Tag Archives: Angela Merkel

A simplified conversation between David Cameron, and Merkel and Sarkozy

Take a deep breath. Step aside from your preconceptions about the UK and the EU, and your views on David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sakozy. I’m trying to do that when writing this blog entry. Follow the steps of the simplified conversation below, and please comment if I am factually wrong.

Merkel & Sarkozy: To stabilise the Eurozone we want to agree a new EU Treaty among all 27 Member States.
David Cameron: I will agree to that only if you add a protocol to the Treaty protecting the City of London, changing some areas of financial service legislation to Unanimity rather than Qualified Majority Voting* (paper summarising Cameron’s proposals here).
Merkel & Sarkozy: But this Treaty is about the stability of the Eurozone, not about financial services. Why are you raising these issues now?
David Cameron: I am raising these issues because they are vital for the UK.
Merkel & Sarkozy: We know that. But we do not want to discuss financial services now. We need to stabilise the Eurozone. So will you help us?
David Cameron: Not without the protocol.
Merkel & Sarkozy:  OK, so we will go ahead in the Eurozone without you, because we can, and you knew that was the danger. And as there will be no protocol as a result of us doing this, then rules for regulating financial markets remain unchanged.

Result: Merkel & Sarkozy get the Eurozone integration that they want, albeit with legal complexity to make it work outside the EU treaties. David Cameron gets nothing, because without the protocol the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon apply.

* – whether this actually would have been achieved with Cameron’s protocol is another debate. Let’s assume it would do what he demanded.

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The complicated balance between listening and leading, and how it applies to politics in Europe

Look across Europe, and think of the calibre of its leaders. Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron. Zapatero, Berlusconi, Tusk. Reinfeldt, Løkke, Pahor. Brussels with Barroso and Van Rompuy. This is not a quality lineup, not what one would classically call a statesman or stateswoman among the lot of them. Not a Schuman, an Adenauer, even a Delors or Kohl. With the danger of a Greek default drawing ever closer it’s not as if we can do without determined leadership in Europe.

Stepping back for a moment, why are we in this predicament?

It starts, I think, with the nature of representative democracy in the era of the internet (building on the era of 24 hour news), and the way that political parties function internally.

Continue reading →

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Ashton: you are the weakest link. Goodbye.

Foreign Ministers of EU countries are meeting today in Brussels, while at the same time protests against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt enter their 7th day. On his way to the Brussels meeting Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted this:

Very early from Stockholm to Brussels. Can EU really be a force for reforms and the rule of law in its neighbourhood? That's the issue now.
31.01.2011 05:51 via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite
@carlbildt
Carl Bildt

The right question to pose – but what prospect for any answers?

For the EU reaction to developments in Egypt has been somewhere between bland and non-existent. EU High Rep Cathy Ashton released two statements on Thursday and Friday last week, and President of the European Council Herman van Rompuy released a statement on Saturday. More from Kosmopolit here. These public positions do not go beyond a basic iteration of the need for non-violent behaviour on both sides, and for respect for human rights. Importantly there’s no mention of what should happen in Egypt, no way forward. Let’s not forget: Egypt is very much within the EU’s sphere of influence.

Presumably due to the lack of any coherence from the EU, Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy did get together to release a statement on Saturday – it’s stronger in its tone, and calls on Mubarak to commit to the reforms he has promised. It also mentions the crucial issue of keeping communications routes open. These words from the leaders of Europe’s big three countries are similar in tone and direction to Obama’s statement on Friday.

So with three European leaders essentially jumping the gun and being more concrete in their demands, where does that leave the EU’s efforts to achieve a coherent voice in international affairs?

In all of this the vacuum at the very centre is deafening. Van Rompuy has many responsibilities, so the critique should not rest with him.

No, the buck stops with High Rep Ashton.

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The EU is a man sat in Princeton, NJ

This blog entry is a partial response to the Presseurop / The Guardian My Europe series

Andrew Moravcsik - photo Princeton UniversityThe man in question is Princeton Professor Andrew Moravcsik, mastermind of the theory of liberal intergovernmentalism, that goes further than any other to explain the EU’s current predicament. The three stages of the theory - domestic preference formation, followed by interstate bargaining and finally the creation of supranational institutions – are the mirror for today’s EU.

Of crucial importance just now is the matter of domestic preference formation, for this is the ingredient that has undergone most change in the last decade. The historical imperative of reunification of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall was enough to keep a supranational EU on track until the end of the twentieth century; not so any longer.

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State of Tory eurosceptic debate

Merkel, Cameron, Van Rompuy - CC / Flickr

Merkel, Cameron, Van Rompuy - CC / Flickr

There’s an interesting piece at Centre Right on Conservative Home that looks at Cameron’s posturing on the EU budget last week (making a similar point to mine about his ‘win’) but also looking more broadly at whether the EU is an important political issue for voters, and what that might mean for the future.

The main argument is that the EU is seen as such a monolithic, unchangeable beast that voters cease to care about it – it’s impossible to alter, impossible to fix, so henceforth impossible to care about. There’s an element of truth in this, but it’s exacerbated by the very sort of approach the Tories (including the author of the Conservative Home piece) advocate – that the way forward is for the UK to renegotiate, for the UK to leave the EU, or for the UK to in some way not cooperate.

The first line of the final paragraph is the important one: “Voters need politicians that lead them, that tell them what matters, what can be changed and what to simply sit back and accept” – yes, precisely, particularly at EU level. So isn’t it about time Cameron got together with Merkel, Sarko, Berlusconi and even Barroso to try to work that out? I suspect that would require a cooperative pragmatism that Cameron’s rather incapable of just now.

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The EU’s merry budget dance

EU Flag - CC / Flickr

EU Flag - CC / Flickr

The British press has been making a big thing of negotiations on the 2011 EU budget for the past couple of days. David Cameron was apparently telephoning EU leaders yesterday, and on the eve of today’s summit claimed victory that the budget would rise 2.9% rather than the 5.9% proposed. About the lower increase Cameron said “the key point is, it wouldn’t have happened without our action”. Not so.

Anyone who has ever looked at how the EU’s annual budget has been negotiated would have seen this pattern replicated loads of times. It’s a merry dance conducted between the institutions, and everyone knows the steps and the rhythm.

The European Commission proposes the budget for the coming year, and deliberately sets it high. The European Parliament likes to see the EU doing things, to generally agrees with the Commission. Then the Member States – the ones who pay 75% of the budget directly as contributions from national finance ministries – step in, and knock down the percentage rise. So everyone gets what they want, give or take a bit. Commission and Parliament get a bit more cash. Member States look like they are reigning in the Commission and Parliament.

And Cameron claims he managed that all on his own? Rubbish.

Merkel and Sarkozy have precisely the same incentives Cameron does and, you could indeed argue, incentives three times as high as Cameron’s. For 2/3 of any extra money the UK puts into the budget is going to come back to the UK in the form of the UK budget rebate anyway, and it’s not clear whether all the numbers Cameron and co are banding around take account of the rebate or not.

As for the crux of the issue – the EU budget itself – then there is a good case for proper reform, but that will all happen when the financial perspectives are negotiated for the years beyond 2013. There some sparks are going to fly for sure.

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German election: a tough night for the left, where now?

CDU at Hauptbahnhof - J. Worth, CC Sharealike

CDU at Hauptbahnhof - J. Worth, CC Sharealike

Hoping for the continuation of the grand coalition was the best the SPD could hope for before yesterday’s Bundestagswahl. In the end the result was even worse than that: 23.1% and a historic low vote for the social democrats. Guido Westerwelle’s beaming grim was everywhere, the FDP the big winners on the night.

Looking behind the simplistic headlines in today’s newspapers, what can be deduced from yesterday’s result? First of all this was no major shift to the right. FDP plus Union (CDU/CSU) were only a couple of percent ahead of the left (SPD, Die Linke, Grüne) and indeed the CDU lost a percent in comparison to the last election and scored their second worst result in history. For the CSU it was worse, at 40% a result that Seehofer found hard to take.

On the left the picture is complicated. The headline figure is the 11% loss for the SPD, balanced to a certain extent by the 3.5% gain for Die Linke and 2% gain for the Grüne. With the SPD on 23%, Die Linke on 13% and Grüne on 10% the left is split as never before. Continue reading →

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German election gender politics

Election poster mockup - Jon Worth, CC License

Election poster mockup - Jon Worth, CC License

Gender framing has reared up in the German general election campaign as reported by The Local. Berlin Candidate for the Christian Democrats Vera Lengsfeld has put up pictures of herself and Angela Merkel both boasting considerable cleavages with the slogan “Wir haben mehr zu bieten” – “We have more to offer”. What the hell is this? Is Lengsfeld incapable of actually putting together some policy statements for her posters? And this is in Germany as well, a country beset by a big gender pay gap, very low birth rates, and poor rights to maternity pay.

So I’ve countered with the mockup above, using pictures of Roland Koch and Eckhart von Klaeden instead. Can you imagine a German male (CDU) politician posing for an election poster with a naked torso on a beach or something? I think not, and judging by the waistlines of some of them, it would surely be a gruesome sight.

This is all similar in style to Caroline Flint posing in a red dress in the UK, a decision dissected by Mary Honeyball, following on from the Blears-Harman handbag fight. Why oh why do we so easily slip into these gender frames and why, all too often, is it women politicians themselves that are not conscious of what they are doing?

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