A European Foreign Policy

A fairly flat but still useful piece by Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian this morning. International society is one of the most important pressures driving serious consideration of the European Union. There are two problems with the way Garton Ash thinks about the process, which I suspect is fairly shared among lots of policy thinkers. We have to take seriously the fact that international society isn't going to wait for the European Union to get its institutional act together forever. Sooner or later some kind of international crisis will impose itself and however and whoever responds on the European level will do more to shape Europe's international dimension than any amount of chat. This was already fluffed once when former Yugoslavia went to pieces, and while it is tempting to berate the Germans for having started the avalanche, they at least had a policy when everyone else had a set of pious aspirations. The problem is not to build the architecture, the problem is to decide what is the issue that is relevant to Europe, rather than its constituent states, and then allow the propaganda of the deed to do its work. Sarkozy may be incredibly irritating, but he seems to have understood the priority of activity in politics.

The other problem is a lazy use of the US as the analogue for a federal republic. The US constitution is unexportable and the institution of the Presidency recognised as the greatest gift to demagogues. The institution barely works in the US which has a rich and mature democratic culture, a president of Europe would be a disaster. So on this I agree with Garton Ash; a strong foreign minister for Europe with a mandate to identify Europe's interests in international life and to hold the feet of the nationals to the fire. A president should be a figurehead though, and leave the rest of us to make a European political sphere one issue at a time.