Wonders never cease… With the UK making an abrupt about-face and supporting pan-European intervention to support flailing banks  http://euobserver.com/9/26898), the chances of a European solution have suddenly increased. If that happens,this will be the umpteenth example in which it took a crisis to convince the EU to do something good that it would have been unwilling to do in the absence of a crisis. Maybe what the EU needs is a strategy to provoke a series of crises targeted at prodding its reluctant members to do the right thing…

EUvangelist.

The latest financial crisis is likely to have long-lasting consequences not just for the United States, but also for the European Union. At least one implication of the changes in Europe is getting very little public attention, however, because it would be political suicide to discuss it- even though it should be discussed.

The issue is the extension of sweeping bank guarantees to European banks. In the absence of any pan-European policy and consensus on what to do, each nation has been left to its own devices. The bailouts and acquisitions so far mostly have been limited to Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. But many more countries, starting with Ireland, have started guaranteeing all savings deposits in their local banks, in a way that smacks of illegal state aid. The fact that it should be considered state aid is easy to prove–no sooner had the Irish begun guaranteeing deposits than money began flowing from the UK, where savings weren’t guaranteed to the same extent, to Ireland, where the money was considered safe.

In the normal scheme of things, Ireland would have had to tell the European Commission in advance that it wanted to do something of the sort, and the Commission would have had time to consider such a sweeping guarantee and either accept or reject it. In the heat of the current crisis, European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes did initially raise questions about the guarantee–then abruptly reconsidered. Not because the Irish maneuver had been deemed kosher after all. But because doing anything to criticize the Irish when the European Union needs Ireland’s approval of the Lisbon (aka “constitutional”) Treaty to usher in a new era of EU reform and evolution would clearly have been political suicide.

So instead of the Commission doing what it should to protect the EU’s common market, the Commission is standing by and watching as not just Ireland, but a host of other countries, now extend sweeping guarantees to all bank deposits in their territories.

In the long run the single market will be saved only if all EU member-states extend the same or similar guarantees to their banks, thereby removing the spectre of the kind of beggar-thy-neighbor competition that the EU has long sought to stamp out. And that may be a good thing if it saves consumers’ deposits and prevents wider banking sector disasters.

The real lesson, however, is that the EU should have anticipated such a crisis long ago, acknowledging the emergence of pan-European banks and investment vehicles by creating a pan-European regulator with the power to supervise banking activity throughout the single market and intervene effectively in a crisis, perhaps with an emergency fund of its own. Instead, it risks further undermining the single market today and failing to prepare for the next crises – which history shows will come sooner than anyone expects.

Wise leaders would see this coming and seek a European solution to an increasingly European problem rather than groping for national solutions that are at best a temporary fix.

Your EUvangelist.

So now it’s France’s turn at the EU’s wheel for the next six months. The question is, will anyone remember it when it’s over?

In an interview with Euractiv.fr, Dominique Reynié, a professor at Sciences Po, said the French presidency and the EU can win some European hearts and minds by showing “a few positive signs, even modest ones, as long as they’re understandable,” to combat the prevailing doom and gloom.

I cannot disagree more. It is a good thing if the French presidency can accomplish a few consumer-friendly initiatives during the next six months, and several lend themselves. But the only things that are going to win European hearts and minds for Europe are VISION and LEADERSHIP.

Think Barak Obama. A young Senator from Illinois has captured the imagination of millions of Americans and achieved rock star status on the basis of a simple vision: Change. Without even much substance, Obama has given Americans a new hope in their country’s capacity for greatness. That is what Europe needs now – belief in its capacity for greatness.

There is no shortage of great European ideas. What about ensuring full portability of European public and private pensions? That would surely resonate with an aging population. What about a real European Coast Guard with its own ships flying the EU flag fishing refugees out of the sea on the evening news? What about a free Interrail ticket and spending money for every single European citizen once in their life? That would surely be money better invested than the millions wasted on farm subsidies and propping up industries better left to die.

At the 60th anniversary of the European Movement in the Hague, a weekend brainstorm produced several other visionary ideas, many of them centered on education. Why not vastly expand opportunities for young people to study in other countries, a kind of Erasmus for everyone? Why not create something similar for high school students? Why not introduce a pan-European civics course that would teach European students about the history and workings of Europe and the European Union in addition to those tired old schoolbooks focused on endless tales of dead kings and military conquests? Why not replace European national passports altogether with a European Union passport? Why not introduce more direct democracy in the European decision-making process? Why not field European teams for some Olympic contests rather than national teams? It works with golf, where a European team was presumably considered more likely to win than the team from the UK, Ireland or Germany alone.

The run-up to next year’s European Parliament elections offers another great opportunity for some European vision. Political groups in the European Parliament have been making noises for years about naming preferred candidates for president of the European Commission, and running on a kind of party-line ticket to which European citizens can relate. Let’s hope they actually do it this time, and that European heads of state and government respect the political groups’ nominations! The ability to increase the perception of democratic accountability of the European Commission by giving citizens a say in the selection of its president would force candidates for the job to actually campaign around Europe and demonstrate the kind of vision and excitement that’s usually lacking in EP elections.

There’s no shortage of visionary ideas for Europe. There’s just a shortage of leaders willing to embrace European visions and run with them.

Sincerely,

EUvangelist

Upon reading Robert Kagan’s commentary in the International Herald Tribune today (“Sliding toward irrelevance“), it’s tempting to quote the old adage that the people in democracies get the governments that they deserve.

Mr. Kagan, author of the well-argued book “Of Paradise and Power” in 2003, argues that petty nationalism and navel-gazing are undermining Europe’s chance of playing a bigger role on the world stage, and that the people of Europe don’t seem to mind.

The problem is, the people deserve better. And not just the people of Europe, but of the world.

Like it or not, Europe and the rest of the world are intertwined. European kings and clerics spent centuries trying to plunder, colonise, enslave and “civilise” their neighbors and overseas territories. France and the United Kingdom have seats in the United Nations Security Council. France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom are members of the group of eight major industrialised nations. Europe is the world’s largest donor of development aid and an inspiration to countries in Africa, Asia and South America that see advantages in sharing sovereignty with their neighbors. Europe and the United States are the world’s largest trading partners. Europe cannot escape responsibility. It can only botch the job.

This has been said before, but what Europe really needs are leaders who will stand before electorates and explain how the European Union adds value to what individual national governments are able to deliver, then rally support behind European initiatives.

Two decades observing the European Union both from Brussels and its member states has taught me that “Brussels” as an institution, or collection of them, can’t do this talking. The message has to be delivered in people’s own languages, by national leaders whom they respect. These could be members of the European Commission (one reason I think that returning to the notion of keeping one commissioner per member-state isn’t such a bad idea). They could be members of the European Parliament. They could be a future elected president of the European Council or a European foreign minister. But in the end nothing beats national leaders, the people that that European voters can most easily hold accountable at the ballot box. The fact of being directly elected confers upon them political responsibility and credibility that “Brussels” as a whole will never be able to replace–at least until EU leaders themselves are directly elected, a day that I hope to live to see.

The question is, how can national leaders be persuaded to sing the praises of the European Union?

For starters, I propose the creation of a European scoreboard of sorts, a means of keeping track of how often national leaders speak about Europe, what they say, and what they don’t, and awarding lashes and laurels accordingly.

If a national leader gives a speech on the environment, for example, and suggests that his or her country alone can solve a global problem, that merits a lash. If the added value of European cooperation in addressing climate change merits mention, that earns a laurel. And so on for all the priority subjects. An independent organisation, or group of organisations representing journalists and civil society, should keep score and announce the results at least once a year, as well as just before any national elections.

The European Commission used to contribute to this kind of “name and shame” exercise, but this particular Commission seems to have capitulated to powerful national interests to refrain from doing so, perhaps in exchange for future political favours. That is a shame, because the annual tally of infringement procedures is an obvious whip for member states that refuse to implement laws that they themselves have signed up to.

If the Commission won’t name and shame European leaders on European issues, someone else should.

Let’s stop talking about Europe being unaccountable.

Let’s hold our own national leaders accountable for what they do and say about Europe.

EUvangelist

Let’s get one thing straight once and for all. A two-speed, or multi-speed Europe is only a “tragedy” (as some EU leaders have said in recent days) for those countries that decide not to keep up.

The EU has always had two speeds — those that want to do something together, and those that don’t.

In the broadest sense, EU membership itself is a multi-speed process, having started with just six countries, and gradually growing into a kind of convoy as more and more countries saw the benefit of economic integration and collective integration.

The Schengen passport-free zone is an example of 2-speed Europe. It began in 1985 not as an EU initiative at all, but as a collective initiative of just five countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. It now counts 13 EU member states as well as Norway and Iceland, which are not even EU member states. For anyone who remembers being woken up by surly immigration officers on the night trains between German and France or Germany and Italy (once at the Swiss-German border, again at the Italian-Swiss border), the Schengen zone represents one of Europe’s greatest accomplishments, and striking testimony to the superfluousness of national borders within a coherent economic and political union.

The euro is another perfect example of 2-speed Europe. Some countries use it, and some don’t. Slovakia will join in January 2009, becoming the 16th country to join the so-called euro-zone. The United Kingdom and a few other countries have chosen not to join the euro-zone (yet). Should the rest of Europe have continued to use national currencies just to appease the countries that chose to keep their pounds and crowns?

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the United Kingdom didn’t complain about a two-speed Europe in 1998 when Britain and France, meeting in St. Malo, agreed to increase cooperation between their two armed forces, the strongest in Europe. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac at the time said “the [European] Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises.” So much for waiting for the rest of Europe to join up first!

The only losers in a 2-speed Europe are the citizens whose countries can’t or won’t keep up.

Your

EUvangelist.

The Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty is a tragedy, yes, but a
tragedy in the sense of ancient Greek theater, in which both sides are
right and both wrong.

The Irish “no” camp claims it wants a better deal, more democratic,
with a directly elected foreign minister and president of the European
Council (EU summits). They’re right, the people of Europe do deserve
more democracy. But the “no” camp was wrong in thinking that they were
going to get it anytime soon by rejecting the Lisbon Treaty.

As a journalist who covered the Convention on the Future of
Europe and the Intergovernmental Conference, I can tell you there
were a lot of people who wanted a more democratic Europe then, too.
Among others, George Papandreou, the former Greek foreign minister,
once called for a president of the European Council directly elected
by the people of Europe (as opposed to being elected by his or her
peers). A large number of delegates to the Convention supported him.
But the assembled representatives of the anciens regimes resisted and
won.

Unfortunately, this Europe that we have today is more of a Europe of
nation states than an ever-closer union of Europe’s citizens. Until
wiser, more forward-looking leaders of EU member states realise that
they can accomplish more, collectively, as members of a Union presided
by a directly elected leader with immeasurably greater political
legitimacy than any one leader in one country can ever hope to command
individually, we will be saddled with the necessity to bow to the
anciens regimes, with all the consequences that this implies.

The Lisbon Treaty yes camp is right in saying that the Treaty would
have improved things. It would have chipped away at EU member-states’
national vetoes, replaced the EU’s ridiculous, 6-month rotating
“presidency” with a more stable and effective — and outwardly more
serious — president elected by his or her peers for up to 5 years. It
would have helped the EU achieve greater coherence in its external
relations by creating the post of European Foreign Minister and an EU
diplomatic corps. It would have introduced a greater degree of
majority voting in the Council of Ministers, making national vetoes
more difficult. And it would have simplified — yes, simplified! –
some of the EU’s more Byzantine structures, making it more accessible
to a skeptical public. And it would have improved the ability of
national parliaments to influence EU legislation earlier in the
political process, reducing the risk of wildly unpopular legislation
cooked up in Brussels landing in national capitals as a fait accompli.

That said, the Lisbon Treaty’s supporters were wrong in trying to push
through a cynical, ‘lite’ reform of the previous Constitutional Treaty
rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. In my book, Ireland’s
rejection of the Lisbon Treaty is not as momentous as the rejection of
the Constitutional Treaty by French and Dutch voters, because those
two countries were founding members of the European Union and, unlike
Ireland, participate in more of its core projects, including European
defense initiatives and the Schengen passport-free zone.

No, the real problem isn’t Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty.
It’s that EU leaders failed to learn from the rejection of the earlier
treaty by French and Dutch voters, who, among other grievances, made
clear that they wanted the EU to become more democratic and more
accountable. Both the Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty
offered significant improvements over the miserable Nice Treaty
foisted upon an unsuspecting public by dark of night. But they were
not good enough, and should be improved upon again – significantly –
before EU voters are asked for their approval again.

The situation is not entirely without hope. There is in fact a clear
precedent for a way forward. The U.S. Constitution initially faced
rejection by states including New York, Virginia, North Carolina and
Rhode Island, and was only ratified by all 13 colonies after three
years of extensive and tortuous public debate involving most of the
colonies’ elected leaders, including Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison and the addition of 10 amendments that came to be known as the
Bill of Rights. Europe deserves the same kind of responsiveness and
public debate-not stealth ratification by national parliaments and
last-ditch campaigns.

It’s high time European leaders realised that the key to a stronger,
more effective Europe on the world stage lies in a more democratic and
more accountable European Union, not the permanent defense of nation
states born in a very different age.

Sincerely,

Your EUvangelist

This blog will be about Europe, and the fact that the European Union is far more than a glass half full, and that there are Europeans, and not just French and Germans and Brits, and that we have more to gain from working together than fighting each other.

It is a humble attempt to contribute to a rational debate, but also to provoke Europeans and their leaders to look at the big picture: the world is a pretty big place, European nations are no longer colonial powers and cannot force other people to do what is right, they need to convince them of it, and encourage them. But that presumes that Europe gets its own act together first, and becomes a more perfect Union, more coherent, more democratic, more transparent and more effective.

The name of this blog, euvangelist, is not in any way a religious statement. I believe that part of Europe’s postmodern contribution to world peace and culture is to demonstrate the power of secular humanism. Rather, the name is an acknowledgment that what Europe desperately needs is people who will sing its praises, and explain it to the masses, both within Europe and beyond Europe.

I hope you find the blog useful and look forward to any comments that people care to submit.

Sincerely,

Your EUvangelist.