Tentative first step towards EU being given permanent seat at United Nations. One should not rush to put the cart before the horse with all the rumours doing the rounds these days about the new EU responsibilities arising from the Lisbon Treaty, particularly because some of the comments seem to be aiming at sinking, rather than promoting, certain candidacies for the new posts. Certain forecasts should not be ignored, however, particularly when they are about general roles and principles rather than specific individuals. The most important one, to my mind, is Germany's announcement that it will be giving up its calls for its own seat on the United Nations' Security Council. Germany's new government will instead call for the EU to be given a permanent seat on the Security Council instead. It will certainly be no easy task to put this into practice. There are currently five permanent members, each of which has the right of veto, namely the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom. Would the EU be given a sixth seat or would the EU replace both France and the United Kingdom? How will the EU's views expressed at the Security Council be decided upon? Would the Security Council gain other new members, like Brazil, India and Japan? All this will have to be negotiated, but if Germany confirms its position, it will have an exceptionally important impact on the European role at the UN and will also impact on the EU having its own seat in other global bodies like the IMF and the World Bank.
The Community method. When it comes to the situation at home in the EU, what is clearly at stake is safeguarding and promoting the “Community method”, which is of particular concern to Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands (see the Benelux views on implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, published in our Europe/Documents series), other small and medium-sized member states and, naturally enough, the European Commission and the European Parliament. This means that a degree of moderation would be a good idea in the announcement of cooperation by big member states. Such cooperation is essential, of course, but the wording of views expressed recently by French European Affairs Minister Pierre Lellouche was over the top. He spoke about “unprecedented cooperation in Europe and in the world,” that would “form the heart of what I would call the third phase in post-war European history.” We can understand his justified enthusiasm for closer and more proactive Franco-German unity, but he should respect the feelings of small and medium-sized member states and also of the United Kingdom. The UK may well decide on its own not to take on a key role in the building of Europe going by some of the stands being taken in the pre-election campaigning that is now under way - like a desire to block the Lisbon Treaty. Attitudes soon change when a party is promoted from opposition to government…
A special case. These comments about the general line to be taken also apply to the candidacies of certain individuals for the new jobs that people say are being presented in order to shoot them down in flames rather than to genuinely back them. Some of this may apply to Tony Blair. The more he is discussed, the more the ire of his enemies is stoked up. Give the stable chairmanship of the European Council to a leading future from a member state that refuses to join the two biggest EU achievements of recent decades, namely the euro and Schengen's scrapping of border controls for EU citizens? Out of the question, according to Tony Blair's enemies, some of whom go as far as forgetting or denying that he was the British prime minister who has given the greatest backing to the European project, but who had to rein in his enthusiasm in the face of scepticism from public opinion and radical Euroscepticism in most of the media. His candidacy is challenged just as strongly in his own country. According to William Hague, possibly a foreign minister in the future if the Conservatives win the next election, appointing Tony Blair would mean that most British people would discover that the main brains behind the Labour government was still in power in Brussels and was on the phone with Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, pushing the British prime minister, David Cameron, into the background.
A monster to be reined in. Alongside the debates about individuals, there is also a call for balances to be struck - between nationalities, political forces and men and women. Partisan views or views refusing to accept different political positions cannot be allowed. There is no one political party or view that holds a majority at EU level and it would be undemocratic to ignore this. Nationality is not in itself a valid criterion because there are nigh on thirty of them. One commentator talks of a “three-headed monster” arising from the institutional set-up that is put in place by the Lisbon Treaty. Whether or not it turns out to be a monster, it will certainly need to be reined in if the EU is to be allowed to function.
(F.R./transl.fl)