UNITED NATIONS: Javier Solana has lost the spring in his step. Leaning on a barrier in the United Nations to ease his aching back after a week of intensive diplomacy, Europe’s ex-future foreign minister looks as if he has had the stuffing knocked out of him.
Since French and Dutch voters rejected the European Union’s draft constitution in referendums three months ago, the veteran Spanish diplomat’s prospects of becoming the single voice and face of a coherent European foreign policy have gone up in smoke. And it shows.
“Solana was really looking forward to being Europe’s first foreign minister,” said one of his senior aides, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It was a body blow.”
If the constitution had come into force in 2007 as planned, Solana was guaranteed the job of EU foreign minister, embodying the 25-nation bloc on the world stage and running its worldwide diplomatic staff and multi-billion-dollar aid budget.
Appointed in 1999 and reappointed last year, he has written a European Security Strategy, set up a military staff to run peacekeeping operations and appointed a network of special envoys in trouble-spots.
Europe is condemned to lumber on for several more years, perhaps indefinitely, with an unwieldy system of foreign-policy-by-committee in which a posse of officials huddle together on the European side of every table.
If it does eventually get a foreign minister, it will likely be too late for the 61-year-old former Spanish foreign minister and former Nato secretary-general, whose term expires in 2009.
Solana keeps up a punishing travel schedule, juggling Middle East diplomacy, trouble-shooting in the Balkans, crisis management in Ukraine and Central Africa, and peacekeeping in the Indonesian province of Aceh.
But when the EU met other powers at UN headquarters, many meetings were once again conducted by its so-called “troika”.
This actually involves four officials representing the government that holds the bloc’s 6-month revolving presidency, in this case British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw; the incoming president Austria; the executive European Commission; and Solana as the EU’s foreign policy “high representative.”
No wonder interlocutors are bewildered. A former US envoy to Brussels quoted US President George W. Bush as having asked staff before his first meeting with the EU “troika” in 2001: “Which one of these guys speaks for Europe?”
Solana was just two years away from becoming the answer to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s apocryphal question: “When I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?”
The setback to efforts to build a more coherent foreign policy came, ironically, just as the Bush administration, after a first term marked by unilateral action and rifts with France and Germany over Iraq, had come around to working with the EU.
Bush has made three trips to Europe this year, underlining that he wants a strong European Union as a partner in fighting terrorism, working for democratic reform in the Middle East and Central Asia, and pressing for global trade liberalization.
But with its constitutional future in flux and its largest country, Germany, in political deadlock after an inconclusive election, the EU looks ill-placed to be a self-confident partner.
Significantly, it was the three biggest European powers, Britain, France and Germany, that took the lead in negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, only involving Solana as an afterthought when smaller EU states bridled at being excluded.
That ad hoc group, known as the EU3, may now take a wider foreign policy leadership role in the political vacuum left by the failure of the constitution.
Solana has tried to shrug off the setback, saying the EU must simply use its existing, imperfect arrangements to meet ever increasing demands for its involvement in diplomacy and peace-building from Kosovo to Aceh, Gaza to Congo.
“We have to continue pragmatically with what we can do,” he told a group of journalists recently.
But Brussels insiders are starting to question Solana’s will to carry on, speculating that he may step down early.
“Everyone he meets now knows he isn’t going to be Europe’s foreign minister,” another member of his staff said.
Outgoing German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is seen as a leading contender to succeed Solana if he did resign.
But the smaller EU member states would be likely to demand the job for one of their own politicians, and Europe’s dominant conservatives could insist on someone of their stripe after the Spanish socialist.—Reuters
