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Pipes Of Peace
Tony Blair met Jacques Chirac in Paris today for a so-called "peace summit" aimed at making next month's Hampton Court EU summit run more smoothly. But what has Blair sacrificed in order to keep Chirac on his best behaviour in November?
The two men have barely been on speaking terms since the collapse of June's budget debate. Back then, Chirac sought to deflect attention from his humiliating referendum defeat by focussing EU ire on Britain's budget rebate. The British rebate will go when the Common Agricultural Policy is reformed to reflect 21st century realities, Blair countered.
June's summit ended disastrously, with what some insiders described as the most intense hostility anyone could remember between the leaders of some of Europe's top nations.
Chirac emerged from today's tête-a-tête promising that France will "will deploy all its support for the British presidency." For his part, Blair stressed the need to "find a way forward together" to meet the challenge posed by citizens questioning EU policies. Hardly what the BBC chooses to describe as "Blair and Chirac revive alliance", though. Indeed, anyone who has paid any attention whatsoever to the Franco-British relationship in recent years would be hard pressed to explain how today's agreements could be any more than cosmetic.
Blair, of course, has been here before. He and Chirac have had numerous rows, often over the Common Agricultural Policy and the British rebate, but also over Iraq and Europe's relationship to the United States. Chirac has complained that no-one has ever dared to speak to him the way Blair has (after a previous row on subsidies), while Blair was reportedly furious when the French president used Blair's young son Leo to warn him off the invasion of Iraq, demanding how the PM could look into Leo's eyes twenty years from now should he support the war.
Every time the pair fall out, Blair makes the first overtures towards renewing the partnership - and every time he does that, Chirac finds a way to knock Blair down a little while retaining a veneer of bonhomie.
One would have thought Blair would have learnt by now. However, here he is, back in Paris, seeking Chirac's assurance that he will not scupper next month's informal summit which Blair hopes will salvage some achievements for the British presidency of the EU.
Blair has already scored agreement on one of his presidency targets, when the 25 nations voted to open final membership negotiations with Turkey. However, both he and Chirac will be long gone from politics in ten or fifteen years, when French and probably Austrian voters have the final say on Turkish accession.
But Blair needs something more solid, and sooner. EURSOC reported in September how complaints from EU commentators that Britain's presidency has been a wash-out were reaching danger levels. Agreement on a new direction for Europe following the rejection of the constitution seems a long way off. Full reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, which France insists is stitched up until at least 2012, is further still. Both London and Paris have differing views on how Europe can best respond to the challenges presented by China and India. And then, on foreign policy, there's the small matter of Iran's nuclear weapons program and Russia's relationship with the EU.
The best, it seems, that Blair can hope for is that Chirac does not wreck November's summit as he did June's.
This means that Blair is going to offer some concession to France. As he does not want to be the prime minister who killed off Britain's EU rebate - not least during Britain's presidency of the EU - then it is likely that he will back off from demands that the Common Agricultural Policy budget is reformed. This, in itself, will be a major victory for France and one which throws into relief Blair's efforts to reform other areas of the EU.
It can't have escaped Blair's attention that CAP embodies many of the issues that plague the EU today. Consign CAP reform to the dustbin and you're dashing any hopes of reforming anything at all.
Because CAP represents Franco-German dominance of the EU at the expense of smaller countries, not just because its structure reflects a post-war settlement that no longer applies but because Paris and Berlin agreed in 2003 to keep CAP payments steady until the beginning of the next decade.
CAP also seethes with corruption: No-one knows exactly who gets what from this system administered at national level and open to abuse at almost every level. Only last month it was revealed that one of Holland's most prominent opponents of CAP reform is one of his country's major beneficiaries of the subsidy. Forget about reforming the EU's deep-rooted traditions of crookedness if you back off from abolishing the CAP.
It represents protectionism: Blair himself once berated Chirac for claiming to support aid to Africa while defending CAP: "Failing to reform the CAP means being responsible for the starvation of the world's poor," he said. Is Blair ditching his much-touted love for Africa now too? Moreover, on the level of economic reform within Europe, support for CAP goes hand-in-hand with the kind of statist protectionism Chirac is demanding more of and which Blair hopes to see phased out.
CAP is anti-modern, and if Blair has one memorable motif, it is his love of modernisation. Get rid of CAP, he once said, and you can fund education, technology and retraining to make Europe a 21st century economy. Keep it, EURSOC adds, and you're condemned to remain stuck in the 1950s.
CAPs funding is rotten, too: Rich countries like France actually benefit from it because of their large agribusiness sector. The Netherlands, to name but one, resents paying the highest per-capita rate in the EU to keep France's agribusiness sector going - just one more reason why the Dutch voted No to the EU constitution in June. Even Britain's rebate, which France loathes, exists purely to correct an imbalance in payments between the two similarly-sized economies.
CAP is undemocratic. Fewer than 5 percent of EU citizens work in the agricultural sector, which contributes on average 1.7 percent of GDP for EU nations. Why, then, does such a tiny sector demand almost half of the EU's total budget? Remember, too, that if current CAP levels are to remain fixed for western nations, where will the money come from to pay a fair rate to farmers in the ten new member states? Britain is among those EU nations demanding that budget contributions be cut or capped - how will this happen without making central European farmers second-class citizens? So much for Blair's supposed admiration for "New Europe."
And then Turkey. Blair was one of Turkey's most vocal supporters. Turkey has a farming sector far larger by both percentage and population than any other EU nation. How does he propose restructuring CAP to reflect Turkey's demands?
It is better that next month's summit ends in acrimony than the Common Agricultural Policy emerge unscathed. Unfortunately, Blair wants the British presidency to have a happy ending, at whatever cost. There will be no budget deal - Chirac will never give him that - no new direction for the EU. There probably will be numerous photo ops and a promise to create a "People's Commission" to look into the EU's future.
How very New Labour. Besides, the PM has one eye on exit stage left. It's likely he wants to hang on until after Chirac goes in 2007, at least. In the next year or so, he's going to face gentle but powerful pressure from within his party to retire. The last thing he needs is Chirac surviving him to take a last few sniper shots at his great rival from across the Channel as he goes down.
