Mr Juncker is just not up to the job
Jean-claude Juncker says what other European pen-pushers only dare to think. This week, he told Italians to stop expecting the EU to fix their problems and to work harder. For good measure, he also said it was time to end Russia-bashing. This is about more than the European Commission president’s titanic lack of diplomacy. The bigger the EU project gets, the less it looks up to the job. This has real world consequences for the Europeans Mr Juncker claims to serve.
Dealing with his statements in reverse, what more has Russia got to do to convince Eurocrats that it means harm? The surrealism of the Arkady Babchenko affair – in which a dissident journalist says he faked his own death in Ukraine in a bid to expose a murder plot – should not distract from the Kremlin’s war on the free press or its links to acts of terror. Dutch-led investigators recently concluded that the missile that brought down a Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014 belonged to a Russian brigade.
Mr Juncker did say that Brussels “will never accept” Russia’s division of Ukraine, but what does his call for détente mean for the relatives of the 283 people killed on MH17? Two hundred and eleven of them were EU citizens.
And what do Italians make of Mr Juncker’s remarks about their work ethic? Yes, a dysfunctional economic system and resistance to reform have contributed to Italian stagnation, worsened by corruption. The country is by no means the only one with political problems. Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s former prime minister, lost his position yesterday following a corruption scandal: he is believed to have spent eight hours ensconced in a restaurant around the corner while the parliament debated his fate.
But when EU officials blame individual countries for their problems, it’s important to remember the power imbalance between Brussels and its clients. Given its own inability to embrace reform, it shouldn’t dish out lazy answers to problems it has helped create and perpetuate – and stifle criticism of. The first choice of Italy’s new government for a finance minister was rejected because he was Eurosceptic: this was enough, said the Italian president, to upset the markets. Europe’s elite politicians are acting like Bourbon monarchs, rejecting ministers presented to them by unruly parliaments. If they’re not careful, they might go the way of Louis XVI.
The Italian political crisis (which appears resolved, for the moment) illustrates a growing tension between the economic dogmas of the EU’S bureaucrats and the needs of its constituent members. The single currency staggers on, largely to the benefit of Germany and to the detriment of its debt-laden southern members. Trade policy is a mess, too. Donald Trump’s steel and aluminium tariff crusade is a big mistake: it will harm American industry in the long run and isolate Washington internationally. But other countries have sought accommodation, negotiating to be excluded from the tariffs in exchange for agreeing to export less to the US.
The Europeans, by contrast, chose to grandstand. Brussels speaks for the whole continent with the self-importance of a protounitary state, even when the economic impact of its actions is spread unevenly. Beneath the arrogance lies hypocrisy. The US puts a tax of 2.5 per cent on imported cars. The EU’S tariff is 10 per cent.
The EU cannot learn from its mistakes. Whether the reader is for or against Brexit, they will surely agree that the referendum was a wake-up call: treating EU citizens with contempt drives them into the arms of Eurosceptics. Instead, the elites have reacted to the British revolt with a mix of stubbornness and masochism. Stubbornness in their refusal to give ground in the Brexit negotiations. Masochism because these displays of arrogance will ultimately hurt the EU itself.
The EU is a confederacy of diverse nations whose interests are in such competition with each other it would require the diplomacy of a Talleyrand or a Kissinger to hold things together. Instead, the EU has Mr Juncker.
Given its own inability to embrace reform, the EU should not dish out lazy answers to problems