Once again, with a couple of honorable exceptions, the U.S. media failed to deliver on a major story about the European Union, which groups America’s closest allies and trading and investment partners. It’s true that EU stories are often hard to make interesting, but the American media has never really tried to do so for the entire past half century, during which the emergence of the European Union has been one of the world’s biggest geopolitical developments.
This time the story was the “Yes” vote in the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – designed to update and consolidate the EU institutions – greeted with jubilation and relief in Dublin, Brussels and elsewhere on Saturday, October 3. Considering that around 35 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, one might think that the nation’s TV stations would show more than zero interest in an event so crucial for their mother country’s future – just 16 months after Ireland rejected the Treaty in a first referendum.
An Irish “No” in the second referendum would have not only produced a crisis in Ireland’s relations with its 26 EU partners but also condemned the European Union to a further difficult period of political and institutional stagnation. The Irish “Yes” was necessary for the EU-wide adoption of the Treaty, the aims of which include enhancing the Union’s global influence though revamped foreign policy leadership.
Yet not one of the main TV stations – not even “news” channels like CNN and Fox – did stories on the referendum’s results, although viewers with sharp eyes might have detected a brief mention in the rapidly scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen. CNN preferred to run a piece Saturday about a pair of “giant marionettes” roaming the streets of Berlin to celebrate the unification of East and West Germany in 1990.
The U.S. print media covered the story with varying degrees of detail and skill, with many reports, especially the one in The Washington Post, containing serious mistakes – another regular feature of American EU coverage. The most honorable exception was The New York Times, with an excellent, error-free, Dublin-datelined piece that reported the significance of the vote for both Ireland and the European Union as a whole, and put the whole process in context. A story from The Wall Street Journal was accurate but pedestrian.
The New York Times lead was apposite and informative:
They rejected it only 16 months ago. But in a stunning about-face spurred by economic turmoil, Ireland’s voters have overwhelmingly approved a far-reaching treaty meant to consolidate the power of the European Union and reorganize the way it does business, the government announced Saturday.
Ireland’s approval of the pact, known as the Lisbon Treaty, removes one of the biggest stumbling blocks to its eventual enactment by Europe as a whole. The treaty would give Europe a more powerful foreign policy chief and its first full-time president, and strengthen the role of the European Parliament; it is also meant to more clearly delineate the relationship between national legislatures and Europe.
The Washington Post, on the other hand, published a report from London (is the paper really too cheap to afford a roundtrip ticket from London to Dublin?) that was so riddled with errors that it would have been better not to have run it at all. It is worth looking at these mistakes in some detail to showcase the extraordinary ignorance of most of the American media with regard to the European Union. The Post report starts with one of the hoariest, though misguided clichés in the book:
Henry Kissinger once famously asked, “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” The answer, thanks to the Irish, may soon be the president of Europe.
What’s wrong with this? Just about everything. First of all, it is very improbable that Henry Kissinger ever used that ungrammatical phrase (it should be: “Whom…”), and he himself has disowned it. Kissinger didn’t really want a “single telephone number” for Europe, because his policy was to play the various national governments off against each other and he was more than happy with multiple telephone numbers. Anyway, adoption of the Lisbon Treaty following the Irish referendum would not make the president of Europe the only person to call – there would actually be three of them.
The Treaty provides Europe with a confusing and untested triad of leaders in foreign relations – the president of the European Council, the president of the European Commission and a high representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy. As Kissinger never achieved a rank higher than secretary of state, the person for him to call under Lisbon would be the high representative, not the president.
[In an interesting article (see below) the French newspaper Le Monde argues that this triple leadership will make the European Union’s foreign policy even more chaotic than it is at present.]
Next, the WP reporter, Anthony Faiola, describes the European Union as an “alliance,” which it isn’t, and in his third paragraph he contradicts his own lead by acknowledging that, in addition to the new president, the Treaty also creates the post of high representative, whom he describes as the European Union’s “secretary of state.” This is misleading because the U.S. secretary of state is a cabinet member in a national government and the European Union does not have a government comparable to that of the United States, which is one reason why the British won’t allow the high representative to be called a foreign minister.
Faiola describes the president and “secretary of state” as “more closely linking the region’s foreign policies and affording the alliance new clout on the world stage.” But it will remain up to the member governments, not the new leaders, to decide whether they want to link their foreign policies more closely, and it still has to be seen whether the Union acquires “new clout,” although that is the aim. The report continues:
The [Irish referendum] results illustrate how the global financial crisis has forced hard-hit nations such as Ireland to find new value in their EU membership, reenergizing a project in cross-border governance that some said would never work.
The author omits to mention that predictions that the project wouldn’t work date mainly from British officials and commentators in the 1950s. Further on, Faiola says the Treaty
…would fortify the power of the European Parliament on regional issues including security, agriculture and transportation, but EU nations would largely remain autonomous on the vast majority of issues.
In fact, the Treaty does not “fortify” the power of the European Parliament on security, where the Parliament’s role remains consultative, although it does increase the number of issues on which EU members would become less autonomous by losing their national vetoes in the Council of Ministers. In reality, a huge range of decisions has already been transferred by national governments to the EU institutions in Brussels, and, even without the Lisbon Treaty, it is not true that “EU nations would largely remain autonomous on the vast majority of issues.”
Next, the report states:
The position [of EU president] is envisioned to be filled with (sic) a major European statesman, similar to the UN secretary-general.
Apart from the fact that Faiola assumes this personage will be male, the position in not at all similar to that of the UN secretary-general. The EU president’s main role is to chair the European Council, the Union’s top decision-making body, whereas the secretary-general does not chair the UN Security Council. The secretary-general never comes from a country that is a permanent member of the Security Council, but there is no such prohibition on the country of origin of the EU president. The EU president must be a current or former Head of State or Government – a prerequisite that does not apply to the UN secretary-general, who is actually more like the president of the European Commission than the president of the European Council, although that is by no means an exact fit either.
Finally, says Faiola, “Irish rejection of the treaty probably would have killed it.” No, the whole point was that a second Irish rejection would definitely, not “probably,” have killed the Treaty, which must be approved by all 27 member states. In sum, the 650-word story averages roughly two major mistakes for every three paragraphs.
A sketchy report in the Washington Examiner manages a slightly better rate of one minor and one major mistake in six paragraphs. The report repeats a common error by describing the Irish “Yes” vote as representing “a 20.5 percent swing” since the first referendum, when it means “a 20.5 point swing,” which is much larger (emphasis added). The more serious blunder is to describe Munster as a county of Ireland, when it is in fact a province, thus undermining the entire report’s credibility.
An Associated Press report from Dublin commits an astonishing error by suggesting that the European Commission is composed of Ministers. The report includes the following sentence:
Ireland staged a second vote Friday after winning legal assurances from EU chiefs that Brussels would not interfere in any of those areas, nor take away Ireland’s guaranteed ministerial seat on the European Commission (emphasis added).
A reporter who doesn’t know the difference between the Commission, composed of high-level bureaucrats, and the Council, in which ministers meet, should not be writing about the European Union. The mistake is akin to asserting that the White House is staffed by U.S. senators. The AP report then includes the curious sentence:
Expressions of joy and relief flooded in from European capitals, particularly neighboring Britain, where Prime Minister Gordon Brown has resisted right-wing demands to subject the Lisbon Treaty to a referendum there, too.
First of all Britain is a country, not a capital; secondly, pressure for a referendum in Britain will continue now that Ireland has voted “Yes” – a “No” vote would have removed the pressure because there would be no treaty to have a referendum about; and thirdly, as polls show that most people in Britain oppose the Lisbon Treaty, they are unlikely to have been indulging in “expressions of joy and relief” that the Irish approved it.
The AP report concludes:
One divisive alternative would have been a “two-speed Europe” in which a core of like-minded nations would move ahead of naysayers like Ireland.
The writer seems unaware that there already is a “two-speed Europe,” as not all EU countries are members of the common currency, the euro, nor of the Schengen agreement, which removes internal frontiers among participating states. It would be more accurate to say “further development of a two-speed Europe,” and that would not necessarily be divisive, because such arrangements are already envisaged under existing EU treaties, and they are designed to resolve, not create, divisions by reducing tensions between countries that wish to proceed at differing speeds.
Finally, it is worth noting a fascinating article in the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, by Arnaud Leparmentier, entitled The Still Improbable European George Washington. Leparmentier points out that at the recent G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Britain and Germany clashed over economic policy, French President Nicolas Sarkozy continued his diatribe against bankers, while Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi repeated his usual monologue against speculators in the oil market. Jan-Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, with only a courtesy seat at the summit went on about everything. With a disproportionate eight seats at the table, Europe produced a veritable a cacophony. He continues:
No matter, seen from Washington or Beijing: if nothing changes the G-20 will quickly be condensed into a G-2, in which the U.S. and Chinese presidents will run the planet’s affairs.
Can one imagine, after the Irish “Yes” to the Lisbon Treaty, that the Europeans will one day speak with a single voice to influence world affairs? That was the dream of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing [former French president, who presided over the EU Constitutional Convention], who introduced into the Treaty the idea of a full-time presidency of the European Council: a person elected for two and a half years to represent the Union on the international stage. “Europe should seek and invent its George Washington,” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing exhorts.
Contrary to a tenacious legend, the reorganization foreseen by the Lisbon Treaty will not simplify the functioning of the Union: it will give birth to a three-headed monster that will make Europe even more ungovernable. “George Washington” will have to cohabit with the president of the Commission, jealous of his commercial and budgetary prerogatives, and the minister of foreign affairs, who will have the [future EU] diplomatic service under his thumb. And no big European country is thinking of giving up its seat – on the G-20, the IMF, or the UN Security Council – for the sake of a unified EU representation.
Only a charismatic personality could federate this Europe, which is worthy of the city states of ancient Greece or the cities of the Italian Renaissance, which were doomed to marginalization because they were incapable of uniting in the face of a changing world. But few people believe in such a providential leader, given that the 27 member states were so quick to reappoint the very cautious José Manuel Barroso as president of the Commission.
The role of the full-time president of the Council also looks limited. Mr. Sarkozy claims to want a strong personality in the job, but he is pushing one of yesterday’s men, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, architect of the Iraq War and inventor of a bankrupt financial model, who faces considerable opposition. He seems to have given up on Mr. Blair: Mrs. Merkel wants a shadowy personality, who would not be the face of Europe but the secretary of the heads of state and government. The name of [Dutch Prime Minister] Balkenende, not a great euro-enthusiast, is being circulated, but a more euro-enthusiastic Finnish candidacy is possible.
In the absence of a sudden burst of energy on this front, Mr. Sarkozy is counting on palliating these weaknesses by giving priority to his relationship with Mrs. Merkel: aren’t these two the charismatic leaders of Europe, given that London is out of the race? Mr. Brown is at his last gasp, while his probable successor, the Conservative David Cameron, will rule himself out because of his euro-skepticism.
In fact, however, the French and Germans are going to tear themselves apart when the explosion of public debt threatens the euro. The two countries are moving further apart each day: Germany, which now devotes a smaller share of its budget to social spending than the United Kingdom, plans to pursue its efforts to increase productivity. Mr. Sarkozy, the man who refuses austerity, is presiding over the world champion of public spending, ahead of Sweden.
In industry, the Germans aim to continue their lone rider role and refuse to join France in constructing new designs. “No serious cooperation is managing to get off the ground in research,” adds a French minister, while old quarrels about the common agricultural policy and the European budget are going to resurface. “A clarification on both sides of the Rhine is indispensable,” this minister worries.
Almost imperceptibly, each country is looking for new frontiers outside the European Union. Germany is dealing with Russia and its Chinese clients, while the country’s constitutional court and public opinion reject any further European integration, Mr. Sarkozy is gradually de-Europeanizing his policy and forming alliances on each continent, with Brazil, Egypt, the Gulf Emirates and even India.
If U.S. journalists read this kind of analysis in the European media, they might produced better-informed, more interesting reports.
