The EU has serious problems too
Sitting at my desk in rural France, I could almost hear the guffaws in Westminster when the news came through that EU leaders meeting this week in Brussels had been unable to agree on who should lead the Union in the years after Brexit – assuming, that is, that Britain’s departure is concluded sometime in the next decade. Not only could EU leaders not reach consensus, they were reportedly squaring up to each other, demanding endorsement of their own choices while excoriating all rival nominees.
In fact, this is par for the course. Speaking of France, De Gaulle once famously asked how it was possible to govern a country that made 246 kinds of cheese. Multiply the number of cheeses by ten, add in at least a thousand winemakers and a hundred or more car manufacturers – to say nothing of 27 sovereign parliaments, all with their own traditions and prejudices – and you get some idea of the complexity of European governance. The wonder is that anyone gets appointed at all. The process may be labyrinthine, but in the end it always produces results.
In other words, there will, in the end, be successors to Jean-Claude Juncker at the Commission, Donald Tusk at the Council, Mario Draghi at the European Central Bank and Frederica Mogherini as High Representative in charge of foreign policy and security. The wrangling now going on will in due course be resolved just as surely as the in-fighting among Tories over who should be the next British prime minister will by the end of July produce a victory for Boris Johnson.
In the midst of the jobs kerfuffle, one fact should be noted by the soon-to-be-outsiders of the United Kingdom camp. The first is that the same duo of Juncker and Tusk will remain in office right up until midnight on October 31, meaning – short of yet another extension of Article 50 – that it is they, not their successors, who will preside over Brexit’s final knockings. If you don’t like the little Luxembourger and the loose-lipped Pole, you need to realise that their time is not yet up. To quote that other great democrat, Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, they haven’t gone away, you know.
One other fact relating to the current job-share is little commented upon, but truly extraordinary. Italy, which has been berating Brussels for the last ten years, complaining that its interests are being ignored in favour of those of the northern member states in general and Germany in particular, currently holds three of Europe’s top jobs. In addition to Mario Draghi as head of the Central Bank and Frederica Mogherini as High Representative, Antonio Tajani is President of the increasingly bolshie European Parliament. Three Italians – all born and raised in Rome – are in charge of vital aspects of the very organisation which their own Government believes takes no account of Italian interests.
Do Italians become Europeans when they cross the Rubicon? The question should probably best be put to Lucia Serena Rossi, Italy’s judge on the European Court of Justice, or her countryman, Giovanni Pitruzella, one of the court’s eleven advocates-general. An alternative ruling could be provided by Luca Jahier, from Turin, President of the European Economic and Social Committee, charged with reconciling mainstream EU objectives with the needs of civil society across the 27.
Quite a spread of influence, you have to admit. If the UK had inserted itself into the Brussels Deep State with the same vigour as Italy instead of standing perpetually on the sidelines shouting abuse, might British interests have been better served, or would our men and women in Brussels have gone native and ended up, like the Supreme Court, as “enemies of the state”?
What is clear, amid the rhetoric and the nationalist chest-beating, is that whoever leads the European Commission and European Council for the five years starting November 1 will help shape the future EU at least as much as France’s Emmanuel Macron and whoever succeeds Angela Merkel as the Chancellor of Germany. The new head of the central bank will also play a crucial role.
The challenges confronting all three, together with the incoming High Representative, are many and varied.
The single currency remains a work in progress. Though more stable today than in the years immediately following the 2008 financial crisis, the euro works well for Germany and the North, less well for the South. Draghi has spoken of more quantitative easing – basically the injection of cash into the system. He has also identified deflation as an underlying threat, bringing with it the possibility of negative interest rates and bank accounts that decrease in value. Europe is not alone in having money problems, but only the EU has to balance the often conflicting demands of a multiplicity of states.
Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, is stuttering. Already hit by the trade war between the US and China, and with Brexit possibly about to hit the buffers, the federal republic is fast losing its swagger. The emissions scandal that battered BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler has been joined by the ongoing Deutsche Bank crisis, rooted in false accounting and money-laundering, to create a new and unwelcome image of Germany as a criminal conspiracy. Falling exports and legal problems stretching far into the future have fuelled fears of a prolonged economic downturn, if not an actual recession, with consequences that do not end at the country’s borders. At the same time, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, leading to a surge in support for right-wing populism and even the reappearance of neo-Nazis on the streets.
On the opposite side of the Rhine, France is governed by a President and his party (La République en Marche) that had hoped to sweep all before it following the electoral triumphs of 2017, only to find that the people had other ideas. The gilets-jaune protests gave Macron a kick up the rear from which he has yet to fully recover. The President retains ambitions to be Europe’s leader, taking over from the ailing Mrs Merkel. He wants to force through another phase of economic and political integration that includes a joint Eurozone budget presided over by a Brussels-based finance minister. Unfortunately for the Élysée, Germany is underwhelmed by the prospect, Italy is positively opposed and pretty well everybody else thinks it is far too much far too soon.
Italy, now governed by La Liga, rooted in the North, and the Five-Star Movement, rooted in poverty and unrest, is constantly on the verge of junk-bond status. The country’s banking system is in traction, the nation’s principal roads and bridges are on the brink collapse and ordinary Italians are obsessed with the thought that, if nothing is done, what used to be the Papal States will end up as a Muslim caliphate. What the country needs is not a new Mussolini, but a new Cicero, but as things stand the former looks to be more likely than the latter.
There is better news from the Southwest. After years of record unemployment and financial turmoil, Spain and Portugal (and, for that matter, Greece) are in recovery. Jobs are returning and the national coffers are being replenished – thus demonstrating that latitude is not the only determinant when it comes to making the single currency do its job. Madrid, on the other hand, is deeply embroiled in the Catalan crisis, which shows no sign of diminishing, and the former governing parties are having to fight for position with a growing number of rivals.
The deepest rumblings, lessened in volume only by distance from the centre, have their origins in the former Communist bloc, whose Vizegrad quartet – Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – behave more and more as if they were a separate Eastern European Union, unimpressed by western liberalism, bored with the social and contractual obligations of EU membership, keen only on the millions of euros that arrive each week from Brussels to boost their economic performance. How to bring the Visegrad to heel will be high on the agenda of whoever takes over the reins in November.
Arching over all of these concerns and crises is the issue of climate change, now officially the EU’s number one priority. If sea levels were rising only slowly, the ice caps were retreating at a snail’s pace and global warming was restricted to no more than a degree or two every 50 years, Brussels would know exactly what had to be done. There would be talk of new regulations and inspections. Committees would meet and evidence would be studied. The problem is that the jury of international scientists and observers has already returned its verdict and they say the outlook is grim. On the bright side, the Commission was green when most of the rest of the world was happy to pretend that climate change was something that only happened to other people. If anything can be done before we all go down the tubes, expect Europe to lead the charge.
And then, of course, there’s Brexit. But we can safely leave that to Boris Johnson, can’t we? No problem there, surely.