Sunday Thinkpiece: Does the EU have a foreign policy (and should it)?

A few years ago, when a very brave university political science faculty invited me to give a talk on why the European Union was an expensive, undemocratic evil (OK, that wasn’t exactly the wording we had agreed for the title – most of the students were funded by the EU’s Galileo programme) I asked the class if they thought that the EU should have a foreign policy, governed by majority voting. They all, without exception, thought it should.

Then we went through the positions that individual governments had taken on the Gulf War, and found that if there had been a vote on sending EU forces to help Bush and Blair, it would have been in favour. This balance, surprising to some, is because France, vehemently against the Gulf War, makes the most noise but only gets one vote, whereas the newly joined Eastern states, still remembering the oppression of the Soviet Union, took a firmly pro-American line. One student suggested that perhaps only the 'important countries' should vote – he must have meant the 'original members' because he was from Belgium, which goes to show you can be thinking one thing while everyone else is thinking another.

Anyway at the end they all agreed that having a foreign policy depended on what the policy was.

And that’s the problem. You could get all 27 members to vote for the desirability of motherhood and apple pie (‘Peace on Earth, Good Will towards men’ would be refused by Hans Schultz and the German Socialists as being too much like Christmas: Rocco Buttiglione was turned down for a Commissioner’s job because he was a practising Roman Catholic). But the developments in North Africa and the Middle East are more difficult than that. So they talk, and they eat.

Baroness Ashton, who I think everyone agrees is miles out of her depth as head of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, will convene an informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council, with lunch, naturally, on 10th March, only three months after the crisis started, to prepare for another lunch meeting the following day. Britain wants to go in hard (or rather wants the Americans to), France wants a Mediterranean lunch Council and most of the rest don’t much care. To give you a clue as to the deliberations, Baroness Ashton is a former left wing ‘peace’ campaigner, and of the three Presidents, Barroso is a former communist; Victor Orban, PM of Hungary which holds the rotating presidency is another former communist who is facing criticism for outlawing press criticism of his government (he’ll fit in OK in Brussels); and the ueber President, Gauleiter of all he surveys, Hermann van Rompuy, is Belgian. In the first Gulf War, Belgium was so nervous of taking a position on the invasion of Kuwait that it refused even to sell bullets to NATO. It was of course holding the rotating presidency when events blew up in Tunisia, but can be forgiven for doing nothing because it didn’t have a government.

Added to all that there are only two serious armies in Europe (no, not Belgium): France and Britain, which rarely agree on anything. But my heavens they have the resources: Ashton’s budget is half a billion euros, of which ten million is spent on PR. She has an ambassador in every capital city, and armies of hungry and thirsty bureaucrats.

But no policies. I think we are entitled to try to make some savings here. The EU will never be a serious player in foreign affairs and each country will always pursue its own policy. There will be a warm miasma of bluster over the troubles in the Arab World: listen to Barroso recently ‘The events unfolding in our southern neighbourhood are a rendezvous with history. Europe will rise to this challenge and support the transformation process’. Hot air. If the French car plant in Algeria is threatened it will be ‘no way, Jose’.

The Euro-realist countries, a growing list, should withdraw from Baroness Ashton’s fine-dining hot air club, and starve the ineffective bureaucracy of its expense accounts. Let’s do like the North Africans are doing: get rid of the old, unelected, thieving tyrants.