President Barack Obama’s decision not to travel to Spain in May for a US-European Union summit does not come as a great surprise to EU policymakers. They knew weeks ago that he had gone cool on the idea. Nonetheless, it will hurt. It will be read as a signal from the White House that the president doesn’t think the meeting would be especially productive. And that speaks volumes about how other powers, even allied countries such as the US, view the EU as a force on the global stage.
“An unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose,” wrote Nick Witney and Jeremy Shapiro in a report last November for the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank. “In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partners. If Europe cannot step up, the US will look for other privileged partners to do business with.”
Obama’s decision will hurt all the more because the EU is in the process, so it thinks, of beefing up its common foreign policy and the way it projects itself to the rest of the world. Now that the EU’s Lisbon treaty is in force, the 27-nation bloc has a full-time president, Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium, and a foreign policy chief with enhanced powers, Britain’s Baroness Catherine Ashton. Along with José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, this pair would presumably have been in Madrid to greet Obama.
But in a way this is precisely the EU’s problem. Obama and other world leaders can’t figure out who exactly speaks for Europe. So far, the main effect of the Lisbon treaty seems to have been simply to add one more European – Van Rompuy - to the party. Neither Barroso nor Zapatero is showing any inclination to step to one side and let Van Rompuy be Europe’s main man. It hardly helps, of course, that virtually no one in Washington had heard of Van Rompuy or Ashton until EU leaders picked them in November for two of the bloc’s highest jobs.
However, the Obama decision is about more than US-EU relations. It is about the EU’s obsolete practice of holding regular summits with third parties – Canada, China, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, the US and so on – that are usually almost completely empty of substance. I recall travelling to Bordeaux in July 2008, when France held the EU’s presidency, to watch President Nicolas Sakozy host a summit for Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president. It was all over in a flash. Sarko even left early so that he could return to Paris to meet Obama, who at that point was a mere candidate for the presidency making a quick trip to Europe.
That told you everything you needed to know about the value of EU summitry. Although Madrid is a lovely place to be in May, Obama is quite right not to bother going there.
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