Charlemagne: Don’t just bash the bureaucrats

Politicians are playing a cynical game when they call Brussels the enemy

AS THE barrage of populist attacks becomes deafening, Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, sounds like an artilleryman who can tell the sound of every shell. He identifies "two kinds of populism--one that is against the market, [and] the other that is against the very idea of Europe and wants to put the blame on the institutions of Europe." Olli Rehn, the commissioner in charge of enlargement, puts it another way: "We are at the bottom of the cycle, and populism is at its height."

It is tempting to tell them to stop whingeing. For years, the commission has taken fire from politicians in every corner of the European Union. In a way, that is its job. Opaque, obscure and obtuse, there are times when it has merited some well-aimed shots. At other times, remaining calm and stoical in the face of enemy shells is part of a game in which its "adversaries" collude. Time and again, finance ministers have sidled up to commissioners and muttered: do strike down this bit of state aid, or that case of fiscal nonsense, because we can't do it ourselves--though you must understand, we'll have to criticise you in public.

But this arrangement, in which politicians pretended to criticise the commission and commissioners pretended to care, depended on national politicians wanting the same things as European ones, and on the EU possessing a store of goodwill it was willing to expend on essential-but-painful measures. Over the past few years, both conditions have changed.

Unfriendly fire

Starting in about 2003, when the leaders of France, Germany and Britain got together to bash the EU's industrial policy (even though the trio differed on what that policy should be), politicians have been increasingly willing to slam the commission for no higher purpose than to distract attention from their own problems. The latest attack--the one that occasioned Mr Barroso's rejoinder--was an example. Jacques Chirac laid into the EU bureaucrats because, he said, they did not care that Hewlett-Packard, an American computer company, planned to axe a quarter of its French employees. In this case, there was no question of the government in Paris needing the commission as an alibi for hard decisions. Nor did the EU have a power to intervene that it failed to use. It had no authority--but still got blamed.

That is hardly the first time. But now the commission cannot afford to walk into the line of fire for its masters as it used to. The Barroso commission is unusually weak. Mr Barroso himself lacked the support of France or Germany when he was chosen as president. Few commissioners are political heavyweights back home. Above all, the Euro-constitution's rejection by French and Dutch voters has started an open season on all things European, and the commission has been first in line.

To the extent that the new populism reflects problems with the commission, the damage is still containable. Because the commission is weak, it has failed to argue effectively for freeing trade in services; it has also been tempted into weird trade-rigging arrangements, like the recent deal on textiles with China. But on balance, its critics have not pushed the EU into protectionism or statism; mostly, the commission has held the line.

The bigger worry is that populism reflects a problem with national governments--specifically, their inability to come to terms with globalisation. As a result, populism is appearing in domestic politics in the form of economic nationalism and anti-capitalist rhetoric. The best known examples come from France, where the president says "liberalism is as dangerous an ideology as communism, and like communism it will not prevail."

But similar talk is heard in Germany. On the hustings, the outgoing chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, denounced "wage dumping" and "exploitation". He lost, but only just. In a tearful political farewell this week, he said Anglo-Saxon economics had "no chance" in Europe. As Jeffrey Gedmin of the Aspen Institute in Berlin observes, the anti-capitalist rhetoric of this year's German campaign matched the anti-American tone of the last one.

When top politicians succumb to populism, that encourages a public opinion that seems all too ready to believe that globalisation is nothing but a disease. All Europeans live in a globalised economy and benefit from free trade. Yet according to the EU's public opinion arm, the word "globalisation" conveys negative images for nearly half of them, versus only a third for whom it is positive. A recent Euro-poll asked people to name the first thing they associated with globalisation: the loss of jobs to low-wage countries, most replied. They had a similar image of the EU itself.

What seems to be emerging, especially in some large European countries, is a crude dichotomy: on one hand, globalisation and "Europe"; on the other, national governments and economic populism. The first pairing is reasonable enough: the EU is, on balance, a force for globalisation. The other--linking populism and domestic politics--is disturbing.

Increasingly, it means nobody--except hapless Eurocrats--is reminding voters that open markets underpin both Europe's prosperity and the "social models" people want to defend. Rational debate about economics is harder when even modest free-marketeers, such as Britain's Tony Blair and Mr Barroso, are demonised. Above all, this distracts attention from the real problems facing Europe, which are national ones. Improving labour markets, reforming pensions, and all the other things needed to create jobs and boost growth, have to be the province of governments. By blaming the EU, as Mr Chirac did, national politicians make it seem as though the problem lies elsewhere.

In the past, national governments were on the same side as the EU but pretended otherwise, in order to get good policies implemented. Now, too many are putting themselves on the opposite side, and highlighting their differences--with the conscious intention of making good policy harder to achieve.

Commentary feature says that national politicians in Europe are playing a cynical game when they call 'Brussels' or the European Commission the enemy. In particular, in blaming the EU for economic ills and a refusal to argue for the type of economic and labour reform needed in many EU Member States.

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