Van Rompuy and Ashton – The right choice?
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So it’s done. The first permanent EU Council president is Herman van Rompuy and the first High Representative for Foreign Affairs under the Lisbon Treaty is Catherine Ashton.
The EU has once again missed a chance to make a real impact on the world stage. The very little known van Rompuy is apparently meant to be more an internal negotiator than a representative on the world stage. And Ashton has next to no experience in foreign policy.
The blame for this disappointing outcome goes to Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, who obviously did not want any serious competition from Brussels. So much for their advocacy of a “strong Europe”.
Well, well (as we say in Dutch). You would have preferred a psychopath war criminal instead?
No, my choice would have been Jean-Claude Juncker and Joschka Fischer…
Don’t know them.
I can understand if only people interested in EU politics know Jean-Claude Juncker. But if someone doesn’t know Joschka Fischer, than this is not a sign of great competence in the field of politics…
(and a tip for everyone who really doesn’t know Joschka Fischer: Wikipedia is your friend)
The important point is not how well-known an appointee is but the strategic significance of the choices made. For it is in strategy that what Fritz Scharpf calls EU’s Government of governments reveals its long-term intentions.
The permanent EU Council President replaces the circulating 6-month chair and needs good negotiating skills, but is not the key position.
More significant is that choosing a Briton as high representative for foreign affairs takes advantage of Britain’s close relationship to the USA. In addition, British and US military bases, especially the RAF Base in Cyprus, and the US military base on the British Indian Ocean Territory island of Diego Garcia, must be a consideration. I believe both Cypus and Diego Garcia were used to bomb Iraq in 2003.
Thank you Jim, you got the point I was making. I’m afraid I do not agree with your comments about Britain’s close relationship with the USA though, I do not believe there is such a special relationship except in the head of some Australians and badly educated Etonians. It is about time US bases outside the US were closed. It’s not nice seeing foreign soldiers in one’s country.
I deliberately didn’t use the phrase “special relationship”, since I don’t think anyone can deny that Britain works hand-in-glove with US military interests. Diego Garcia is just one of the arrangements in which British colonies are used to project US global power. Diego Garcia has also been used by the US to attack Afghanistan, and the US is extending its Diego Garcia facilities by building a submarine base.
My point is really a more general one, supporting Scharp’s observation about the dramatic shift to the right in EU politics. I would just point out here that the ex-Warsaw Pact countries and the former Soviet Socialist Republics that are now member states of the EU have a common fear of Russia, a fear rooted in centuries of experience stretching back to at least the 1600s. This fear has been a major reason why these countries were so keen for the shelter of EU protection.
To this must be added the fact that the social policies of some of these countries are far to the right of anything the EU has hitherto experienced stretching across a range of social issues, while anything reminiscent of Soviet communism in social policy is anathema.
Since all 27 countries have to agree every decision that the government of governments makes, it doesn’t take much for agreement by the lowest common denominator to be the appointment a Briton as High Representative of Foreign Affairs in the not unreasonable expectation that she will work closely with the USA.