Like a searchlight on a night landscape, the appointment of the obscure couple, the Belgian PM Herman Van Rompuy and the British peer Cathy Ashton, casts a revealing insight into the current state of the EU. Despite the Lisbon Treaty paving the way for a powerful new European voice in world affairs, the opportunity has been passed up in the interests of preserving the dominance of the main few key nation States. Despite the pressure to balance the widening of the EU with a deepening of accountability to its citizens, the democratic deficit has been intensified. Despite the need to create a fairer balance of power between the big States and the medium/smaller States, the horse-trading has been confined to the traditional carve-up within the handful of the biggest States. Despite the desirability of transparency to usher in a new era of glasnost, the decision has been taken with the usual secrecy behind close doors as though only half a dozen persons mattered and the other half million were irrelevant. Welcome to the new, or rather very old, Europe.

The whole affair could hardly be more unseemly. Van Rompuy was chosen as the lowest common denominator of administrative co-ordination. Blair was rejected, not because he was ruled out by the illegality and immorality of the Iraq War where he chose Bush rather than Europe, but because his glamour quality presented a threat to Merkel and Sarkozy. Alternative candidates like Spain’s Felipe Gonzalez were sidelined because the Centre-Right majority were determined to have one of their own. Once they had secured that, the third member of the Big Three, Britain, was placated with the other major post. Not so much a new European leadership of all the talents, more a stitch-up to keep the main parties happy. Europe is seen not as the forum for an overriding vision of a new geostrategic partner of the US and China, rather as the conduit for the expression of nationalist interests.
None of this of course means that the concept of a European federal super-state has gone away. It has merely been shunted into a siding for the moment. It is likely to re-emerge as a corollary of the outrage which will inevitably follow the shabby back-stairs dealing which has tarnished this whole process of the launch of a new and greater Europe. The demand will unquestionably arise for cross-EU direct elections for these posts next time round, and when figures of real stature are elected by the whole EU electorate, a much more potent and forceful power structure will be created. What is needed between now and then, which has been dodged first time round, is a reconfiguration of the balance of power between the old nationalisms and the new European governance which, despite this first miscarriage, is still coming to birth.

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