Charlemagne: Europe’s lost leaders

The last thing the European Union needs is more visionary leadership

AS THE European Union sinks deeper into political confusion and economic stagnation, a nostalgia for the good old days is setting in. Anguished Europhiles pace the Schuman district of Brussels, bemoaning the lack of a modern Schuman to chart a new future for Europe. All that is left of the great man is a giant rock bearing his name, strategically positioned outside the European Commission's Berlaymont headquarters. Schuman is not the only name that evokes fond memories. Where are today's equivalents of other figures in the Europhile hall of fame: Monnet, Adenauer, Delors, Kohl, Mitterrand? Europe's crisis, it is said in the corridors of Brussels, is above all a crisis of leadership.

It is certainly true that the European leaders who assembled at the G8 summit in Gleneagles this week make an uninspiring sight. Jacques Chirac is in deep political trouble, after his failure to persuade the French to vote yes in a referendum on the European constitution. His poll ratings are collapsing, he is looking his age and he has developed an unerring capacity for insulting fellow Europeans; having told the central Europeans to shut up a couple of years ago, this week he was overheard making sneering comments about British and Finnish food, and Britain's responsibility for mad-cow disease.

Gerhard Schroder of Germany also seems to be on the last lap of his political career. His situation is so desperate that he is committing political hara-kiri, by precipitating an election that he seems sure to lose. Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, is dogged by political and economic troubles at home - and, as always, by his own legal problems. Outside his own country, he often comes across as something of a buffoon; he started the trend for denigrating Finnish food and famously likened a German member of the European Parliament to a concentration-camp guard. José Manuel Barroso, the recently installed Portuguese head of the European Commission, who is also at Gleneagles, seems to be a man of energy and intelligence. But he has shown uncertain political judgment since he arrived in Brussels, and the commission cannot help but be tarnished by the current atmosphere of crisis within the EU.

That leaves Tony Blair as the one European leader to arrive in Gleneagles with a bounce in his step. He has just won an election, London has been awarded the Olympics in 2012, and an accident of timing has given him the presidency of both the G8 and the EU at the same time. After a much acclaimed speech to the European Parliament, there are those (most notable, it must be said, among Mr Blair's own entourage) who see the British prime minister as well placed to give the EU the new leadership it needs. Mr Blair intends to press the case for reform at a specially convened informal EU summit in October.

Yet Mr Blair's aspirations to European leadership suffer from the fact that he too is something of a lame duck, having announced that this will be his last term as prime minister. He has been around a long time - long enough to make plenty of enemies. Few on the European left will ever forgive him for the Iraq war, and his relationship with Mr Chirac is beyond repair. Even a change of leadership in Germany and the use of the bully pulpit of the EU presidency are unlikely to be enough for Mr Blair to seize the intellectual and political leadership of Europe at this late stage of his career. Fraser Cameron of the European Policy Centre, a think-tank, speaks for many in Brussels when he argues that the EU will probably not be able to make a fresh start until the entire present generation of leaders - meaning Mr Blair, as well as Mr Chirac and Mr Schroder - has gone.

All this yearning for a new generation of decisive leaders is, however, missing the real point. Many of the problems of today's EU stem from an excess of visionary leadership, rather than a lack of it. The Kohl-Mitterrand-Delors troika of the late 1980s and early 1990s was certainly bold, and it is still revered in Brussels. But the three men's enthusiasm to create new political structures for a united Europe left them careless both of public opinion and of the need to get the economics right. The Maastricht treaty, which led to the single European currency, was nearly tripped up in a referendum in France in 1992: a near-death experience that presaged the fiasco of this year's vote on the constitution. Similarly, Mr Kohl was notoriously uninterested in economics. For him monetary union in Europe, like German unification, was above all about politics. He assumed that the economics would work out. In fact, the mishandling of German unification has turned out to be an economic disaster for the EU as well as for Germany itself; even the economics of the euro are increasingly questioned by some of its members.

No more dreams, please

The last thing today's European Union needs is more political leadership of this sort. After the French and Dutch votes, European leaders will surely be warier of signing up to grand political visions in the hope that adverse public opinion can somehow be finessed. Of course, there are many problems facing the EU; but they are primarily economic and are better solved country-by-country, rather than by European leaders convening in a picturesque castle and spelling out some ambitious political dreams for the future.

That is partly because the legal powers to make the necessary changes to labour markets and the European social model reside above all at national, not EU, level. But it is also because the tough work of persuasion that is needed to make economic reform work can ultimately be done only by national politicians who need to convince their own voters. No EU member is going to accept the pain of reform just because Mr Blair makes a good speech in the European Parliament, or because an EU summit passes a stirring resolution. Economic reforms in France and Germany will be carried through by French and German politicians, or not at all.

Commentary feature says that the last thing the European Union currently needs is more visionary leadership.