UK needs different ‘top job’ in Brussels (William Hague, FT)

EU pressed to appoint more women to top jobs (Stanley Pignal, FT)

EU top job search is too narrow (FT editorial)

Investigating Iceland’s financiers (Stanley Pignal, FT magazine)

Single market bargaining (Charlemagne, The Economist)

I confess to a certain surprise at the way that Massimo D’Alema is climbing up the list of candidates for the post of European Union foreign policy chief.  At first sight the former Italian prime minister and foreign minister ticks far too few boxes to get the job.  But there are, in truth, some straightforward reasons for his ascent - none of which reflects well on the EU.

First, the unticked boxes.  1) His communist past.  This is usually condensed into: “He’s a former communist and therefore unacceptable to Poland and other EU countries, which suffered under Soviet domination while the Italian communist party was gorging itself on covert funds from Moscow.”  In fairness, D’Alema abandoned communism 20 years ago.  I spent five years in Rome covering Italian politics, and he never struck me as an extremist or a hardliner.  Quite the opposite: he was highly pragmatic, in a shifty kind of way.

2) His opinions of the US.  D’Alema isn’t foolishly anti-American, but he has more than a few traces in him of that quintessential European personality, the austere leftwing intellectual who drips with cultural disdain for the US.  This could be a real risk for the EU.  If as EU foreign policy supremo he were to make critical remarks about the US in public, European influence in Washington would be killed stone dead - and there would be bitter recriminations in the 27-nation EU, making a mockery of the entire idea of a common foreign policy.

3) His linguistic skills.  These days it would be crazy for the EU to have a foreign policy chief who doesn’t speak fluent English.  D’Alema has picked up some over the years, but not enough.  “He has Italian waiter’s French and not much English,” says one EU minister who has known him during his various spells in the Italian government.

4) The domestic Italian political factor.  You have to ask yourself, why is Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi so eager to promote the candidacy of D’Alema, his political adversary?  A little history is needed here.  Back in 1996-2001 Berlusconi completely outmanoeuvred D’Alema in a lengthy set of negotiations over Italian constitutional reform that ended up going nowhere - to Berlusconi’s benefit.  It must have crossed Berlusconi’s mind that D’Alema is quite capable of self-destructing in the EU foreign policy job, something that would damage his career and strengthen Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian political scene.

So why is D’Alema’s star on the rise?  One reason is that France and Germany have never shown much interest in getting the foreign policy job (they prefer powerful economic posts on the incoming European Commission).  Meanwhile, the UK persists in its stubborn support for Tony Blair as the EU’s first full-time president, thereby reducing the chances that David Miliband could become the foreign policy supremo.  The behaviour of France, Germany and the UK has left a vacuum that has been filled by Italy, the EU’s fourth-ranking power.

The other reason is that D’Alema has the backing of Europe’s socialist parties.  The key player in this game is Martin Schulz, the German who chairs the centre-left group in the European Parliament.  Schulz is exploiting D’Alema’s candidacy for his wider purposes, which include maximising the legislature’s power relative to the EU governments and the Commission, increasing the left’s voice in Europe and consolidating his personal authority over the European centre-left.

It’s all pretty unedifying.  Whatever happened to the idea that Europe’s top jobs should go to the best qualified candidates?

Watch the Bank of Spain’s governor discuss the need to reform the labour market Continue reading "FT video: Spain ready for recovery"

Enlargement of the European Union is, almost imperceptibly, moving forward once more.  EU foreign ministers are expected next week to forward Albania’s membership application to the European Commission for an opinion.  This is a necessary technical step on the path to entry - small, but important.

The Commission is already preparing opinions on the applications of Iceland and Montenegro.  The opinions will take quite some time to deliver - longer for Albania and Montenegro than for Iceland - but the machinery is now in motion.

There are signs of progress elsewhere, too.  For a long time Serbia’s efforts to draw closer to the EU have been held back by the refusal of the Netherlands to permit implementation of Serbia’s EU stabilisation and association agreement.  The Dutch insist that Serge Brammertz, the chief United Nations war crimes prosecutor, must first of all declare that Serbia is fully complying with its efforts to capture war crimes suspects - principally, Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander.

Brammertz is due to hand his latest report to the UN Security Council in early December, and the Serbian government appears confident that it will be positive.  That would remove the Dutch veto and allow Serbia to make a formal application for EU membership.

Meanwhile, Croatia’s bid to join the EU is back on track after a compromise over a maritime border dispute with Slovenia.  One possible complication here is that Slovenia may hold a referendum to approve the deal.

Nor will it be plain sailing for Albania.  As Olli Rehn, the EU enlargement commissioner, pointed out this week, the Albanian socialist opposition has been boycotting parliament since the national election of June 28.  The boycott “does not respect European democratic standards”, Rehn said, and could damage Albania’s chances of being granted the formal status of an EU membership candidate.

Of all the countries with EU aspirations, there remain serious problems over Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey and a frustrating deadlock over Macedonia.  But the recent movement on enlargement is encouraging, nonetheless.  Enlargement has been one of the EU’s great foreign policy success stories.  With the Lisbon treaty finally in place, it’s time to step up the pace.

There are all sorts of threats to the European Union’s unity, but something tells me that the biggest threat isn’t the Visegrad group.  This appears to be a view not shared by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Speaking after the October 29-30 EU summit in Brussels, Sarkozy criticised the fact that the leaders of the four Visegrad countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - had held a pre-summit meeting to co-ordinate their positions.  “If they were to meet regularly before each Council, that would raise some questions,” Sarkozy said.

Would it, really?  When I put this question the other day to a high-ranking official from a Visegrad country, he replied with a Sarkozy-like grimace on his face.  The Visegrad group was, he said, as harmless as other EU regional subgroups, such as the Nordic trio (Denmark, Finland and Sweden), the Benelux countries (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands), the Iberians (Portugal and Spain) and Club Aristotle (Cyprus and Greece).

In truth, the most curious thing about the Visegrad group is that it still exists.  No sooner had it been set up in 1991 after the fall of communism than, like some mysterious mitteleuropäisch cell, it mutated from three members into four with the break-up of Czechoslovakia.  It held together largely because of the belief that strength in solidarity would accelerate the integration of the four into western security and economic structures - the EU and Nato.

But the strains inside the group have never entirely gone away.  Poland, the biggest member, tends to see itself as a kind of big brother, with a wider view on the world than the rest.  The Poles no longer want to be treated in the EU as a mere regional player, a country defined by its proximity to places like Belarus and Ukraine.  They want to be at the top table, next to France, Germany and the UK.

The Czech Republic tends to be regarded as the smarty-pants of the four, a perception reinforced by the Czech EU presidency in the first half of this year.  The Czechs spent an awful lot of time telling everyone how they were superior to their neighbours, because their far-sighted policies had enabled them to escape the worst of the financial crisis.  This know-all attitude didn’t exactly endear them to their EU partners.

Slovakia had a bad reputation in the 1990s because of the misrule of Vladimir Meciar, the former prime minister.  But it then transformed itself so fast that it is now the only Visegrad country in the eurozone.  However, there are continuing tensions over Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarian minority.

Hungary was hit hardest by the financial crisis.  Its neighbours gave Hungary the cold shoulder in February when the government in Budapest proposed a €180bn emergency aid programme to recapitalise the banking systems of central and eastern Europe and reschedule foreign currency debt.

This in itself is proof, if any were needed, that Sarkozy’s suspicions are exaggerated.  But then again, French opinions about the EU’s former communist countries have a rich history.  After all, who was it who told the central and eastern Europeans at the start of the Iraq war that they had “missed a good opportunity to shut up”?

Step forward, ex-president Jacques Chirac.

Anger of GM’s Opel U-turn (Daniel Schäfer, FT)

Oracle braced for EU objections on Sun deal (Nikki Tait, FT)

The end is nigh, we plan to do nothing about it (Charlemagne blog, The Economist)

I admired Thatcher, says Chirac in memoirs (Charles Bremner, The Times)

Even EU having trouble on climate agreement (Paul Taylor, IHT)

Where did Vaclav Havel’s anti-communist dream take us? (Adrian Bridge, Daily Telegraph)