Europe does not need a big shot

Poor Tony Blair – sabotaged by his own countryman. Just weeks ago,Mr Blair looked like the frontrunner to be president of the European Union. But now William Hague, Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, has let the rest of Europe know that the opposition Conservative party would regard his appointment as a “hostile gesture”. Since the Tories and Mr Hague are likely to be in government by the middle of next year, after a British general election, their views have real weight. Charles Grant, head of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, says: “On my travels around Europe I have found that Hague’s comments have made a huge impact.” Mr Blair’s candidacy has been badly damaged.

There is, of course, history between Mr Hague and Mr Blair. A decade ago, Mr Blair was prime minister of Britain and at the height of his powers, and Mr Hague was the leader of a struggling Tory party. Ten years on, both men have gone down in the world. Mr Blair is an elder-statesman for hire. Mr Hague has seen the Tory leadership pass to a younger, more charismatic man.

Some in Britain regard Mr Hague’s anti-Blair comments as an act of petty spite. Others see it as worse than that: Mr Hague, they charge, is so blinded by his Eurosceptic ideology that he is prepared to damage both Britain and the EU, by blocking Mr Blair.

But Mr Hague is right. It would be a mistake to appoint Tony Blair to the presidency of the EU. This is not because he is a bad man or a bad politician. He is neither. The problem is the job – an unelected post with no democratic mandate.

In fact, there are two closely related difficulties with nominating a president of the EU. The first is to do with the job’s shaky legitimacy. The second is to do with a lack of underlying unity that still bedevils efforts to create a common European foreign policy. Both problems would be made worse by appointing Mr Blair.

The EU knows that it is far too soon to attempt direct elections for a president of the Union. The 27 members lack the common language and political identity that would make such an election work. When I once discussed the idea of a directly elected European president with a senior official in Brussels, who hails from Finland, he shook his head sorrowfully and said: “I just can’t imagine Sarkozy campaigning in Lapland.” But that is just one of many amusing possibilities: how about Berlusconi in Berkshire; or Merkel in Warsaw?

Since a directly elected European president is unthinkable, the EU’s Lisbon treaty – which is finally limping towards ratification – allows the leaders of the 27 EU nations to appoint a president. But the precise nature of the job has always been a little vague. There is a minimalist interpretation, which would see the president of the European Council playing a relatively modest role: co-ordinating between national governments, chairing European summits and generally providing more policy continuity than the current presidency, which rotates every six months. And then there is the maximalist interpretation, which wants the new EU president to be a high-profile figure, strutting the world stage.

Mr Blair’s keenest supporters are maximalists. David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, thinks that the EU should be the third partner in a global triumvirate, managing world affairs with the US and China. He thinks that Mr Blair would be the perfect man to represent Europe at the world’s top table, since he is an international figure whose presence would “stop the traffic in Beijing”. Mr Blair would be presented as a real “president of Europe” – able to speak on equal terms with Barack Obama of the US or Hu Jintao of China.

But if Mr Blair turned up in Beijing claiming to be president of Europe, the only thing that he would have in common with Hu Jintao is that they would both lack a democratic mandate. Ordinary Europeans would be justified in asking by what right the unelected Mr Blair speaks for them. The former prime minister remains a deeply controversial figure in much of Europe because of his support for the Iraq war.

Mr Blair is particularly controversial, but any high-profile European president would be a divisive figure. For unlike the Chinese president, the president of the EU would not speak for a unified polity. In fact, European unity tends to crumble at moments of international crisis. The EU split badly when Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990s; and the major EU powers were at each other’s throats over Iraq in 2003.

This is not to say that the effort to create a common EU foreign policy is always a joke – or that substantial progress has not been made over the past decade. The EU has presented a more-or-less united front on Iran and on climate change, and has deployed peacekeepers to more than 20 conflicts around the world. The Lisbon treaty will create a souped-up foreign minister with more resources, which should help further the long-term work of carving out common European positions on the big global issues.

But it is too soon to appoint a high-profile “president of Europe”. If the new president claimed to speak for the nearly 500m citizens of the Union – without a direct mandate – he would invite a backlash in Europe and humiliation in the rest of the world. The EU deserves better than that. Come to think of it, so does Tony Blair.

gideon.rachman@ft.com
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