by David Steven | Apr 30, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia
And for the EU’s latest foreign policy disaster (and one that reflects enormously badly on Gordon Brown if the story is true), the Telegraph claims that Baroness Ashton is on the brink of resigning after only months in her job:
“Every day is an uphill struggle,” said a European Commission official. “No one predicts she can stay five years, not even she.”
Lady Ashton has come under fire from powerful countries led by France, for allowing the Commission to seize too much control of a new EU diplomatic service that she is building from scratch.
Her lack of political authority has been blamed for a failure to stamp out bureaucratic Brussels in-fighting over who will control the new European External Action Service, with 7,000 diplomats manning over 130 embassies around the world.
Bitter turf wars over budgets and senior posts mean the diplomatic corps will be delayed, a situation that has angered governments and embarrassed the EU on the global stage.
Following one recent row, she allegedly threatened to walk out of her job and had to be talked out of resigning on the spot by diplomats and officials.
Of course, this may be wishful thinking by the Telegraph, but it’s another shocking misstep if true…
Update: And the plot thickens. According to the Daily Mail, Peter Mandelson is floating the resignation rumours because he expects to be Foreign Secretary and needs to find a job for David Miliband.
An Ashton aide told the MailOnline the report had ‘Mandelson’s fingerprints all over it.’ Mandelson wants to force Ashton to resign and hand over the EU job to David Miliband, the source said.
Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, was offered Ashton’s job last year but refused it, reportedly because he didn’t want to spend ‘years on a plane’.
But does Mandelson really expect Labour to form the next government? And how could he push Ashton out between now and Gordon Brown naming his cabinet after the election?
by David Steven | Apr 29, 2010 | Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, UK
If you’re in any doubt of the seriousness of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, read Mohamed El-Erian in the FT. A banking crisis has fuelled a sovereign debt crisis, which could in turn spark another banking crisis (with the whole caboodle, as I have argued, part of a sustained episode of financial instability that stretches back to the 1990s):
A number of things have to happen very fast over the next few days to have some chance of salvaging the situation. At the very minimum, the government in Greece must come up with a credible multi-year adjustment plan that, critically, has the support of Greek society; EU members must come up with sizeable funds that can be quickly released and which are underpinned by the relevant approval of national parliaments; and the IMF must secure sufficient assurances from Greece (in the form of clear policy actions) and the EU (in the form of unambiguous financing assurances) to lead and co-ordinate the process.
This is a daunting challenge. The numbers involved are large and getting larger; the socio-political stakes are high and getting higher; and the official sector has yet to prove itself effective at crisis management.
Meanwhile, the disorderly market moves of recent days will place even greater pressure on the balance sheets of Greek banks and their counterparties in Europe and elsewhere. The already material risks of disorderly bank deposit outflows and capital flights are increasing. The bottom line is simple yet consequential: the Greek debt crisis has morphed into something that is potentially more sinister for Europe and the global economy. What started out as a public finance issue is quickly turning into a banking problem too; and, what started out as a Greek issue has become a full-blown crisis for Europe.
Election or no election, the UK simply cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while this crisis runs out of the control. Alistair Darling needs to stop giving speeches to activists in Scotland and get back to work at the Treasury.
Lord Adonis stopped campaigning as soon as Eyjafjallajökull erupted. Darling must do the same as the UK faces contagion from Eurozone turmoil.
by Alex Evans | Apr 21, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, UK
Tony Barber in Brussels:
Viewed from Brussels, the rise of Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats in Britain’s election campaign is a fantasy come true. For most of its 37 years in the European Union, Britain has been the bloc’s most awkward, cussed member-state. Now, the unthinkable is happening. Britain’s opinion polls are topped by a party whose leader spent five years working at the European Commission and another five years as a MEP in the European Parliament. Gott am Himmel! A Brit who actually understands the place!
And it doesn’t stop there. Clegg studied at the elite College of Europe in Bruges, an institution geared to producing crop after crop of graduates with a lifelong enthusiasm for EU integration. He speaks Dutch, French, German and Spanish, making him as proficient a linguist as such dedicated Europeans as Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s full-time president, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg premier.
Clegg has a Dutch mother, a half-Russian father and three children called Antonio, Alberto and Miguel. There has been no British party leader like him since the EU’s 1957 Treaty of Rome. In fact, you may have to go all the way back to Charles James Fox, the Whig who briefly served as foreign secretary in the Napoleonic wars, to find a British statesman whose mental outlook was so naturally rooted in Europe. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! Clegg’s emergence is enough to make even the most agnostic Eurocrat think that there must be a god, after all.
by David Steven | Apr 9, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, North America
Jonah Golderg (of cheese-eating surrender monkey and liberal fascism fame) is no fan of Europe (Switzerland, excepted). Today, he frets that, if Obama is allowed to continue with his big gubmint ways, the world is likely to stop having new ideas.
Europe, he argues, is only able to keep afloat because it is propped up by US innovation:
America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? Not often, and when they do, it’s usually because companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline increasingly conduct their research here. Indeed, the top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single country combined. We nearly monopolize the Nobel Prize in medicine, and we create stuff at a rate Europe hasn’t seen since da Vinci was in his workshop.
If America truly Europeanized, where would the innovations come from?
Comparing rates of innovation between nations is no easy task, but the Economist Intelligence Unit produces an index – the last of which came out in April 2009. Here’s the top twenty, with the Europeans appearing to hold their own:
1. Japan. 2. Switzerland. 3. Finland. 4. United States. 5. Sweden. 6. Germany. 7. Taiwan. 8. Netherlands. 9. Israel. 10. Denmark. 11. South Korea. 12. Austria. 13. France. 14. Canada. 15. Belgium. 16. Singapore. 17. Norway. 18. United Kingdom. 19. Ireland. 20. Australia.
Such evidence, I fear, is unlikely to sway Goldberg. He prints, approvingly, an email from a reader which supports his thesis as follows:
I think that everything we need to know about the state of innovation in Europe is supplied by the search list results and the fact that the fifth-highest listing is this: Top 10 Inventions of the Middle Ages.
QED, say I.
by David Steven | Mar 29, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, North America
Lots of protestations from European leaders that they really can be credible partners for the United States:
Stung by a perception of America’s indifference to its historical alliance with Europe, senior European leaders are calling for a rebalancing of the relationship, promising the Obama administration that the Europeans can be partners for global challenges ranging from security to climate change.
A high-level conference here on Sunday was dominated by European efforts to get Washington’s attention, with promises of new, concerted action that were met with polite skepticism. American officials and European experts largely see European national leaders as focused on their own debates about Greece and the debt crisis afflicting the group of countries that use the euro, divided over China and Russia and tired of Afghanistan. Europe is seen just now as not a problem for the United States, but not much help, either.
But the European message here was striking, both as a response to criticism from Washington and as an effort by Europe’s new leadership, put in place under the Lisbon Treaty, to articulate a new foundation for an old relationship that most take for granted.
The European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, urged Europeans to “think global and act trans-Atlantic.” After President Obama’s postponement of a European Union-United States summit meeting, which caused resentment in Europe, Mr. Barroso, speaking to the conference here, the Brussels Forum of the German Marshall Fund, called for future summit meetings to be more substantive, less scripted and “much more efficient and results-oriented.”
The new president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy, said it was vital “to translate this shared history and our shared values into a shared future.” Both Europe and the United States “are entitled to ask the other: ‘What do you bring to the table?’ ” he said. “The only easy relationship is an empty relationship.”
I am all in favour of the Obama administration ignoring the European Union when it is divided and/or inward looking. But will the Americans create positive incentives for unity, by working hand-in-hand with the EU when it caucuses effectively on a global issue, and invests energy and resources in trying to reach agreement?
In the past, this has not been the case – think Copenhagen. Indeed, my impression is that many US policy makers instinctively (and perhaps unconsciously) prefer to see Europe weak and marginalised. In the future, a policy of divide-and-ignore needs to be replaced by one of notice-when-united.
