The haggling over Europe’s new top jobs resembles that old children’s card game of mixing up the heads, bellies and feet of different animals, for a deliberately preposterous result. If only the European composite leadership that will emerge were so droll.
Instead, it will be dull, and paralysed by its incompatible parts (nor will any be British, as it is panning out). Fredrik Reinfeldt, Sweden’s Prime Minister, is tackling the task with high solemnity, saying that he wants a consensus of the 27 countries, not just a majority, in choosing the president and foreign policy chief, by November 19. He wants supposed balance between North and South, East and West, big countries and small ones, and Right and Left. He might want to add balance between male and female, but there is not, as things stand, much of a choice.
In awarding the prize jobs created by the Lisbon treaty, the European Union is indulging in its old game of starting with the person and wondering what he might do, tapping its big pool of politicians who have held a high-up job sometime, somewhere. It would do better, as many have said, to define the roles and then hold auditions. Yet even that is too abstract. It would do best to start with the urgent issues and work out who could best address them.
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Top of the list is the struggling economic recovery and the huge divergence of prospects between countries. The severe problems still affecting some eastern countries — Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania — and the difficult reforms they face, comes next. How to help them is one of the most expensive and urgent questions the EU faces.
Those economic questions will dwarf others in the next few years. Yes, immigration, energy and climate change are there but their eternal presence on the agenda signals the EU’s failure to tackle them as much as their weight.
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I am not one of those who maintains (as does this newspaper) that Tony Blair would have been a poor choice because he is too prominent, too liable to use that global recognition to set his own course. The EU presidency, at this exact point, demands someone expert in trade, financial regulation, and liberalisation of markets, and with the clout to argue the EU’s case. That means not just technical combativeness but the ability to reassert on the world stage the virtues of free markets, after two years of upheaval which require that the case be made again. For all its internal tussles over the role of the State, Europe stands on that side of the argument, but too often mutes it through endless nuances.
Blair would have been the best, but he is out, it seems. So too, now, is David Miliband for the foreign role. So too probably is Lord Mandelson, despite a flutter of suggestions to the contrary.
The odds are that there will be no British element to the final duo, and very likely, no one of the stature and economic experience to solve the EU’s most urgent problems. That is a loss for Britain, but even more for Europe.