The Come-Down Continues
By EURSOC Two
22 June, 2005
More details of last weekend's bad-tempered EU heads of government summit are beginning to emerge - and it looks like this scrap may have poisoned relations between the current batch of leaders for good.
As ever, France's president Jacques Chirac took centre stage in the hurling of insults - though his sidekick Gerhard Schröder did not miss the opportunity to get in a few digs of his own. Holland was targeted for particularly rough treatment from the ailing Franco-German axis. Holland sided with Britain in rejecting Luxembourg's plans (approved by Chirac and Schröder) for the new EU budget. The Dutch are the EU's largest paymasters per capita, and are fed up with this status - not least because they are expected to subsidise other rich nations, who are perhaps less careful with the pursestrings that Holland's people.
According to Dutch PM Jan-Peter Balkenende, Schröder accused Holland of "national egotism" for refusing to sign the Franco-German stitch-up.
Chirac, predictably, was worse: Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot claimed that "things were said that I have never heard in my eleven years as a diplomat in Brussels."
Such as? Well, here's a gem of a quote Bot attributes to president Chirac - one which seasoned Chirac-watchers will treasure as much as previous golden classics like "They missed a good opportunity to shut up."
Bot said that Chirac "Talked about fat, bloated countries that are not ready to do something for poor countries and looked at us (Holland)."
Fat, bloated? Hardly describes the Dutch, who contribute more than anyone else to the EU. Indeed, Holland's people pay three times per capita into the EU than France. Worse, if any nation is unprepared to do anything to help the poorer nations in the EU it is France - which only begrudgingly deigned to allow new members to join the union, and has stitched up a Common Agricultural Policy deal to make certain that it remains by far the biggest beneficiary of EU funds for the next decade.
Worst of all, barely a week passes without new evidence of how western farming subsidies devastate farmers in the the third world.
If Chirac wanted to see a "fat, bloated" nation slim down by allowing other countries space at the trough, he would have shifted on CAP funding. As the weekend and subsequent events have proved, he will never do so.
Unsurprisingly, Bot blamed France for the failure of the summit. |
