BARELY an hour before European Union leaders began their summit last Thursday,
a team of technicians was desperately screwing new energy-efficient light
bulbs into the vast foyer of the Justice Lipsius building in Brussels.
Three months earlier, the leaders had promised to banish ordinary
energy-draining light bulbs to reduce Europe’s contribution to global
warming. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, boasted that she had already
switched all the bulbs in her flat.
Unfortunately, the building maintenance people had forgotten to do the same at
the summit venue, leaving themselves with a frantic last-minute job to
correct the mistake.
From an environmental point of view, it was just as well they did. For the
meeting of the 27 EU leaders to thrash out a replacement for their failed
constitution turned into a marathon that kept the lights burning well into
the early hours of yesterday.
Tony Blair had a bigger incentive than the rest to end the wrangling and get
out of Brussels fast. While other leaders, including Jose Manuel Barroso,
the European commission’s president, had nothing more exciting than another
international meeting to look forward to – in his case, a conference on
climate change in Greenland – the prime minister had a personal appointment
with the Pope. His wife Cherie and daughter Kathryn were waiting to join him
for the trip to Rome.
The 11am meeting with Benedict XVI in the Vatican’s papal library was hanging
in the balance until 5am, when the leaders finally emerged, bleary-eyed, to
announce that they had struck a deal on a new European treaty.
“People don’t want to be staying up till 4.45am debating the intricacies of
institutional points,” Blair admitted, as he headed for the exit. “It would
be nice to think that nobody’s going to do a late-night sitting of the EU
summit again.”
Given the well-established pattern of such summits, that is likely to prove
wishful thinking; while a series of bitterly fought summit battles ended
with ritual declarations of triumph all round after a deal was struck, the
devil, as ever, will be in the detail.
From today thousands of lawyers, politicians, trade unionists and other
interest groups in every EU country will be poring over the small print of
what was agreed. They have months to work out what it really means before
the leaders reconvene to finalise the text in December.
As he appeared for the last time before the cameras at an EU summit, Blair
claimed that he had delivered everything he promised. “We’ve got a basis to
move on now,” he said. “The four essential things that we in the UK required
in order to protect our position have all been obtained.”
Although it had been a classic “three-shirt summit” – dragging on from
Thursday into Saturday, the departing prime minister was wearing the same
pale blue shirt as the previous day when he stepped forward to make his
announcement.
Looking tired but sounding remarkably perky for a man who had had no sleep, he
said that he was bored with the “endless debating of institutional
questions”. He had spent the past three days “getting us out of this bind”,
he said, and was optimistic that the EU could now turn its attention to “the
problems that concern us all” – such as the economy, organised crime and
climate change. FROM the outset, the Poles had provided the drama, racking
up tension before the summit even began by warning that they were ready to
walk out if they did not get what they wanted over proposed changes to the
EU voting system.
In Brussels, the “Pole with the mole” – President Lech Kaczynski, who has a
small growth on his left cheek – was doing his best to keep negotiations
civil. But back home his identical twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the
prime minister, provoked a furore by breaking the biggest unwritten rule of
EU summits – don’t mention the war.
Speaking from Warsaw, he claimed Poland deserved a better deal on voting
rights because of Germany’s “incomprehensible crimes” against his country
between 1939 and 1945.
“It was the Germans who inflicted unimaginable injury, terrible harm, on Poles
– incomprehensible crimes – and Poles like Germans, while Germans do not
like Poles,” he said.
Polish objections over voting weights in EU decisions became – as expected –
the biggest stumbling block of the summit.
At the heart of the dispute was the “double majority” system, which would
require representatives of 65% of EU citizens, plus 55% of member states, to
pass decisions. Poland argued that it was getting an unfair deal and the
prime minister dismayed other leaders by arguing that his country had 28m
fewer people than it should have had because of atrocities inflicted on it
during the second world war (not to mention the seizure of Polish territory
by the Soviet Union afterwards).
His intervention cast a shadow over an exquisite dinner laid on by Merkel on
Thursday. As waiters served rollmop herrings, artichoke-filled beef olives
and chilled soup of sour cherries, accompanied by German and Portuguese
wines, the Hungarian prime minister led criticism of Poland’s outburst.
The British were seen to be the next-biggest summit trouble-makers, with Blair
and Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, insisting on four “red lines”
to protect national interests in foreign and defence policy, social
security, labour laws and policing, justice and common law.
As the opening dinner drew to a close, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president,
formed an alliance with Merkel and President Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania to
find a compromise with the Poles. Falling into a “good cop, bad cop” routine
with Merkel, Sarkozy railed at the Polish president for the war jibe, while
Merkel remained calm.
Sarkozy, who asserted himself as a deal maker on his summit debut, went on to
impress observers with his seemingly limitless energy.
As day two dawned, he bounded to the Parc Royal after just a few hours’ sleep
for a rousing jog in front of a strategically positioned French press corps.
Dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, Sarkozy returned to the luxurious Amigo
hotel to find Merkel quietly reading the morning newspapers in the breakfast
room.
Sarkozy greeted the startled chancellor with an enthusiastic but sweaty
embrace before returning to his room for a shower.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister, went out for a six-mile run
at 7.30am, while Blair got his exercise simply by walking to the summit from
his hotel nearby.
Despite the vigorous start to Friday, the twin spectres of Polish and British
intransigence loomed once more. Growing frustration with the Poles found its
clearest expression on the blog of Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister.
Poland seems “like it is sometimes on a different planet to the rest of us”,
he wrote.
MEANWHILE, Britain momentarily put its four red lines to one side when it was
suddenly confronted with an unexpected problem by the French.
Sarkozy had pulled off a surprising initiative to remove from the EU’s list of
objectives a commitment to an internal market “with free and undistorted
competition”. In London, Gordon Brown, the chancellor, who will be landed
with the unenviable task of selling the new treaty to voters after he
becomes prime minister this week, was monitoring events closely.
He and his advisers were huddled in the Treasury, with lawyers on standby.
According to insiders, the chancellor “went ballistic” when he discovered
that Blair had casually nodded through a change that threatened the EU’s
50-year adherence to free competition.
A furious Brown telephoned Blair at least three times to demand a U-turn,
refusing to accept reassurances from the prime minister’s aides that the
commitment would be protected in other parts of the treaty.
Brown insisted instead that a separate protocol be added to reiterate the EU’s
undertaking to advance competition. A sheepish Blair was forced to return to
the negotiating table, where he managed to secure an addendum.
However, Sarkozy had won a symbolic political argument about the direction of
the EU that he could present as a victory to French voters who, along with
the Dutch, had rejected an EU constitution in 2005.
By 7pm, a new compromise was on the table for Warsaw. Changes in voting
procedures that will disadvantage Poland would not take full effect until
2017. The Poles were offered seven extra MEPs for good measure. Merkel paced
up and down her temporary office in Brussels, mobile phone in hand, as she
waited for the Kaczynskis’ verdict. On a hotline to Warsaw, Lech consulted
Jaroslaw who, in typically combative style, replied on television rather
than on the telephone, rejecting the deal.
At this point Merkel resorted to the “nuclear option” that she had prepared as
a last resort. She publicly announced that the 26 other member states would
press ahead with the treaty with or without Poland.
Her tactic of threatening to isolate Warsaw appeared to work. Shortly after
midnight yesterday the Poles caved in.
Blair later claimed some credit for helping to seal the deal. “I tried to keep
the show on the road,” he said.
There was one last hurdle. While Blair’s official spokesman trumpeted
Britain’s success in preserving the “four red lines”, Belgium started
objecting to 17 points in the new text.
A group of countries – Belgium, Italy, Austria, Luxembourg, Hungary,
Malta, Cyprus – complained that the text was too skewed in favour of
the Eurosceptics.
One of their biggest concerns was over the charter of fundamental rights,
which enshrined rights ranging from union recognition to secondary picketing
but which Britain had refused to accept as legally binding.
However, at 4.32am there was finally a deal. Britain had managed to keep in a
clause that it had negotiated with the aim of ensuring that the charter
would have no impact on British law. WHAT happens next? According to Blair,
the EU can now focus on “things that are ultimately more important”.
“It gives us a chance to concentrate on issues to do with the economy,
organised crime, terrorism, immigration, defence, climate change, the
environment, the problems that concern us all,” he said.
The next phase begins in three weeks’ time when so-called “sherpas” –
officials representing each country – will gather at an
intergovernmental conference to go over the details of what was agreed by
their bosses. The treaty will be finalised at another EU summit at the end
of the year. First, however, Brown will have to deal with Conservative
demands for a referendum on the reform treaty.
William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “Large parts of the EU
constitution are repackaged but back. Blair and Brown have signed up to
major shifts of power from Britain to the EU and major changes in the way
the EU works.
“The EU would now be able to sign treaties in its own right and, despite any
‘opt-ins’, the European commission and Court of Justice would now have new
powers over criminal law. The EU treaty would also set up a new EU president
and diplomatic service. These are just some of the fundamental changes that
were in the constitution and are now set to be in this new treaty.
“Given their manifesto commitment to a referendum on the EU constitution, the
government has absolutely no democratic mandate to introduce these major
changes without letting the British people have the final decision in a
referendum.”
That is the last thing Britain’s new prime minister will want.
Regardless of whether he believes there has been a “shift of power” to
Brussels, Brown knows that British voters would throw the treaty out.
