitive economy by 2010, is that it was all too easy for governments to pay lip service to reform without doing much about it in practice (except for the virtuous Nordic countries).
But under Zapatero’s proposal, the European Commission would acquire new powers to police the efforts of national governments, which in extremis might even be subjected to the humiliation of “corrective measures” if they failed to perform up to scratch. Such a procedure would surely require changes to the power structures established in the EU’s newly adopted Lisbon treaty. And if there is one thing most EU leaders can agree on at the moment - leaving aside the question of whether they would welcome a more powerful Commission – it is that they do not want to reopen the excruciating issue of institutional reform.
I do not doubt Zapatero’s commitment to strengthening the coherence and unity of EU economic policymaking. But it must be said that, in floating the idea at the start of Spain’s six-month EU presidency, he appeared intent on demonstrating that rotating national presidencies will still be relevant in spite of the fact that the EU now has its first ever full-time president, Herman Van Rompuy.
Zapatero’s response, I suspect, would be to say that the country holding the rotating presidency can be a useful “ideas factory” – this was the phrase he used when he talked to some of us Brussels-based reporters in Madrid last week. In other words, Spain thinks Van Rompuy can prepare and chair EU summits, and the European Commission can enforce whatever decisions are taken, but the real intellectual and political force behind EU policy should come from the elected national government that holds the rotating presidency.
Like his proposal for more rigorously enforced economic policies, Zapatero’s ideas about the rotating presidency have an appealing logic. It would be unnecessarily cynical to interpret them as a subtle attempt to undermine Van Rompuy. And precisely because they do not require treaty changes and do not encroach on national governments’ prerogatives, they will probably last for longer than four days.
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