From the UK's leading independent newspaper.
guardian.co.uk
Friday April 6, 2001
Appalling, provocative and depressing are all eminently suitable adjectives to describe George "Dubya" Bush's ill-considered forsaking of the crucial Kyoto climate change protocol. For without the participation of America, the world's biggest polluter, the accord looks shaky.
But America's idiocy could now be Europe's gain if the EU and its constituent member states honour their own commitments and marshall other countries to ensure that they do not follow President Bush's lamentable lead.
The hour of reckoning for Romano Prodi, the president of the European commission, and his able environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom, has now come.
Foreign policy experts and EU insiders are always complaining that the union in political terms punches way below its weight - in fact the phrase has become something of a mantra for Chris Patten, the EU's external relations commissioner.
The 300m-strong population of the eurozone - the 12 countries which have adopted the euro - outstrips that of the United States as does the area's share of world exports. But for a whole host of reasons, Washington is the only superpower on the block while the EU, thanks to conflicting views of what is should be, is simply not a power to be reckoned with. The fact that it manages the world's biggest humanitarian aid programme for example seems to count for nothing.
But America's increasingly vocal unilateralism and gradual retreat from the world stage - be it in the Balkans, North Korean policy and now environmental policy - creates a power vacuum just waiting to be exploited by the EU. This would not be a question of the EU as a superpower finally coming of age. On the contrary it would simply be a question of Brussels passing its own credibility test.
Where member states can agree on a common policy - be it on the environment or anything else - then surely it makes sense to act as one and start punching at the EU's mythical weight.
Judging from the fuss President Chirac of France and chancellor Schroeder of Germany have made in the last week, global warming and the issue of how it should be tackled is one policy area where Europe stands more or less united.
To her credit, the EU's Wallstrom is doing what she can to shore up the weakened Kyoto accord. A senior EU delegation wasted little time in racing to Washington to hear the bad news from the horse's mouth. And Mrs Wallstrom, a Swede, is now engaged on a whistlestop tour of Russia, Iran, China and Japan to see how the rest of the world can ratify Kyoto without the United States. That's a good start.
But what is needed now are concrete results - the pact was signed in 1997 and yet not one single EU member state, including Britain, has ratified it in their national parliaments since. The challenge - to cut 1990 greenhouse gas emissions levels in major industrialised countries by an average 5.2% by 2012 - is ambitious but achievable.
The fact is that Kyoto is not dead in the water if 55% of the original signatory countries press ahead and ratify the pact, provided that is that they also account for 55% of the world's greenhouse emissions.
With Japan in the middle of a massive economic downturn, this then is the chance the EU has been waiting for. But to pass the test the EU cannot be seen to be hypocritical and its member states need to ratify Kyoto themselves as soon as possible.
The shuttle diplomacy being practiced by the EU's Wallstrom must yield results.
Firm commitments from other key players such as Russia need to be extracted and Brussels needs to play the honest and responsible broker. If it succeeds, spiralling apathy about what the EU is actually for might start to dissipate and Brussels would have strengthened its diplomatic hand immeasurably. |
