The reality is a lot more incremental and prosaic, and the fact that it does play well on TV or sell newspaers is not our problem.
However I would have a couple of cribs. Both Van Rompuy and Ashton are barely a year into their previous roles as Prime Minister and Trade Commissioner, and so we really have very little evidence of their supposed competence. Let us hope you are right.
Secondly, and relatedly, neither have obvious accomplishments at a European level. Baroness Ashton has never been elected to anything and has never served as aq foreign minister or top politician even in the UK. If you wanted to pick a women Commissioner, why not Neelie Kroes - European Commissioner for Competition - who has some accomplishments in that role?
The truth is that even though these individuals may turn out to be competent, both were very much "lowest common denominator appointments" in the political sense that they had offended no one important. Ashton got the Gig to persuade Brown to back of Blair and row in behind Van Rompuy. No other reason. She's barely known in the UK. Rompuy got the gig because more long-standing and experienced Prime Ministers had offended someone important somewhere along the way.
IO don't have a problem with low key, or consensus building. But we needed more evidence of competence and achievement, and even a greater nod to democracy in the case of Ashton. Let's hope they are as competent as you surmise, but compromise for its own sake isn't necessarily much better than the cult of leadership. notes from no w here
As to not having offended anyone, I'd say it is a fundamental prerequisite of the job, given its definition. A Swinging Big Dick, or anyone having pissed off one or more of the big countries would have been a certain reciped for clashes and crises when the time would come to speak in Europe's name on the next international crisis.
On Ashton, I agree that we need to reserve judgement, but she has demonstrated spine in standing up to the US in trade negotiations in the past year - she had a EU mandate, and proved up to the task, fwiw. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
And, as I said yesterday:
I don't actually mind van Rompuy. If he managed to compose a viable government for Belgium after the last parliamentary election he may be just what the Council needs to get its job done.
Maintaining the status quo or appeasing everyone for the sake of a cosy consensus is not always the right course to take, and it can be argued that it is hard choices which will define the EU as much as technocratic efficiency in the longer term. notes from no w here
There is no one in mainstream European politics with those qualifications.
So Europe's lapdog status continues for now, at least until the current generation of Atlanticists dies out and is replaced by fresh blood.
The best we can hope for is to start finding and supporting the fresh blood, with a view to 2020 or 2030.
But there's a continuing tension between scrappy charisma-politics, which is what happens at the national level in the EU, and the amorphous and not very well-defined push towards federalisation.
At some point those two trends are going to be personalised in a very public clash.
Blair would have forced that collision ahead of time, which would have been unpleasant for everyone, but interesting to watch.
The democratic problem hasn't been solved - Van Rompuys doesn't give the proles a reason to believe in the EU. That's not a huge problem now, but it's going to start becoming a problem within a term or two.
Besides, there are real issues of infrastructure and regional development that would benefit from federal involvement - high-capacity/high speed railways, water management along the Rhine and Donau rivers, fishing and environmental protection in the Mediterranean and Baltic seas, trans-European communications, phone and internet backbones, trans-European power generation and distribution and so on and so forth and etcetera.
Nationalists of all flavours can bitch and moan as much as they like - but geography and infrastructure are more powerful drivers in political unification than zeitgeist.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Nor should he -- I am more concerned that MEPs and Barroso fail to. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
On the one hand it gives the lie to all the apocalyptic gloom and doom stroies emanating from the left and right parts of the NO campaign in Irteland that the EU was in the process of building a superstate which would strip countries of their identities and force conscription etc. on us all.
Last night one of the people that BBCs Newsnight chose to interview was that fool who is head of UKIP. Their angle was that it had brought about this European Superstate, but it was going to be something of a Blundering Elephant, with no one strong enough to steer it, and passengers like Sarkozy (Who he mentioned specifically) being able to take over and push it in directions that were bad for the people of Britain. (why British prime ministers werent going to be able to do something similar and do something good for Britain maybe says more about the calibre of current British politicians) Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
The fact that the best he can do is pick on Sarkozy as the new Adolf Hitler is an amusement in itself... notes from no w here
