LONDON: Javier Solana, the European Union’s energetic foreign policy chief, was entrusted with an unusually delicate mission when he flew to Tehran to deliver a new international package deal that attempts to defuse the looming crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Basking in the limelight as he met the top leadership of the Islamic Republic, the Spanish envoy was representing not only the EU, but also the US, Russia and China — which are trying to engage with Iran over this highly sensitive issue.
Even if he was only playing postman for the five permanent members of the UN security council, Solana was still in a better position than in late 2003, when the European “troika” of Britain, France and Germany, then led by Jack Straw, launched its first Iranian initiative without even bothering to tell him what they were up to.
That move by Europe’s three biggest countries was a painful blow to the idea that the EU, so often seen as an economic giant but a political and diplomatic dwarf, could perform more effectively on the world stage if only it could speak with one voice.
Now, with the security council’s “big five” formally backing a new package of trade, economic and political incentives — and crucially holding off the search for punitive action against Iran at the UN — the stakes could hardly be higher.
Solana had big ambitions for his job — the cumbersome formal title is “high representative for the common foreign and security policy” — when he began work in 1999. The 15-member EU was then on the brink of its biggest expansion and it had managed to remain united (avoiding a bust-up with the US) throughout the Kosovo crisis.
This affable former Spanish foreign minister and Nato secretary-general has been trouble-shooting ever since — heading off conflict in Macedonia as well as soothing relations between Serbia and Montenegro in the EU’s volatile Balkan backyard.
He has also ventured into the minefield of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where the EU is the biggest single donor but has little clout to show for the millions of euros it has spent. Since Solana’s role is to represent the governments who sit in the EU’s council of ministers, the Iraq crisis effectively put him out of a job. With France and Germany on one side of a bitter argument, and Britain, Spain and Italy on the other, the union had no policy at all on the burning global issue of the day, and no role. Brussels had nothing to say at all about what was happening in Baghdad.
These national disagreements were deep and divisive enough. But the problem was also an institutional one. The complicated architecture of the EU meant that foreign policy remained the jealously-guarded preserve of the member states, with only a limited role for the supranational European commission, despite it having a dedicated commissioner for external relations (a job filled for five years by the talented Chris Patten).
This messy Heath Robinson arrangement made it frustratingly hard for the outside world to understand how it all worked, and harder still to answer Henry Kissinger’s old question of who exactly spoke for Europe in a crisis. That is why an important part of the EU’s new constitution, designed for a union of 25 countries and 450 million people, was devoted to this question. Its answer was that the parallel and overlapping jobs in the commission and the council would be merged into one. Solana would become commission vice-president, with the title EU foreign minister, and a European diplomatic service created to work under him.
Last summer’s defeat of the constitution in the referendums in France and the Netherlands put all that, and much more, into the deep freeze. Without the constitution Solana remains outside the commission, with limited financial resources, and cut off from direct access to its far larger staff, representations abroad and a 6bn euro external aid budget.
Jose Manuel Barroso, the commission president, warning gloomily of a “spectre of Europessimism” haunting the continent, argues that this situation is doing serious damage to Europe’s performance. “Unsatisfactory coordination between different actors and policies means that the EU loses potential leverage internationally, both politically and economically,” he reported. Proposals for improved foreign policy coordination — quickly dismissed by one critic as a “sticking plaster” solution — are to be put to the Brussels summit this week, but there is little likelihood of change as long as the wider constitutional deadlock cannot be resolved. Few believe that is possible until Germany is running the union’s rotating presidency, and Jacques Chirac steps down next summer. It may well take even longer.
Javier Solana meanwhile, is still waiting anxiously for news from Tehran about the next step in the nuclear drama. A positive response to the incentives package he delivered with such fanfare will be good for him and for the EU’s tired diplomatic profile. But if Iran says no and the crisis escalates again, he could yet regret having played the postman.—Dawn / Guardian News Service
