EU Presidency - Figurehead or Powerful Blair

In the end, Tony Blair’s great European adventure seems to have been a balancing act too far. As prime minister, Mr Blair built a career on political acrobatics. He was the Labour politician who left in place great chunks of Thatcherism. As prime minister, he swore he was a true European (the “most European of Englishmen”, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy once said) even as he defended opt-outs from such policies as ending internal European Union passport controls. More than any British leader, he backed closer European defence co-operation—and then he split Europe by joining America in Iraq.

But high-wire acts hurt when they fail. And, at an EU summit in Brussels on October 29th and 30th, Mr Blair fell, watching his bid to become the first permanent president of the European Council collapse. Mr Blair needed leaders to agree that he was a sincere European, and they could not. He needed his fellow socialists to admit he was one of them, and they declined (the centre-left Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, said Mr Blair represented “Bush and the war in Iraq”.)



The post at issue is not “president of Europe” but a narrower job, created by the Lisbon treaty, to chair meetings of the union’s 27 national leaders, and speak for them abroad, for up to five years. It replaces a rotating system under which countries set the agenda for, and chaired, EU summits for six months.

EU jobs were not on the agenda of this summit. Mr Blair was not even in Brussels. But he dominated the corridor talk. Officially, EU leaders were waiting for final treaty ratification, which came a few days later on November 3rd, after the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, ended a one-man campaign to resist Lisbon and signed it, paving the way for another summit to discuss top jobs. Yet even before Mr Klaus climbed down, leaders had found proxy means of debating Mr Blair.

At the October summit, socialists from Spain, Portugal, Austria and the European Parliament said their block should get the other big job created by Lisbon, that of high representative for foreign policy. Because the left controls a minority of EU governments and cannot claim both top jobs, that was code for ditching Mr Blair. Meeting socialist colleagues before the summit, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, testily urged them to “get real” and back Mr Blair. His browbeating failed. Euro-socialists say their top candidates for high representative are David Miliband, the British foreign secretary (who may prefer to stay in national politics), and Italy’s Massimo D’Alema, a wily ex-communist who was quite a successful foreign minister.

On the right, Mr Sarkozy declined to repeat his endorsement of Mr Blair. Sphinx-like, he would say only that EU jobs rarely went to early front-runners. In late-night briefings, the French murmured that Britain’s EU opt-outs were “not an advantage” for Mr Blair. In truth, Mr Sarkozy’s chief concern is to stick close to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. He announced proudly that France and Germany would jointly support candidates for the top jobs. Ms Merkel, a Christian Democrat, is more tribal than Mr Sarkozy. She reportedly feels the centre-right should provide the first council president, as it controls most national governments. The president should also come from a “small country”, she briefed German reporters, at least this time.

That will have big consequences for the EU and its image. Whatever people think of Mr Blair, making him president would have signalled that the EU wanted a spokesman with direct access to world leaders. Mr Blair’s apparent demise as a candidate (British officials loyally insist he still has a chance, once EU leaders ponder the unpalatable alternatives) signals the opposite. So does the rise of such alternative frontrunners as the Dutch or Luxembourgeois prime ministers, or the current darling of the corridors, Herman Van Rompuy, a clever, Haiku-writing ascetic who is prime minister of Belgium. Mr Van Rompuy, a Christian Democrat, is an Atlanticist and (a bit) less of a Euro-fanatic than previous Belgian prime ministers. He is endearingly modest: indulging in his first foreign caravan holiday this summer, he declared that at his age “you are allowed to go a bit mad”. But as prime minister, his main experience of international disputes is a Belgo-Dutch spat over the dredging of the River Scheldt.

Turning inwards, not outwards
When speaking jointly as the European Council, it turns out, EU leaders do not want to talk to the world. They want to talk to themselves. Pointing out that the new high representative will have lots of money and staff, as people in Brussels do, cannot hide this essential lack of ambition: he or she will be a peer of the world’s foreign ministers, not of its leaders.

The Blair saga also casts alarming light on Britain’s Conservative Party. Their foreign affairs chief, William Hague, told EU ambassadors in London that making Mr Blair president would be a “hostile” act. David Cameron, the Tory leader, called for a modest “chairmanic” head of the European Council. The Tories offered two arguments: that voters were denied a referendum on Lisbon so Mr Blair had no right to the job, and that Mr Blair would make the post too big a deal.

Britain was, indeed, denied a Lisbon referendum. But it is hard to see how Tory interests are advanced by helping a Belgian federalist into a top EU job. An even bigger Tory mistake is the belief that a modest president will mean a modest Europe. It will not. It means, rather, that the bit of the EU machine that directly represents national governments will have a weaker voice, to the advantage of the more federalist institutions: the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Europe is about balancing interests. Mr Blair knew that—just a little too well for his own, or Europe’s, good.