I have sat on several black leather sofas today, which suggests to me that I might be in Germany. If so, that is a good thing. The Germans are running both world and European affairs during the month of June. Next week they will be hosting the G8 summit. Then on June 22 Angela Merkel will be chairing a European summit in Brussels.

Things aren’t looking great for the G8. President Bush’s speech on climate change has been hailed as a huge breakthrough by Tony Blair. But I met a senior German official shortly after Bush had finished speaking and his first reaction was downbeat. As the Germans see it, there are two big things separating the European and American positions on climate change. The Europeans want to run climate change programmes through the UN and the Americans don’t. And the Europeans want strict, binding targets on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. And they still don’t think the Americans are ready for that. It will be interesting to see if closer analysis of the Bush speech changes that view.

If there is a failure at the G8, the Germans will be all the more desperate to get a success at the EU summit. Success for them would be a re-launch of the EU’s vexed constitutional debate – but this time ending in a quick success, rather than the debacle that followed after French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed EU constitution.

The mood among German foreign-policy academics seems to be pretty positive. They can see all the problems; but they think Merkel will pull off a deal that slightly revises the constitution, but keeps its essential features. However senior diplomats who are rather closer to the negotiations are more cautious. One of them puts the chance of success at the Brussels summit at no more than 50:50. They think it will be a long hard negotiation. European summits are meant to last no more than two nights. But I was advised to “bring at least four shirts” – this summit is clearly going to run over.

Five countries have been identified as potential problems. The French and the Dutch because they have already rejected the constitution and will need some evidence that something has changed – before they can summon up the will to ram the wretched document through their parliaments. (No referendums this time, thank you very much.) And then there is the group charitably referred to by one German diplomat as the “three crazies” – Britain, the Czech Republic and Poland.

Of the three, the Poles are seen as easily the most difficult. The Germans and the Poles do not get on. (Apparently there is some historical baggage there.) The Poles want to re-open the question of EU voting weights. The proposed deal in the constitution is that countries’ voting power will be directly proportional to their population. This suits the Germans nicely since they are the biggest country in the EU. But it is poison for the Poles, who under the present system have almost as many votes as the Germans with less than half the population.

The Germans claim that their determination to stick with the constitution’s voting system goes well beyond their own national interest. Re-open the voting deal, they claim and everything else is back on the table – and agreement will become impossible. As one German diplomat puts it – “Poland just has one request, but that request is dynamite”.

June 1st, 2007 in Current Affairs | Permalink