Van Rompuy, Ashton appointments could boost French protectionism within Europe

By Alan Osborn, International News Services 

The share-out of top jobs in the EU announced last Thursday night after weeks of political maneouvring has had an almost universally poor reception. The appointment of Mr  Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian prime minister, to be the first full-time EU president, and that of the British peer baroness Catherine Ashton to be the EU’s foreign policy chief, (both of them relative unknowns) have been widely seen as disappointments and the waste of a chance to put the EU on the world stage by appointing well-known, assertive figures.

 Not everybody will see it negatively though. As the realpolitik behind these moves becomes plainer, we can see that France and Germany have done a lot better than other countries – apparently at the expense of the United Kingdom. As part of the deal to install Lady Ashton, Britain has agreed to allow Michel Barnier, a centre-right French politician, to take responsibility for the internal market in the new EU Commission next year.

M Barnier is an avowed defender of trade protectionism and openly scornful of Anglo-Saxon free and open market policies. Although it will not be clear until the New Year whether M Barnier’s responsibilities will include regulation of all financial services or just part of the industry, there is no doubt that the City of London (the UK financial sector) and the Conservative party in the UK view his arrival with considerable anxiety. It would be surprising if that thought hadn’t occurred to the British prime minister Mr Brown last week: there is widespread expectation that the Conservatives will win the general election which has to take place in Britain by June next year.

An important consequence of the Brussels changes then is that the friction already expected between a Eurosceptic Conservative government in the UK and its European partners is likely to be even worse than feared. There now seems a strong chance that EU development over the 5-year term of the new Commission – and perhaps for a much longer period than that – will follow the French model of dirigisme with heavy regulation and state intervention. A second, perhaps more nuanced, outcome is likely to be a turn toward federalism in the EU. Both by background and inclination Mr van  Rompuy is an avowed supporter of closer union between the EU member countries and is already on record as favouring a new Euro tax in the member countries whose proceeds would be paid directly into the Brussels coffers. 

In the more immediate future however there is the prospect that Turkey’s bid to join the EU will be blocked, or at best cold-shouldered for some time. Mr van Rompuy is a pious man who fervently opposes Turkish membership on religious grounds, arguing that the EU’s Christian values would be diluted by Turkey’s Muslim population. How this will go down in the context of European, and even world, politics, is unclear.

Photo credit: European Union photo gallery