Debriefing of the Laeken Kermess....
Postcard From Belgium
By Robert Kagan
Friday, December 21, 2001
So six European leaders go into a bar, see. . . . Well, actually, the six leaders were at the European Union summit in Laeken, Belgium, last weekend, and they were having a shouting match that brought the summit to an abrupt halt. The topic of their titanic tiff? George Bush and the ABM Treaty? Afghanistan? Iraq? No. The heads of Europe were arguing over who gets what EU agency: Specifically, should the European food safety agency be put in Helsinki, Finland, or Parma, Italy? The International Herald Tribune helpfully printed a verbatim account of the discussion:
Silvio Berlusconi (Italian prime minister): "Parma is synonymous with good cuisine. The Finns don't even know what prosciutto is. I cannot accept this."
Wolfgang Schuessel (Austrian chancellor): "I'm not satisfied. We got nothing."
Goran Persson (Swedish prime minister): "This is no easy task. . . . But it's strange that the IT [information technology] agency should go to Spain."
Guy Verhofstadt (Belgian prime minister and acting EU president): "The gastronomic attraction of a region is no argument for the allocation of an EU agency."
Jacques Chirac (French president): "How would it be if Sweden got an agency for training models, since you have such pretty women?"
Berlusconi: ". . . . My final answer is no!"
Gerhard Schroeder (German chancellor): "I love Parma, but you'll never get it if you argue like that."
Verhofstadt: "That's it."
With that, Verhofstadt closed the meeting, for, as he later told reporters, "further negotiating . . . would have given a very negative image of what Europe is all about."
Pas du tout! After all, there was more to the EU summit than this unseemly squabble. There were, in fact, several unseemly squabbles, as the IHT reported. For instance, there was the moment when Berlusconi ostentatiously turned his back on the Belgian foreign minister, Louis Michel, and refused to shake his hand. You see, Michel had publicly compared Berlusconi to the Taliban. Meanwhile, an Italian minister accused the Belgian government of protecting pedophiles, prompting Verhofstadt to denounce such "idiocy," and prompting Michel to threaten legal action: "I know the name of a good lawyer in Rome!"
True, some serious business was done at Laeken, and with potentially revolutionary consequences for Europe. The collected leaders agreed to name former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing to lead a constitutional convention in 2004 to reform the European political system. But even this momentous decision was not without its dark humor. Monsieur Giscard was Chirac's candidate, of course, and some EU members opposed him as perhaps not the best possible symbol for the "new Europe," inasmuch as he will be 78 years old in 2004, and inasmuch as he was thrown out of office in 1981 after improperly accepting diamonds from central African dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa.
After Giscard was chosen, the Portuguese foreign minister publicly denounced him as "a man of the European past, not a personality for the future of Europe." Can't wait for that convention! Prime Minister Verhofstadt promises it will be a free debate "with no taboos."
The high point of the Laeken summit may have come when Foreign Minister Michel announced that the vaunted European "Rapid Reaction Force" had now officially become "operational" and that the European Union planned to send 3,000 to 4,000 peacekeeping troops to Afghanistan. This was, Michel declared, "a turning point in the history of the European Union." Not so fast, euro-cowboy. A nanosecond later, the British, French and German governments publicly denied there had been any discussion of an "EU force" for Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, no such force exists.
At the summit, Greece blocked a deal, recently agreed to by archenemy Turkey, that would allow the EU to use essential NATO planning assets. Michel was undeterred, though. "If no
access to NATO's resources can be secured," he declared, the EU force "must declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability." Apparently in Europe this works.
Or maybe European leaders don't really care that much whether they have "true capability" or not, what with so many other things to worry about, from prosciutto in Parma to the political constitution of the continent. Maybe they'd rather just pretend.
In the Declaration of Laeken, the EU posed a rhetorical question: "Does Europe not, now that it is finally unified, have a leading role to play in a new world order, that of a power able both to play a stabilizing role worldwide and to point the way ahead for many countries and peoples?" We'll have to get back to you on that.
The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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