Monday May 12 2008
All times are London time
The case of the disappearing MEP may be the most baffling of all the mysteries contained in the new EU reform treaty. Others include the decision by 27 presumably busy leaders to fly to Lisbon to sign the wretched thing a day before they all meet in Brussels. Presumably this cost in time, taxpayer’s money and carbon emissions is the price to pay to thank the Portuguese for putting the “Lisbon treaty” to rest.
They say English is the European Union’s lingua franca these days, and for better or worse it probably is. But a knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese turns out to be very handy as well.
At the EU’s Lisbon summit on approving the long-awaited institutional reform treaty, Luís Amado, Portugal’s foreign minister, emerged late in the evening to update the press on the progress that EU leaders were making.
Transfixed no doubt by his immaculately trimmed beard and equally immaculate English (one could imagine him in a 19th century group portrait with Lev Tolstoy and Karl Marx), none of the assembled hacks
and hackettes paid much attention when a reporter asked Amado a question in Portuguese - all the others he answered were put in English.
Was it true, the reporter asked Amado, that one of the main obstacles blocking approval of the treaty would disappear because Italy would be offered an extra seat in the European parliament and the parliament’s president would give up his voting rights? She added that she had picked this up at a Spanish press briefing.
Smooth as ever, Amado answered that this was one of the things that the leaders were looking at. But once again few of those present bothered to listen to him because he was speaking Portuguese.
And yet it turned out that the Portuguese-speaking reporter was absolutely right - as Amado was probably well aware.
So there are two lessons here for all of us. One is to brush up on the language of the country that holds the six-month rotating EU presidency (from January, eh-hem, it’s Slovenia). The other is to attend Spanish press briefings. Olé!
Like a patient undergoing aversion therapy, the European Union is painfully learning to kick the referendum habit. The Dutch government decided last Friday it would ratify the EU’s Reform Treaty without a referendum. The British and Danes intend to follow suit. Less well-known, at least outside France, is that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in Paris is thinking of joining the club - albeit from a different angle. They want to change a clause added to the French constitution in 2005 that requires a referendum to approve the entry of all would-be new EU member-states after Croatia, which is expected to join a few years from now.
The principle behind aversion therapy is pretty simple and not very nice. To suppress an undesirable habit, you make the patient associate it with unpleasant side effects. So, if you are the EU and you have a habit of holding referendums, you make sure the referendums go the wrong way.And that they certainly have, on several occasions between 1992 and 2005. Aaarghh! Can you feel the benefits already?
The first 24 hours of the summit in Brussels to hammer out a replacement for the European constitution has been a “phoney war”, to steal the wartime parlance that Poland’s government has adopted. Knowing that another night of skirmishing lay ahead leaders happily remained camped behind their red lines, brooking no suggestion of compromise.
This is often the way at the biannual events, if only to add a little drama in an attempt to get the public’s interest. It certainly worked for the British press, excited by Poland’s claims of compensation for its war dead.
The haggling that goes on before every European summit is legendary. I’m not referring to all the talk of red lines by posturing leaders but the procuring by those lower down the pecking order of a pass into the Justus Lipsius centre where it all takes place, with its free flow of drink, food and, most of all, gossip.
Members of the European parliament are particularly keen to see their status recognised with the prestigious pass to feed off the crumbs at the top table. Each political group gets just one ticket. So Andrew Duff, the British Liberal who lives and breathes the constitution from every pore, will be left with his nose pressed against the glass while Graham Watson, his esteemed leader, prowls the corridors of power.
There are ways and means of getting round it. The eurosceptic Independence and Democracy group has found places for its two co-leaders. Jens-Peter Bonde, the veteran Dane, sneaked in as a journalist. That allows Nigel Farage, the voice of British obstructionism, to do what he does best, knocking back the beers with hacks at the bar and providing soundbites about Tony Blair’s duplicity.
Nothing could more annoy the UK Conservatives, who are stuck on the outside. They also want a referendum on any treaty and would love to bend but as members of the European People’s party are represented by Joseph Daul, a French farmer who backs greater integration.
Aides to Timothy Kirkhope, the Tory European leader, were left yesterday afternoon desperately lobbying for a badge as vice-chairman of the constitutional affairs committee to avoid this debacle.
José Manuel Barroso raised a few titters in Berlin at the weekend with his assertion that "size matters" - a reference to the fact that the 480m people of the European Union made it a big player in the world.
I took away from the EU summit in Berlin a different impression: the little things matter. Strip away the speechifying and the Berlin declaration - a worthy enough attempt to mark the Union’s 50th birthday - and what will linger from the summit was the fact that 27 European leaders (and their spouses) actually seemed to have a good time.
That may sound trivial, but sometimes European Union leaders spend so much time slagging off Brussels or other national leaders that they forget that they are in this together, they have things in common, and they need to make it work.
Poland could be about to make life much harder for Angela Merkel, German chancellor, as she tries to give the kiss of life to the EU’s comatose constitutional treaty. Warsaw is threatening to reopen one of the treaty’s most contentious issues: how much power each country should have in the Council of Ministers, the Union’s main legislative body.
"The proposed voting system in the EU constitution mostly hits Poland, according to mathematicians," said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland’s prime minister last week. I don’t know which mathematicians he’s been speaking to, but he’s plain wrong.
The real maths behind the argument are fascinating, because they underscore a traditional Polish suspicion of their western neighbours - a factor which could make a Poland-Germany summit this week on the Baltic coast especially tricky.
Great to have some feedback on my recent comment about Britain’s attitude towards Europe post-Blair. But some people in Brussels would chuckle at the idea I’m some kind of self-loathing federalist Brit - a species which admittedly can be found in this habitat.
My point is not that Britain should sign up to a federalist agenda (indeed there aren’t many countries left that are still pushing it, apart from Belgium), but rather that there exists a great opportunity for Gordon Brown or David Cameron to shape the EU in a way that helps the UK.
As a French MEP told me the other day: "The Brits are winning in Europe. So what is their problem?" Indeed one of the reasons cited by French politicians for the No vote to the constitution is that it was too Anglo-Saxon.
Tony Blair is not the most loved politician in Europe: too pro-American, too liberal, too British and so on. But what many European politicians seem to have missed is that Blair is the most pro-European British prime minister since Edward Heath in the 1970s: things aren’t going to get any better.
Gordon Brown, Blair’s presumed successor, has a reputation around Europe for being uninterested in the EU and dismissive in his dealings with fellow ministers. But what would happen if Brown lost the next British election - probably in 2008 or 2009 - to the Conservatives?
A glimpse of Britain’s European future came on Wednesday in a wide-ranging speech by William Hague, the Conservative foreign policy spokesman. If you thought Tory thinking had moved on much since the days of Margaret Thatcher, this might make you think again.
I’ll be in Madrid on Friday, listening to the representatives of 20 countries protesting their love for the European Union constitution (deceased), and insisting that as much of the hallowed treaty should be saved as possible.
That is their right and they have a point. After all, 18 out of 27 member states have ratified the constitution (that’s the equivalent of 270m people) and Portugal and Ireland will also be in Madrid as non-ratifying but honorary "friends of the constitution".
But they should prepare to be disappointed. The fact is that if anything is going to be saved it will have to be modest, unthreatening and boiled down to its barest essentials. This is how you do it:
