Greek crisis shows EU's fall from superpower to impotence

Share

Only a few months ago, it could call itself the United States of Europe: 27 countries forming the world's largest economy, backed by the world's strongest currency, with a newly minted constitution establishing a permanent president and foreign minister and, with a few bold moves, the foreign-policy clout of a true superpower.

This week, a series of shocks, humiliations and failures is threatening to reduce the European Union to little more than the trading bloc of 20 years ago, unable to deal with its gravest problems on its own, or to exercise major influence on the larger world.

The spiralling financial emergency in Greece has become a continent-wide crisis as members realize that neither the European Central Bank, guardian of the euro currency, nor the EU itself, headquartered in Brussels, is able to come to the rescue.

Instead, Greece's salvation will come either from Germany acting largely alone - a return to the old days of single economies - or from the International Monetary Fund, a product of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which saw the United States step in to save Europe's economy.

For the IMF to rescue one of the earliest members of the united Europe would be an embarrassing repeat of history, a badge of impotence.

That humiliation by itself is telling enough, but it follows a sequence of political emasculations that has rendered Europe all but invisible beyond its own shores.

When U.S. President Barack Obama announced last week that he wouldn't bother attending a major U.S.-EU summit in Madrid in May, it was more than a passing snub.

To many Europeans, it seemed the multipolar era had come to a symbolic close and the world had reverted to a two-superpower dynamic, this time pitting the United States against China, with Europe in the sort of supporting role it played during the Cold War.

"The Americans don't love the European Union the way they used to," said Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, one of the EU's most ardent supporters. "We have common values, a common history, but the love has been lost. … We are being left out."

The leaders of Europe, despite representing 450 million people and a third of the world economy (the United States represents about 20 per cent), have been visibly excluded from many major events of the past months, in large part due to the failure of their own elaborate structure of unity.

December's Copenhagen Summit on climate-change policy, though it was a European-initiated project taking place within the EU, turned into a three-way showdown between the United States, China and a body of poor countries, with Europe's carefully forged ideas left on the cutting-room floor as the plot veered into tragedy.

Similarly, Europe has had almost no influence over diplomatic efforts to bring Iran's nuclear program under control, improve relations between Israel and the Palestinians, or revalue China's currency - arguably three of the biggest issues in the world today.

Yet these failings have all occurred since the EU ratified its new constitution and installed its new "permanent" president and foreign minister in their Brussels posts last year. Those two figures, Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium and Catherine Ashton of Britain, have been utterly invisible on the international scene and remain unknowns.

That's largely because the EU's Byzantine internal workings have cast them into even further irrelevance by creating a situation in which the continent has two competing presidencies, neither of them powerful enough to assume control over the financial crisis or the affairs of the world.

In January, Spain assumed the rotating six-month presidency of the EU - a system that existed before the permanent leadership was created, but which, through a quirk of the rules, left one member-nation EU presidency remaining after the new constitution took effect.

Instead of passing the baton to the new figureheads, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero opted to complete his country's presidential term, turning it into a major foreign-policy platform and organizing a dizzying series of high-profile summits.

The U.S.-EU summit in Madrid was part of that program, but Mr. Obama, apparently bewildered by the two competing command structures and the seeming irrelevance of both of them, decided to travel to Asia instead.

Part of the problem is that there are several factions within Europe which are quite happy to keep the dual structure: countries like Finland, which are interested in the internal workings of the EU and the elaborate structure of fairness they represent; and countries like France and Britain, which still believe they can project their foreign-policy interests independently, and resent competition from Brussels.

The EU's lack of international clout could be explained, perhaps, with the argument that the bloc is turning inward, devoting attention to its own complex affairs. But this week's crisis has produced the shock of realization that Brussels is by itself incapable of dealing with a financial cancer in its midst.

That cancer is threatening to metastasize beyond Greece and into the stagnant and debt-encrusted economies around Europe's southern and western borders, a circle of countries rather rudely known as the PIIGS - Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain - as well as those on the eastern flank, including Hungary and Latvia, that have already been subject to complete collapses and painful bailouts.

Unable to face the world outside or deal with the most serious problems within, Brussels has fallen into disarray, without a language to describe its own condition.

Leaders quietly remind one another that the union has kept all of its 27 member countries democratic and at peace with each other.

But beyond the comforts of peace and good government, there is the shocking knowledge that, by its own rules, none of the EU's major states would currently qualify for membership. It increasingly resembles a beautifully tooled timepiece lacking either hands or a face.