Regards, Ivan
Posted on 08/18/2004 2:38:46 PM PDT by MadIvan
But the new EU commissioners will have to combat the army of regualtion freaks
THE KING lies there like a beached whale, but he is not yet dead, nor will he die for another ten dreary weeks. His ministers are still formally in office, lingering until November 1 like ghosts, in a machine that is barely ticking over.
Yet not only has Romano Prodi’s successor as President of the European Commission been crowned; he is already shaping the character of his reign. Tomorrow, rudely interrupting the deep slumbers of Brussels in August, José Manuel Durão Barroso will hold an “informal” first meeting of his newly appointed college of commissioners, for “team building and internal organisation” — two things notoriously absent in the ancien regime.
For Europe this is the start of a new era. Most Europeans will not even notice. Senhor Barroso and his 24 commissioners will be responsible over the next five years for initiating the bulk of fresh legislation affecting their lives. Yet, so ingrained is the habit of thinking that politics is something “national” that a minor political reshuffle at home still seems more important than who does what in Brussels.
“New era” is, anyway, a term so overused as to be justly suspect. Yet the advent of this Commission, the first to be drawn from a Europe of 25 nations, does mark a distinct break with the past. France and Germany have had things their way for 50 years, setting the agenda and embedding in EU thinking a “social model” that combined France’s dirigiste traditions with Germany’s welfare-padded, consensual brand of “Rhineland capitalism”. With enlargement, they can no longer expect to dominate EU decisions, or even the thinking behind them.
For a start, they did not get the man they wanted for the top job, the integrationist Belgian Guy Verhofstadt. Instead, “new Europe” picked a free-market reformer who had, furthermore, supported the US over Iraq. They had already had to swallow the big countries’ loss of a second commissioner; each now has only one. This automatically dilutes their influence and ensures a truer, which means more Atlanticist and pragmatic, reflection of diverse European interests. Paris and Berlin could previously have expected top commission jobs as “compensation” for these losses. But that game, too, is over — a point Senhor Barroso’s allocation of portfolios last week neatly drove home.
Germany wanted, but did not get, a super-commissioner, with powers spanning industrial policy, competition, taxation and the internal market. Senhor Barroso replied blandly that he expected all commissioners to be equally “super” and gave Günther Verheugen a downsized industrial portfolio. France did worse. Not only did it fail to grab the competition portfolio, which it wanted in order to curb EU investigations into the illegal subsidies lavished on ailing French “ national champions”; it landed nothing more weighty than transport. True, President Chirac had sent a monoglot political hack called Jacques Barrot to Brussels, as a consolation prize for being dropped from the Cabinet. It was a stupid time to treat Brussels as a retirement home. But thus to make an object lesson of France would, until now, have been unthinkable.
Who is “in” is even more revealing. That powerful competition post, which also deals with mergers and monopolies, went to Neelie Kroes, a redoubtable Dutch entrepreneur. She has sat on the boards of dozens of multinationals, has zero hang-ups about what the French call capitalisme sauvage and, having privatised the Dutch postal and telephone services when in government at home, can be expected to be dry-eyed at pleas for the preservation of similar monopolies. In creating a genuinely open market, she will have a powerful ally in Charlie McCreevy, the Irish Finance Minister whose tax cuts and supply-side reforms made Ireland the success story that most inspires “new Europe”. By handing tax to Ingrida Udre of Latvia — which has thriven mightily since adopting a 25 per cent flat tax — Senhor Barroso has told Paris and Berlin to forget about EU-wide minimum tax rates to stop “unfair” competition from the new members.
He has done well to pick and to weld his team early, because to establish its credibility, he must move fast. He should pick no more than two big issues, and master them.
One will be forced on him: the EU’s future budget. One he should avoid like the plague: involvement in national referendum campaigns on the EU constitution. These are not the Commission’s business and would entrench its image as an inveterate meddler.
One obviously tempts him: the so-called Lisbon agenda whose declared goal is to turn the EU (hollow laughs off-stage) into the world’s most dynamic region. Senhor Barroso may be right that economic recovery is the key to restoring public respect for the EU. But the Lisbon agenda is a mess, full of silly targets and pieties about “social Europe” — and it will come to little until “old Europe” takes reform seriously.
He should strike where he can hit home — in Brussels. The biggest source of disgust with the EU is the undisciplined bunch of regulation freaks that passes for an EU civil service. Senhor Barroso has divided responsibility for the budget and financial control, removing a conflict of interest that should never have existed, and put two newcomers, both from the Baltic, in charge. With luck, they will be shocked into radical action. But he needs to do more than clean up the EU’s inexcusably sloppy accounts.
He must turn inside out an EU culture that chokes talent and shields incompetents. He needs to change a mindset that measures success by how much power can be clawed away from member states, and show that Brussels can recognise, and reverse, its mistakes. That, truly, would deserve to be hailed as a new era.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Germany will just have to wait to install their version of Wesley Mouch.
Is it wrong to enjoy seeing Germany and France (especially France) humiliated in this way? Am I a bad person for liking the way the rest of the EU countries brought these dogs to heel? Should I feel guilt in wanting to see more things like this happen?
NAHHHHHHHH!!!
I think I like this guy, how did this ever happen?
sxome kewl adjectives...."monoglot"..and " dirigiste"...gotta click on the "Funk & Wagnalls"...I was hoping for a "gobsmacked" or two...
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