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Timothy Garton Ash: The G20 summit in London will be missing one great power. Europe | ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...europe-g20-financial-crisis

Europe EU US China Timothy Garton Ash

shared by Argos Media on 26 Mar 09 - Cached
  • When President Barack Obama comes to London next week, he will find one great power missing at the world's summit table: Europe. Five of the 20 leaders at the G20 meeting will be Europeans, representing France, Germany, Britain, Italy and the EU, but the whole will be less than the sum of its parts. There will be plenty of Europeans but no Europe.
  • Obama's European trip, which continues to the Nato summit and then an EU-US meeting in Prague, will also be about foreign and security policy. Here, Europe is even less of a single player. To be fair, Europeans have got their act together on diplomacy with Iran, though it remains to be seen whether that European unity would survive an American request for more economic sanctions on Tehran. On most of the other big issues on Obama's agenda - Afghanistan, Pakistan, relations with Russia and China, nuclear proliferation - there is no Europe. There are individual European countries.
  • Unlike George W Bush at the beginning of his first term, President Obama is both ideologically and pragmatically predisposed to work with a stronger, more united Europe. But even he can't work with something that doesn't exist.
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  • Looking back, one begins to see that Europe has spent the best part of 10 years failing to get its act together. A decade that began with ambitious plans for a European constitution ends with the fate of a much more modest Lisbon treaty hanging on a dubiously democratic attempt to persuade the Irish to alter their "no" to a "yes". If we had spent half the time we wasted in that constitutional debate simply co-ordinating our actions better, under the existing treaties, we would be in a better position today. Europe talks the talk but does not walk the walk.
  • Every EU member state bears some responsibility for this shambles, as does the institutional leadership in Brussels. But its three largest member states are especially to blame.
  • It's nothing new that France and Britain are behaving like France and Britain. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. What's new is that Germany is now behaving like France and Britain.
  • In this constellation, neither the Americans nor the Chinese see Europe as a single, coherent partner. The G20 seems to be gaining acceptance as a new institutional framework for global collective action, at least in financial and economic policy. But it is just that: a framework. To make such frameworks work, you always need, behind the scenes, a strategic coalition of major players. Increasingly, here in Beijing as well as in Washington, one hears talk of a "G2" inside the G20. G2 means the US and China. Yet it's the EU, not China, that has an economy the size of the United States'. Especially in economic policy, the strategic coalition should be G3. But where is Europe?
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