Reflections on a 'snub'
In Greece, where I spent the better part of this week, the "snub" didn't register. No one spoke of the perceived slight of an American president The people there are focused on the real world of wage freezes, cuts in spending and paying for their nation's deficit.
Elsewhere it has been another week of angst for an insecure union. As one Belgian paper put it, "the EU is in danger of being sidelined".
If the EU were in therapy, the analyst might conclude its stress derives from willing what cannot be.
Sometime down the road European officials became obsessed with influence, with being a global player. After all, one often hears, the EU is the largest donor of international aid. It is the biggest trading bloc...so surely, the argument goes, they deserve a seat at the top table. And yet, too often, they feel slighted.
On climate change European leaders, with some justification, believed they had set the pace. Yet when the final accord was agreed in Copenhagen they were outsiders. The Swedish prime minister got to hear about the deal by text message. The EU was left bruised.
The push for recognition was one of the drivers behind . Europe needed to speak with one voice, so it was said. Yet the structure it ended up with after eight years of haggling is off to a rocky start.
When, recently, I was in New York I found bafflement over the EU's top jobs. There's a President of the European Council, a President of the Commission, a rotating Presidency, a President of the European Parliament. And then there's a new foreign policy chief. Washington is struggling to decode this. "It is not clear who is speaking for Europe," said one official.
Stephen Flanagan of the in Washington was quoted as saying "the great hope that the naming of Catherine Ashton, the EU's new foreign policy chief, would lead to coherence has not turned out to be true".
While some European officials yearn for that top-table place, they bump up against an uncomfortable reality. Some European leaders jealously guard their influence at the international level. That is what lay behind the choice of the relatively unknown as the first President of the Council.
It is difficult for Europe to always speak with one voice when there are clear differences between countries. The UK, for instance, supports Turkey's accession to the EU while President Sarkozy does not. And the EU's most powerful leaders, Merkel and Sarkozy, do not want further integration. It is not clear, either, that the European public shares this desire for global influence.
So these contradictions make for European anxiety, particularly when an American president prefers to stay at home.
There are other factors at work here. The EU-US summits are twice-yearly. The Europeans tend to love summits; the Americans want to know what they are for. Last November, when the summit was in Washington, President Obama dropped by for just over an hour. Then he was done and Joe Biden was sent in. Again the Europeans bristled.
President Obama is a pragmatist. He is less concerned with whom he speaks to and more with what Europe delivers. The Americans are disappointed at the European response to his "surge" of troops into Afghanistan. I recall at a recent Nato meeting an American saying that Europeans seemed, for the most part, content with gestures.
France's Le Monde drew the conclusion that there are fundamental differences between the United States and Europe. "Bush wasn't the problem; Obama isn't the solution...the allies are discovering that the misunderstandings go beyond personalities."
But outsiders often see a Europe focused on structures and procedures. In her recent , Catherine Ashton spoke of some of the changes she is trying to introduce. "At the UN in New York," she said, "there used to be a Council delegation (representing EU governments) and a Commission delegation operating side by side but separately. Now we've brought them together." It may be an important step, but it says nothing to the outside world. The Financial Times concluded, "the problem is that the Europeans are obsessed with symbols rather than substance".
Whether Europe speaks with one voice may be the wrong question. I am not certain that Washington demands a single voice. It looks for something else. A willingness to commit, to deliver. That can involve a number of nations. It does not have to be all 27 countries in the EU.
Influence, too, may not derive from countries acting together. Turkey, on its own, is hugely influential. Brazil is listened to. India commands attention.
In this debate it is not clear what Europe wants influence for and whether the European public wants to shoulder the responsibility of acting decisively on the world stage.
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