President Blair would give the EU Superstate Worldwide clout

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*Perilous Times and The Revived Roman Empire

President Blair would give the EU Superstate Worldwide clout*

You don't have to like Tony Blair's record to realise he is just the
figurehead the European Union needs

* Giles Merritt
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 October 2009 09.09 BST

Whoever steps into Europe's new top job as president of the European
Council will set the mould. If it is someone of worldwide renown, the
presidency will immediately be established as a post of global
importance. But if its first occupant is not a household name, the
presidency will be doomed as just another of the European Union's
confusing plethora of worthy senior positions that are neither valued
nor understood outside Brussels.

The key point here is that Europe won't be able to upgrade the job
later. If the presidency goes to a politician who lacks fame and
charisma, its place will forever be low down in the international
pecking order.

Of the half-dozen candidates to become "Europe's president," only Tony
Blair needs no introduction anywhere. All the other names in the ring
have to be accompanied by a description – the former Finnish this or
Austrian that.

Nobody knows whether the current prime ministers of the EU's 27 member
countries will choose Blair. There is considerable lingering ill will
over his role in the invasion of Iraq, and there is the inconvenient
fact that he is from Eurosceptic Britain, and that many on the left view
him as a leader whose "third way" was a betrayal of socialism.

But choosing a president for Europe isn't about Blair the man, or about
the political records of any of the others who would like the job. It is
about the job itself. Europe's problem is that it lacks a clearly
identifiable leader. As a result, despite the EU's many successes, it
still speaks with too many voices.

This was among the problems that the EU's controversial Lisbon treaty
was designed to fix. It is now in the final stages of its long and
difficult birth, and by the new year should be bringing new mechanisms
to bear to streamline European decision-making. The jewel in its crown
is to be the appointment for a 30-month term of a full-time president of
the European Council, which groups the heads of EU member governments,
along with a foreign policy chief who will be backed by an embryonic EU
diplomatic service.

Now that more than two-thirds of Irish voters have reversed their
country's earlier opposition to the Lisbon treaty – with only the Czech
Republic's Europhobic president, Václav Klaus, holding out against it –
the focus is on who will fill these two jobs. And that, in turn, has
triggered a round of bitter political squabbling that threatens to
negate the entire idea of a much more powerful European voice on the
global stage.

The three Benelux countries, along with a few other smaller EU nations,
are opposed to the new European president being from a large nation. And
there are also those who fear that a political heavyweight in the job
might eclipse the EU Commission's president, former Portuguese prime
minister José Manuel Barroso, who has just been confirmed for a second
five-year term, and devalue the role of the foreign policy chief whose
authority Lisbon is due to beef up.

These are specious arguments. The EU's external relations involve two
different types of politics. The first is the politics of world theatre,
where a political figure of global stature could do much to raise the
EU's profile and ensure that it has a major say in re-ordering the
post-crisis global economic rulebook. The second is the politics of
detail, where the new foreign policy chief's role is to create a single
EU stance on the wide range of issues about which European governments
still have wildly different national positions.

Europe has an international image problem that in part stems from a
complex institutional structure that non-EU countries find baffling. It
is over-represented at G20 world summits, for instance, but the presence
of four European national leaders, plus EU representatives such as
Barroso, weakens rather than strengthens its political weight. The same
is true of other global bodiessuch as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund.

The result is that Europe's achievements in recent years – its expansion
to create a single economic market of 500 million people and its
creation of the euro as a currency that challenges the dollar – are not
accompanied by a significantly greater global standing. World leaders
from Barack Obama to Hu Jintao address themselves to Berlin, Paris, and
London, rather than to Brussels. The result is that EU policy proposals
that could do much to advance the economic and geopolitical interests of
Europeans are not as influential as they could be.

The text of the Lisbon treaty is studiously vague in its job description
of the president's role – an approach that prevented trouble for
treaty's framers, but merely postponed disagreement. The real argument
now taking place between Europe's national governments is about the
authority that the EU's president should have. The risk is that Europe's
squabbling politicians will opt for a figurehead and miss this golden
opportunity to create a global leader.