The European Union ends the summer in some anguish. On 30 July, the Doha Round collapsed. Much to the evident frustration of the European Commission, the Council of Ministers failed to back the compromise proposal from WTO director general Pascal Lamy for a special safeguard mechanism to protect the interests of certain developing countries. France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland and Lithuania led the faction in the Council of Ministers which scuppered the mandate of the EU’s chief negotiator Peter Mandelson.

The effective end of these complex multilateral trade negotiations is indeed, as Messrs Lamy and Mandelson say, a collective failure by the global community. But the recriminations inside the EU, which is supposed to have a common commercial policy, will continue to poison the atmosphere in Brussels and, more pointedly, to mar the Union’s attempt to shift spending away from agricultural support towards industrial productivity.