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It would not be true to say that the European Union has never faced a crisis as serious as the one it faces over the next five years. For a union that, in less than 25 years, has had to cope with the end of the cold war, the expansion from 12 to 28 members, the struggle to create a single currency and, most recently, the eurozone crisis, such a claim risks accusations of hyperbole. Nevertheless, the European Union unquestionably faces a fresh bout of huge and defining problems as the José Manuel Barroso era at the European commission gives way – officially from 1 November – to that of Jean-Claude Juncker.
The current crisis in Ukraine aside, the biggest of the major foreseeable problems include economic stagnation, unemployment, migration, energy, relations with Russia, internal political legitimacy and the British question. And that’s without mentioning defence policy, epidemics, climate change and the Islamic world. But none matters more to the health of the union than the eurozone’s continuing economic crisis and the crying need for a stronger growth strategy.
The eurozone’s much touted early 2014 recovery has stalled , with GDP flat, inflation at rock bottom and dismal recent performances by all three core nations of the single-currency area. There have been plenty of calls for the European Central Bank to authorise a programme of quantitative easing when it meets this week, and the ECB president, Mario Draghi, appeared to be responding in a recent speech in the US, only to row back. The latest figures, with their implicit threat of deflation, make all this much more urgent. But QE on its own will not be enough. Europe needs to stimulate demand in other ways too, mainly by cutting the member states some budgetary slack. It is essential that Germany makes this possible. The moment for this is now.
Seen against this grim and urgent backdrop, Saturday’s EU leaders’ summit in Brussels was not headline-grabbing stuff. The 28 government heads sat around the dinner table behind closed doors with Mr Juncker and did a deal – business as usual. The Polish centre-right prime minister Donald Tusk, the first eastern European to get a top EU post of this kind, quickly emerged as the new European council president to succeed Herman Van Rompuy, while the Italian centre-left foreign minister Federica Mogherini becomes the new EU foreign policy chief to succeed Catherine Ashton. These choices now open the way for Mr Juncker to pick the rest of his commission team, all of whom will face confirmation hearings at the newly empowered European parliament before the new commission takes over the reins in two months’ time. This was, inevitably, a trade-off session – a necessary price worth paying for a Europe in which the member states retain much power. Yet no one should pretend that the appointments, though important, will galvanise many people outside the corridors of Brussels.
It is ridiculous to see the appointments too excitedly or through an exclusively parochial prism. Mr Juncker has been consistently and absurdly vilified in the UK as a threat to Britain, even though he has made clear that he wishes to strike a compromise with the UK, while Mr Tusk, after an earlier spat with Downing Street over EU benefit rights, is now being portrayed as the man whom David Cameron can do EU business with. For her part, Ms Mogherini is patronisingly cast as inexperienced and soft on Russia. Meanwhile, the possibility that Mr Juncker might now offer the financial services job to the new British commission nominee, Jonathan Hill, is variously seen as an olive branch, which it manifestly would be, or a dastardly Brussels power grab, which it isn’t.
None of this is to say that parochial considerations don’t matter in relations with the EU. But the big tasks facing our continent are all shared business – to get the European economies growing again and to prevent war in Ukraine. That was the most important discussion at the weekend summit. And that is where real British interests are at stake too.
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