The Berlusconi option for Lady Ashton?

• European foreign policy

  The Berlusconi option for Lady Ashton?

    by Charlemagne | BRUSSELS

  WHEN it is not fretting about the failures of the euro, Brussels’s favourite pastime is to fret about the failures of its diplomatic arm, the European External Action Service (EEAS).
  With the Arab world in ferment, the West as a whole in decline and America drawing down its military commitment to Europe, one would assume that Europeans would have a lot to think about and do in international affairs. But a year after the launch of its "foreign ministry", though, the despair is palpable. Fewer and fewer people have anything good to say about its boss, Cathy Ashton.
  One unusually fierce shot was fired last month from the pages of The Economist’s sister publication, European Voice (here). The author, Toby Vogel, concluded:
  
  
  

  I wrote here a year ago that the EEAS would be judged not by its performance at launch but by the state of the EU's foreign and security policy after a year or two. The new service is still failing. Among all the design flaws that have held back the EEAS, by far the biggest has been to put Ashton in charge of it.

  Since then the reports and assessments have been coming in thick and fast. One poor grade comes from the foreign-policy “scorecard” issued by the European Council on Foreign Relations. Another think-tank, FRIDE, analyses more generally the growing trend towards commercial interests in "Challenges for European Foreign Policy in 2012" (PDF here).
  Perhaps the most comprehensive demolition came today from Stefan Lehne, a former senior Austrian diplomat who worked for Mrs Ashton’s predecessor, Javier Solana.
  His analysis, "More Action, Better Service: How to Strengthen the European External Action Service" (PDF here) is phrased diplomatically, as one might expect, but its exposition of the weakness of the EEAS is more devastating for the sober tone in which it is delivered. In some ways, he concludes, the situation is worse today than it was under the previous system of fragmented roles.
  Any new organisation is bound to have its teething problems, particularly one such as the EEAS, which incorporates functions that had been performed by several officers, and which must reconcile the aims and prejudices of 27 different countries. The service, moreover, has been systematically undermined by the European Commission, and by the bigger beasts among the foreign ministers. But much of the trouble boils down to poor leadership, ie, Lady Ashton. There are some first-rate people in the EEAS. But the stories of chaos in her entourage and despair among her subordinates are worryingly commonplace.
  
  

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• The EU summit

  A deal, but to what end?

  Jan 31st 2012, 0:18 by The Economist | Brussels

  
  

  BY THE standards of past summits, European leaders finished early—shortly before 10pm on January 30th. And by the acrimonious standards of past gatherings, notably last month’s bust-up with Britain, this event was uneventful, even amicable. Agreement was reached on the fiscal compact, the new treaty to toughen budget rules, in record time: less than two months.

  A final row between France and Poland over who gets to attend which summits was resolved with a complicated compromise. This involves variable configurations of meetings involving 17 countries (the euro zone), 23 (the largely-forgotten Euro-Plus Pact, 25 (the signatories of the fiscal compact), 27 (all EU member states, still in charge of the single market) and 28 (involving soon-to-join Croatia).

  It shows that, at the very least, European leaders can negotiate rapidly when they have the political will to do so—and when the British and the Czechs decide to step aside. Whether electorates will be quite so quick to shackle themselves to Germanic fiscal rules is another matter.

  But did the leaders achieve anything useful to stem the crisis in the latest of their interminable summits? Their compact—now called the “treaty on stability, co-ordination and governance in the Economic and Monetary Union”, has as its main aim the imposition of balanced-budget rules on members. This may be a useful discipline in good times. But many worry that, at a time of widespread crisis, such pro-cyclical rules risk imposing too much austerity too widely, thus darkening the spectre of recession and making it even harder to balance budgets. This may explain why leaders suddenly want to be seen talking about their plan (declaration is here in PDF) for growth and jobs, particularly in tackling the problem of youth unemployment.

  Nevertheless, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who had pushed hard for the treaty, hailed it as a great success. Many others, however, dismiss the compact with so much faint praise. “It is an important distraction”, says one diplomat. “It has gone from damaging to merely useless,” says a member of the European Parliament. Even Mario Monti, these days everybody’s favourite Italian, judged the compact little more than “a decorative songbird”.

  By contrast the two issues that could affect the course of the euro-zone debt crisis in the coming weeks—the fate of Greece and the possibility of creating a bigger firewall—were for the most part ignored or relegated to side-meetings. With Greece and its private creditors still negotiating the scale of haircuts to be imposed on bondholders, this may have been too delicate a time for leaders to discuss Greece. A statement from the euro zone says little that is new.

  Moreover, Mrs Merkel was keen to dampen emotions after her officials floated the idea of placing the country under a commissar with the power to reject Greek budgets. When asked about such a prospect, Mrs Merkel expressed “frustration” with Greece’s lack of compliance with its austerity-and-reform programme, but backed away from imposing such a draconian loss of sovereignty on Greece. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, for his part, said "there is no question of placing Greece under tutelage.”