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Europe realises that Lisbon does not fix the EU [naar index]
06-01-2010 - Charlemagne - the economist
DID none of them read the Lisbon Treaty? By them, I mean the grand commentators now tut-tutting in the pages of various European newspapers about the complexity of the European Union's new institutional arrangements. Some of them appear genuinely stunned by the fact that Herman Van Rompuy, who took up office this week as standing President of the European Council, is going to have to share the limelight with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain, because Spain has the rotating presidency of the EU for the next six months.
Here is Jean-Marie Colombani, the former long-time editor of Le Monde, writing in El País today about the fact that Europe will be represented at the highest level not only by Mr Van Rompuy and Mr Zapatero, but also by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, and by the new foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton:
"Put ourselves in the place of European citizens, who were sold the idea that the Lisbon Treaty would simplify things... The idea was that this simplification would make Europe more dynamic and more efficient. And yet, in this new year, one feels a rush of vertigo: nobody had really realised that the rotating presidency would continue... Now we realise that Europe will be run by a complex mechanism with at least four axes: the president and the European foreign minister; the country holding the rotating presidency; the president of the Commission and his team and finally the national heads of state and government."
This would be the same Jean-Marie Colombani who edited Le Monde until 2007, and whose newspaper was among the loudest cheerleaders for the ill-fated EU Constitutional Treaty and then its near-identical replacement, the Lisbon Treaty.
I don't want to be difficult, but if he had read, say, The Economist at any point in the last few years, M. Colombani might have heard some views about the new treaty that did not come from the Brussels echo chamber. Here is a 2007 piece about a (French) study debunking the claim that EU decision-making was paralysed after the union enlarged. That piece argued that the real reason people wanted the new treaty was to prevent laggard countries from holding up the majority. Here is a piece about the competition likely to emerge between the council president, commission president and the new foreign policy chief, written at the October 2007 summit that drew up the Lisbon Treaty. Here is a piece from 2008, reporting alarm in Brussels as people belatedly realised that Lisbon did not include a role for the head of government from the rotating presidency, and here is a piece from October 2009, pondering how messy it was that nobody knew which of the EU bosses created by Lisbon would carry more clout.
Le Figaro, meanwhile, carries a similar op-ed today by Yves de Kerdrel [no link, the Figaro website is quite impossible] complaining that Europe is now offering four telephone numbers in response to the mythical request from Henry Kissinger, for a way of calling "Europe". I do not remember the Figaro complaining about this when it was cheering President Nicolas Sarkozy for turning the rejected constitution into the Lisbon Treaty.
M. Colombani consoles himself with the thought that nobody can fail to support at least one innovation in the new treaty, the "citizens' initiative", under which one million voters from a "significant" number of EU member countries can ask the European Commission to bring forward an "initiative of interest to them in an area of EU competence".
"What doubt can there be that the popular initiative will allow European public opinion better to understand the advantages of the Union?" asks M. Colombani.
Hmm. Actually, plenty of people in Euroland privately dread the citizens' initiative, whose ground rules are not spelled out in the treaty. They know it is perfectly possible these initiatives will be hijacked by any number of special interest groups. It is also perfectly possible that initiatives will be so flawed that the European Commission refuses to draft legislation in answer to them: a result which would hardly bring Europe closer to the people. Let's just hope the very first one is not a call for banning minarets on mosques, eh?
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