[Comment] Is the EU certain of its own priorities?
PETER SAIN LEY BERRY
11.07.2008 @ 13:07 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - What are the three most important challenges facing the European Union today? Or, if you dislike making hard choices between matters of equal moment, the five most important? Or even the seven most important?
It's not an easy question to answer: personally, I would rank the top three as climate change, steering the European economy and promoting European European values - democracy, human rights and so on - in the wider world. But others might substitute, or add, topics like institutional reform, migration, terrorism, defence, international development and managing our ageing population. Nor is that a definitive list; if this were a seminar we could go on, I suspect, until we had filled a blackboard.
Is dealing with climate change the EU's priority? (Photo: Tom Jensen/norden.org)
Of course, not all are independent issues. One could argue that managing the economy, or institutional reform, were important only as a means to an end: just necessary mechanisms that then enable us to do something that we really want to do - manage our ageing population, for instance, or bring greater social justice to the world's poor.
Others again might prefer to respond in terms of the angry and contradictory challenges that seem to be flung like gauntlets in our path: expensive oil and rising emissions; food shortages and obese children; a falling stock market and sustainable development.
We all think we know what the problems are - which are the main and which the subsidiary issues. We think we know which topics should be written and underlined in bold 16 point capitals and which should be relegated to numbered paragraphs or footnotes. But what consensus is there on these issues in Europe at the present time?
Ask any minister, or European Commissioner, and they will, as often as not, be viewing the world through the prism of their own department. Thus, I suspect, Mr Dimas might place climate change at the top of his list; higher anyway than Mr Verheugen who is in charge of industry. Mr Mandelson would stress the fundamental importance of a new trade round; Mr Michel that of international aid and development and so on.
The whole picture
This is natural and expected. But then we come to the top job, in the case of the Commission to Mr Barroso. He does not have a departmental axe to grind. Instead he can see the whole picture and arrange the imperatives and priorities and the fundamentals in an order that is strategic, coherent and balanced. It falls to him, as leader of the Commissioners, to articulate a clear grasp of the overriding objectives, the small fist of supreme issues to which we citizens should gear ourselves and apply our efforts.
"The main thing is to do the main thing," said a senior Microsoft executive to me the other day, repeating an instruction that has been rehearsed and retailed ever since men and women began to organise themselves for any kind of action: to wit the absolute necessity to focus on a few limited objectives if one is ever going to achieve any sort of worthwhile result at all.
Marcus Porcius Cato, the Roman statesmen, condensed his objective to just three words, endlessly repeated in every speech he made. " Delenda est Carthago" - Carthage is to be destroyed. And lo! Carthage was destroyed. And sadly for you, I and the Tunisian Ministry of Tourism, rather more completely than future generations might have wished.
Indisputably focus works; trying to do a little bit of everything doesn't. Which brings us, rather circuitously, to the recent G8 summit in Hokkaido, which has just ended, leaving us all desperately trying to remember what anybody said or what weighty matters were decided.
This was not for lack of output. The communiqués ran into pages and pages of opaque text, some of which was incoherent and self-contradictory. It was, no doubt, prepared in draft, weeks before, by earnest clerks in the Japanese Foreign Ministry anxious that no-one should accuse them of leaving anything out. Who they imagined might actually read this stuff is an interesting question: even journalists find it hard going.
Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches the news on television knows that the world is facing multiple challenges. They want to know what the world's leaders are going to do - where the focus is going to be, in which direction we should be travelling, behind whom should we fly our banners?
Instead the G8 meeting came and went and we are no further forward. We, the public, have learned a lot about what the great and good had for dinner and about how much Japan paid for the privilege of hosting and securing this jet-lagged jamboree. We now know that the world's leaders can line up to plant a row of trees, if suitably assisted by white-gloved flunkeys.
But in terms of real achievement, of direction, of prioritising, of setting goals and objectives, of responding to the current crop of crises under which we are collectively reeling, this year's summit has failed. Indeed, one measure of failure lies in the fact that the mere re-assertion of its 2005 targets of aid to Africa could be counted a success.
There was, yes, that pledge to cut carbon emissions to 50 per cent of 1990 levels by 2050, but such pledges - 42 years off and without intermediate targets - are mere froth. Such pledges are not pledges in any meaningful sense; they are no more than good intentions.
I began this piece by asking about our European priorities. I asked this because Europe provides half the (that is 4 out of the 8) G8 heads - indeed more than half if you acknowledge that Mr Barroso, as President of the European Commission, attends and addresses G8 summits as of right. (Whether such arrangements will continue if the EU ever gets to have a ‘President' as envisaged by the Lisbon Treaty is an interesting question, which we do not have space, unfortunately, to discuss here).
I can understand how difficult it may be for the leaders of the world's most developed (joined now and then by the leaders of the most developed-undeveloped) nations to reach agreement, but I have the awful fear that even in Europe we have not properly clarified our objectives - Cato style - and arranged our priorities. And if not in Europe, how in the world?
As the Bible says: ‘for if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?'
The author is an independent commentator on EU affairs