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A president of Europe?
By ANGELA CHARLTON Associated Press Writer
PARIS - The European Union
has battled long and hard for this moment: the imminent choice of
its first president.
To get there, the EU
strong-armed Irish voters, brushed aside hostile French and Dutch
ballots, and pressured the Czech president into agreeing to a single
leader to give Europe a strong voice on the world stage.
Yet after all that, EU leaders
meeting Thursday may end up picking someone from a small country
with little international power instead of a charismatic heavyweight
to head this continental bloc of 27 nations, half a billion people
and huge economic heft.
To pick a boss they can all
live with, they must strike the right balance between big countries
and small, east and west, socialists and conservatives, perhaps male
and female. They must maneuver between proponents of a strong Europe
and those who fear it - eurocentrics and euroskeptics, in the local
parlance.
The decision will help define
Europe's future, the climax of a decade of agonized contortions and
oft-thwarted efforts to make the EU about more than money and
markets and common rules about what bananas Europeans can buy.
"The time has come to have a
personality who will make an imprint ... a European mark" on world
affairs from Iran's nuclear program to relations with Russia, French
Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said last week.
"We should have weight in the
world; we are 500 million people," he said. "We should participate
in world events and not just finance them."
The early favorite was
Britain's former prime minister, Tony Blair, but his candidacy has
run into trouble. He cuts a big figure on the world stage - perhaps
too big for the liking of other powerful figures such as French
President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Now the talk among diplomats
is that the EU president won't be that globally powerful after all
and that the role will primarily be to liaise internally among EU
governments. That would leave room for a low-profile president and a
more eye-catching figure in the No. 2 slot of EU foreign minister,
which carry the real international oomph.
There's talk of grudges: Will
Britain block Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy as punishment
for Belgian objections to Blair? Will Poland nix Italy's Massimo
d'Alema because of his communist past?
The path toward giving Europe
a public face has been a tortured one. First, there was the EU
constitution, which was meant to streamline decision-making and
stipulated creating a president and a commissioner of defense and
foreign affairs. But French and Dutch voters rejected the
constitution in referendums in 2005, fearing a threat to their
sovereignty.
Then a toned-down reform
treaty was born. That made it past most governments - but then Irish
voters said no.
They were talked into a second
vote, said yes - and then the euroskeptic Czech president, Vaclav
Klaus, resisted. Under heavy pressure, the Czechs also signed on
last week.
There are no declared
candidates and no public campaigns. President Barack Obama's future
European counterpart will be determined not by elections but over a
closed-door dinner.
Blair's most visible handicap
is his enthusiasm for the Iraq war, which many Europeans opposed. He
is especially resented among European leaders who bucked resistance
at home to join the euro, the bloc's common currency, only for
Britain to stay out of it.
British Foreign Secretary
David Miliband is often mentioned for the job of foreign minister,
but he insists he's not in the running.
Being on the left and coming
from a big country, Miliband could have been nicely balanced against
a conservative from a small country holding the presidency, such as
Dutch Premier Jan Peter Balkenende, Belgium's Van Rompuy or former
Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel.
At the last EU summit two
weeks ago, calls mounted to give the presidency to a woman. That
boosted the long-shot chances of Latvian former President Vaira
Vike-Freiberga.
The logic of choices is often
mysterious or counterintuitive. Balkenende is vaunted as a good
candidate because his country's voters rejected the EU constitution,
"which should comfort the euroskeptics," the Dutch newspaper NRC
Handelsblad surmised.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl
Bildt is known internationally for his U.N. role in the Balkans, but
says he's not running. He says only that Europe's president should
be "a good person."
The European Union that rose
from the ashes of World War II has torn down its borders, adopted
common standards in everything from the death penalty to the weight
of cargo trucks. It has dug a tunnel to link Britain to the
Continent and its haves have poured billions into its have-not
member states - 10 from the former communist bloc - raising their
living standards beyond recognition.
And that's where it should
stop, say the euroskeptics, before national governments lose their
sovereignty to a faceless superstate.
A face, say the europhiles, is
exactly what Europe needs in order to take its proper place on the
world stage. They have a stock phrase: When America needs to talk to
Europe, it doesn't know whom to call. Now, said France's Kouchner, "Europe will have a telephone number."
Associated Press writers
Robert Wielaard in Brussels and Toby Sterling in Amsterdam
contributed to this report http://www.theledger.com/article/20091114/API/911142015# http://www.theledger.com/article/20091114/API/911142015
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FILE
- In this Oct. 9, 2009 file photo, Britain's former Prime
Minister Tony Blair 
