Today, two obscure figures will take to the highest posts in the new European Council: Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy as president and EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton as high representative for foreign policy. The positions, created by the Lisbon Treaty after eight long years of wrangling within the European Union, were highly heralded and meant to give Europe a powerful unified voice on the world stage. But the selection of Van Rompuy and Ashton by European leaders was met with derision -- or, worse, yawns -- on both sides of the Atlantic.
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The choices baffled most Europeans and bemused most everybody. The Economist's Charlemagne exclaimed "a decade of institutional wrangling for that?" Others described them as "Europe's gray mice," the "bland leading the bland," or "the EU's perfect couple of nobodies." Writing for the Irish Times, former EU Commissioner Chris Patten argued that the selections "surely [underline] the extent to which member states are in the driver's seat in the EU," signaling that it "is no superstate striding bravely into a bright new dawn." I joined in the fun too, on the Atlantic Council's blog, concluding that the Van Rompuy decision would "virtually assure that the EU president remains largely a figurehead, subservient to the heads of the member countries."
The reaction, alternately disappointed and chuckling, is understandable. After all, Europe had the opportunity to select a vigorous leader, like Tony Blair, who could stand shoulder to shoulder with leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama and finally provide that phone number in Europe Henry Kissinger sought three decades ago. Instead, we get what EurActiv's Rick Zednik has jokingly termed the dawn of "the Obama-Van Rompuy era."
But though the disappointment over what might have been is perfectly understandable, we should not lose sight of what is.
Many had hoped for a kind of European George Washington -- a commanding figure who would shape the presidency in his own image and lead a strongly unified country. But Europe is not the United States. The more apt comparison might be (as one of my blog commenters pointed out) to Samuel Huntington, the first president under the Articles of Confederation.
Europe has its own parliament, its own flag, its own currency, and a new president. But it's not even a confederation, much less a country. The three traditional major powers -- Britain, France, and Germany -- carry outsize influence over the 20-plus lesser actors. The countries in the EU retain, and want, a definite degree of autonomy. Thus, the EU is, in essence, a glorified free-trade zone.
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