Jun 16th 2008

Choosing Mr. Europe

by Gilles Merritt

Giles Merritt is secretary-general of the Brussels-based think tank Friends of Europe and Editor of the policy journal Europe's World.

BRUSSELS - America's riveting presidential election campaign may be garnering all the headlines, but a leadership struggle is also underway in Europe. Right now, all eyes are on the undeclared frontrunners to become the first appointed president of the European Council.

Nobody - not even people closely involved in the process - really knows how the European Union's leaders are chosen. There are no formal rules, much less elections; somehow, names just surface in the media to become part of the EU's mysterious internal bargaining system.

In fact, there are five jobs up for grabs, so a complex but secretive discussion is being conducted between Europe's chancelleries over who might do what without disturbing the delicate balances between political families or between large and small states.

At the heart of this process is the even touchier issue of whether the people who will take charge of the EU's main institutions should be strong leaders. In principle, everyone wants heavy-hitters; in practice, many national leaders resist the idea of a more independent and assertive team in Brussels.

The dilemma is neatly summed-up by the two clear candidates for the top job as "Mr. Europe." On the one hand, there's the safe pair of hands personified by Jean-Claude Juncker, the veteran prime minister of tiny Luxembourg, who knows the ins and outs of the EU's political machinery and chairs the euro zone's ministerial set-up. He won't make waves, but he won't make headlines either.

Then there's Tony Blair. World famous but controversial, Blair is capable of rallying public opinion and giving the European project the high profile that the EU craves. But he's also liable to turn a 30-month ceremonial post as the EU's figurehead into one with much more political clout than its 27 national leaders might like.

The other four posts will probably be decided as part of a package deal, owing to the need to achieve some sort of balance. First, there's the question of whether the European Commission's current president, former Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Barroso, should get another five-year term. His early promise to be the EU executive body's new broom has turned into a steady-as-she-goes captaincy, and there's the added question of whether his re-appointment might turn the job into a standard 10-year post for his successors, regardless of their abilities.

The choice for No. 3 job - the foreign policy supremo who will have extra resources and powers to build on the position created by Javier Solana - looks more straightforward. Solana, the soft- spoken Spaniard who was previously NATO's secretary-general, looks like the odds-on favorite to take the new job for a few months before handing it over to Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister and ex-premier who gained international stature in the Balkans in the 1990's.

But nothing is certain. If Denmark's prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen were to succeed as a compromise candidate between Juncker and Blair, as is widely suggested, the presence of two center-right Scandinavians would present a problem. The remaining two posts, president of the European Parliament and the "Mr. Euro" job currently held by Juncker, will also have to contribute to overall balance and reflect the outcome of the European Parliament elections in mid-2009.

The parliament is a further wild card in this wholly undemocratic and unpredictable process. Under the Reform Treaty - the look-alike successor to the controversial European constitution that creates the post of EU president - the parliament's 785 members will also have their say. In years past, only governments could torpedo candidates for Europe's top jobs, but now the parliament also will be able to reject them. It's not at all clear which will have the greater power to decide the outcome.

This uncertainty is beginning to focus attention on the fundamental question of whether the EU can continue to choose its leaders in such a strange and furtive manner. When the Union was smaller and more modest, inter-governmental horse-trading seemed acceptable, not least because national politicians could downplay the importance of "Europe."

Today, with the EU eager to play a forceful role on the world stage, a move towards a more open system appears to be inevitable. The EU's interlocutors in Washington, Beijing, and elsewhere already make it plain that national leaders claiming to speak for Europe lack credibility, as do EU leaders who so evidently have no convincing political mandate.

Two clearly defined schools of thought are emerging. There are those who argue that these are sensitive and complicated issues beyond most voters' understanding, and that more democracy would result in either populism or embarrassingly widespread abstentions. Others believe the EU cannot continue being run along the same lines as in Beijing or even Pyongyang. It's an issue that will confront any new team chosen by the old methods.

Copyright: EUROPE'S WORLD.

If you wish to comment on this article, you can do so on-line.

Should you wish to publish your own article on the Facts & Arts website, please contact us at info@factsandarts.com. Please note that Facts & Arts shares its advertising revenue with those who have contributed material and have signed an agreement with us.

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Can the ECB Escape Its Own Trap? 
by Otmar Issing
Jun 9th 2023
EXTRACT: "Given the scale of the ECB’s bond holdings, however, its approach to quantitative tightening (QT) seems downright homeopathic. At the current rate, bringing the asset-purchase program to zero will take roughly 15 years (and this does not even account for the fact that the ECB continues to reinvest all maturing assets purchased under the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program). "
The Poverty of AI Pessimism 
by Jim O'Neill
Jun 9th 2023
EXTRACT: "Hardly a week goes by without various pioneers in artificial intelligence issuing dire warnings about the technology that they introduced to the world." ---- " I have my doubts. Since the start of my professional life in the 1980s (and of course for much longer), technological progress has repeatedly been held up as a major threat to jobs in key industries such as automobile manufacturing. Yet...."
RERUN FROM OCT 1918: An AI Wake-Up Call From Ancient Greece
by Adrienne Mayor
May 31st 2023
EXTRACT: "In discussions about the implications of artificial intelligence (AI), someone almost always evokes the ancient Greek myth of Pandora’s box. In the modern fairytale version of the story, Pandora is depicted as a tragically curious young woman who opens a sealed urn and inadvertently releases eternal misery on humankind. Like the genie that has escaped the bottle, the horse that has fled the barn, and the train that has left the station, the myth has become a cliché. And yet the actual story of Pandora is far more apropos to debates about AI and machine learning than many realize. What it shows is that it is better to listen to “Prometheans” who are concerned about humanity’s future than “Epimetheans” who are easily dazzled by the prospect of short-term gains. One of the oldest Greek myths, the story of Pandora was first recorded more than 2,500 years ago, in the time of Homer. In the original telling, Pandora was not some innocent girl who succumbed to the temptation to open a forbidden jar. Rather, as the poet Hesiod tells us, Pandora was “made, not born.” Having been commissioned by all-powerful Zeus and designed to his cruel specifications by Hephaestus, the god of invention, Pandora was a lifelike android created to look like a bewitching maiden. Her purpose was to entrap mortals as a manifestation of kalos kakon: “evil hidden in beauty.”
AI, Democracy, and the Global Order
by Manuel Muñiz and Samir Saran
May 31st 2023
EXTRACT: "Specifically, many believe that the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – an AI that can teach itself to perform any cognitive task that humans can do – will pose an existential threat to humanity. A carelessly designed AGI (or one governed by unknown “black box” processes) could carry out its tasks in ways that compromise fundamental elements of our humanity. After that, what it means to be human could come to be mediated by AGI."
he Myth of Western Decline 
by Chris Patten
May 29th 2023
EXTRACT: "In his 2018 book Destined For War, political scientist Graham Allison observes that the US and China are headed toward what he called the “Thucydides’ Trap,” a reference to the ancient Greek historian’s account of Sparta’s efforts to suppress the rise of Athens, which ultimately culminated in the Peloponnesian War. A better analogy, however, is the message sent by the Athenians to the inhabitants of the besieged island of Melos before executing the men and enslaving the women and children: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." ---- Allowing China and other authoritarian countries to shape the rules would result in a world order based solely on this “realist” principle. It is a nightmare scenario that the G7 countries and other liberal democracies must strive to prevent. ---- China’s assertions about the decline of the West reveal an underlying anxiety. After all, if liberal democracy is failing, why do Chinese officials consistently express their fear of it? The fact that leaders of the Communist Party of China have instructed rank-and-file members to engage in an “intense struggle” against liberal-democratic values indicates that they view open societies as an existential threat."
The AI Moment of Truth for Chinese Censorship 
by Stephen S. Roach
May 28th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) decreed that generative AI content must “embody core socialist values and must not contain any content that subverts state power, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites splitting the country or undermines national unity.' ” .... "This implies that the harder the CAC tries to control ChatGPT content, the smaller the resulting output of chatbot-generated Chinese intelligence will be – yet another constraint on the AI intellectual revolution in China. Unsurprisingly, the early returns on China’s generative-AI efforts have been disappointing."
Is there a tipping point for Trump supporters to stop backing him? Here’s what the science says
by Geoff Beattie
May 20th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Cognitive dissonance occurs when one’s beliefs and actions conflict with each other." .... "This conflict might constrain people from acquiring new information that will increase the existing dissonance" .... "if someone commits wholeheartedly to Trump, they may well experience dissonance as they watch the news from that Manhattan courthouse. But they don’t necessarily stop supporting him. Instead, they might seek yet more information about the “deep state” and how it is persecuting Trump, or preach more about his positive attributes and the witch hunt against him." .... " If so, we can expect to see more conspiracy theories and more proselytising from the hardcore supporters going into 2024 and beyond. Donald Trump may not be finished just yet."
Winners and Losers in the AI Arms Race 
by Barry Eichengreen
May 11th 2023
EXTRACT: "....the US possesses advantages in developing large language models (LLMs). It benefits from close business-university collaboration, lubricated by a deep-pocketed venture-capital industry. It is no coincidence that ChatGPT came out of the US, and out of Greater Silicon Valley in particular." .... "Developing countries would seem to be at a significant disadvantage in this AI arms race and are at risk of losing their competitive advantage: abundant low-cost labor. Yet AI also holds out the promise of benefits for these countries." .... " however, economic development depends on human development – that is, on the accumulation of human capital. Where developing countries lack the resources, financial and otherwise, to increase significantly their spending on traditional modes of education, AI holds out hope for providing what is missing."
Neoliberalism's Final Stronghold 
by J. Bradford DeLong
May 2nd 2023
EXTRACT: "The past decade has not been kind to neoliberalism. With 40 years of deregulation, financialization, and globalization having failed to deliver prosperity for anyone but the rich, the United States and other Western liberal democracies have seemingly moved on from the neoliberal experiment and re-embraced industrial policy. But the economic paradigm that underpinned Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and the Washington Consensus is alive and well in at least one place: the pages of the Economist."
The Economic Costs of America's Conflict with China 
by Stephen S. Roach
Apr 25th 2023
EXTRACT: "Yet there is an important twist for the US: a chronic shortfall of domestic saving casts the economic consequences of conflict with China in a very different light. In 2022, net US saving – the depreciation-adjusted saving of households, businesses, and the government sector – fell to just 1.6% of national income, far below the longer-term 5.8% average from 1960 to 2020. Lacking in saving and wanting to invest and grow, the US takes full advantage of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s dominant reserve currency and freely imports surplus saving from abroad, running a massive current-account and multilateral trade deficit to attract foreign capital."
The Great Revision
by Joschka Fischer
Mar 31st 2023
EXTRACT: "Although the EU will have gained more internal stability, its basic character will have changed. Security will be a central concern for the foreseeable future. The EU will have to start thinking of itself as a geopolitical power and as a defense community working closely with NATO. Its identity will no longer be defined mainly by its economic community, its common market, or its customs union. The bloc has already accepted Ukraine as a candidate for future membership, and that decision was driven almost entirely by geopolitical considerations (as was also the case, previously, with Turkey and the West Balkan states)."
The Coming Doom Loop 
by Nouriel Roubini
Mar 30th 2023
EXTRACT: "As I have long warned, central banks ..... will likely wimp out (by curtailing monetary-policy normalization) to avoid a self-reinforcing economic and financial meltdown, .... "
Netanyahu’s Reality Check Is Overdue
by Alon Ben-Meir
Mar 30th 2023
EXTRACT: "Netanyahu is simply unfit to be prime minister of Israel. He is a liar, a schemer and a fraud. If he has an ounce of integrity left in him, he should resign and save the country instead of stopping short of nothing, however evil, to save his skin."
Xi's the Boss 
by Nina Khrushcheva
Mar 29th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Though Mao Zedong viewed himself as Joseph Stalin’s peer, leading the world’s peasant communists as Stalin led its proletarians, behind closed doors Stalin reportedly called Mao a “caveman Marxist” and a “talentless partisan.” " ----- "Stalin’s behavior enraged Mao." ---- "When ..... Khrushchev, took over as Soviet premier following Stalin’s death in 1953, Mao paid back for Stalin’s disdain – and then some. On his return from his trip to Beijing in 1958, Khrushchev talked incessantly about how unpleasant his experience had been." ---- "Even if Xi did not have the upper hand before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war of choice in Ukraine, he certainly has it now..." --- "So, when Xi arrived in Moscow ..... he carried himself with an air of superiority, whereas Putin’s expressions appeared strained."
Accounting for Casino Capitalism 
by Hans-Werner Sinn
Mar 27th 2023
EXTRACT: "The spectacular collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – the second-largest bank failure in US history – has evoked memories of the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, which sparked the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But the current situation is, at least for Germans and other Europeans, more reminiscent of the “founder’s crash” (Gründerkrach) of 1873. Then, as now, an era of cheap credit had fueled a tech boom and then triggered a banking crisis. In those days, the startups were in railroads, electronics, and chemistry, but there were also a large number of financial startups rising with the tide. In both cases, the crisis was rooted in bad accounting rules that turned the financial system into a playground for gamblers."
Updating My Munich Predictions 
by George Soros
Mar 16th 2023
EXTRACT: "Putin is desperate for a ceasefire, but he does not want to admit it. Chinese President Xi Jinping is in the same boat. But US President Joe Biden is unlikely to jump at this seeming opportunity to negotiate a ceasefire, because he has pledged that the US will not negotiate behind Zelensky’s back. -- The countries of the former Soviet empire, eager to assert their independence, can hardly wait for the Russian army to be crushed in Ukraine. At that point, Putin’s dream of a renewed Russian empire will disintegrate and cease to pose a threat to Europe. -- The defeat of Russian imperialism will have far-reaching consequences for the rest of the world. It will bring huge relief to open societies and create tremendous problems for closed ones."
Why central banks are too powerful and have created our inflation crisis – by the banking expert who pioneered quantitative easing
by Richard Werner
Mar 15th 2023
EXTRACT: "Fifty years ago, a war broke out in the Middle East which resulted in a global oil embargo.... " ---- " Many historical accounts suggest the decade of global inflation and recession that characterises the 1970s stemmed from this “oil shock”. But this narrative is misleading – and half a century later, in the midst of strikingly similar global conditions, needs revisiting." ----- "In early 2023, the global financial picture feels disconcertingly similar to 50 years ago. Inflation and the cost of living have both risen steeply, and a war and related energy supply problems have been widely labelled as a key reason for this pain." ---- "In their public statements, central bank leaders have blamed this on a long (and movable) list of factors – most prominently, Vladimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops to fight against Ukrainian armed forces. Anything, indeed, but central bank policy." ---- "Yet as Figure 1 shows, inflation had already been increasing in the US and Europe long before Putin gave the order to move his troops across the border – indeed, as far back as 2020."
The Culture-War Trap 
by Ian Buruma
Mar 7th 2023
EXTRACT: "The United States is in the midst of a book-banning frenzy. According to PEN America, 1,648 books were prohibited in public schools across the country between July 2021 and June 2022. That number is expected to increase this year as conservative politicians and organizations step up efforts to censor works dealing with sexual and racial identity."
Sleepwalking Toward Accidental Conflict 
by Stephen S. Roach
Feb 28th 2023
EXTRACT: "As was the case before World War I, it is tempting to minimize the risk of a major conflict. After all, today’s globalized, interconnected world has too much at stake to risk a seismic unraveling. That argument is painfully familiar. It is the same one made in the early twentieth century, when the first wave of globalization was at its peak. It seemed compelling to many right up to June 28, 1914."
Netanyahu's Sabotage of Israeli Democracy 
by Shlomo Ben Ami
Feb 19th 2023
EXTRACT: "Another front has opened in the global rise of populist authoritarianism. With their efforts to weaken Israel’s independent judiciary, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his corrupt coalition of Messianic fascists and ultra-Orthodox allies are determined to translate their anti-democratic rhetoric into authoritarian policy."