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EU latest: a triumph for democracy?

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Robin Lustig | 23:32 UK time, Sunday, 22 November 2009

The Euro-chatterati can be divided broadly into two camps, following the choice of Herman van Rompuy and Cathy Ashton as EU council president and foreign policy chief respectively. In the words of a leader on Saturday: "Supporters of the European Union are dismayed, just as Eurosceptics are sneeringly exultant."

But just for the sake of argument - and simply in the interest of encouraging some debate - let us suppose there is a third camp, those who might suggest that for the people who live in the EU, this could have been something of a triumph.

Let us take the Financial Times leader-writer's viewpoint: "By lasering in on the lowest common denominator ... leaders of the big member-states ... reveal themselves as geopolitical pygmies."

If you were seeking to contradict that in a debate, I suppose you could reply: "On the contrary: by insisting that unelected officials must remain clearly and unambiguously subservient to the elected leaders of all member-states, the leaders have shown themselves to have a better understanding of what democracy means than some leader-writers."

And you could point to a comment elsewhere in the FT (in the print edition only, not the online version, oddly): an anonymous US official is quoted as saying "Selecting a foreign minister with next to no foreign policy experience has sent a discouraging and disappointing signal to anxious US allies."

Foreign minister? Who said anything about a foreign minister, you might ask. And you might in turn quote the FT's own Brussels bureau chief, : "Perhaps the real winners are the EU's governments and the cross-national centre-right and centre-left political party groups that dominate the European parliament."

In other words, you might suggest, the people who have actually been elected to represent the EU's 375 million voters.

The core of the Euro-enthusiasts' case is to be found elsewhere in that same FT article: "Globalisation is pushing the world into an age of unsentimental Great Power politics, in which Europe must get its act together to avoid being pushed to the sidelines by Brazil, China, India, Russia, the US and so on. The EU's remedy is the Lisbon Treaty, a set of reforms intended to strengthen its cohesion and upgrade its global influence."

To which you might reply - if you still had the energy and appetite to debate these matters: "Fine, if that is the case, let us elect an EU president and an EU foreign minister so that they can meet all those other leaders as equals." Because the big difference between Brazil, China, India, etc. on the one hand, and the EU on the other, you might argue, is that the former are all independent nation states, and the EU is not.

But you would have to concede that whenever EU voters have been asked if they want the EU to resemble more closely a nation-state, or super-state, they tend to have answered with a resounding No. Which, you might suggest, could be why the EU leaders decided to do the choosing themselves.

Let me make it clear: it is not my intention to advance any particular argument. I just think these are interesting, and important, issues to consider.

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