Hindustan Times
Fine wine, oysters and Euro-despondency
I have come to expect that European conferences will be marked by excellent cuisine and mediocre ideas. It’s not that people who congregate on the Continent are somehow mentally addled by the taste of fresh oysters, endives and Chablis – it’s just that Europeans get ever more tongue-tied trying to match their soaring international objectives with their declining domestic capacities.
I had a sense of déjà vu at this year’s Brussels Forum, hosted by the German Marshall Fund for the United States (quite a mouthful, probably one polysyllabic word in German). If anything, the Euro-gap was even wider then ever.
There were three or four reasons for this impression. One was that the European Union gamefully continued to push those issues that would make the world a better place like carbon cuts, human rights, No More War and so on. Yes, there was an acceptance that Europe had to be more flexible and tack a little here and there. But the speechifying was replete with talk of values, confidence in the euro and diplomatic solutions to all and sundry.
Two was a distinct sense that the world was moving in another direction, one of hard-nosed power and national interests. The Great Yellow Hope of Europe a year ago had been China. China, speeding its way through its industrial revolution, it was argued, would become a responsible global power in an equally rapid fashion. Then Beijing got brutish about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Then Copenhagen happened. And it’s been downhill since then. A Chinese delegate at the conference, after listening to a few Euro-dominated sessions, was contemptuous. “They don’t realize the world is changing,” he told me.
Three was a continuing lack of coherence within the governing structure of the European Union. I heard the new EU President, Herman von Rompuy, and the new EU Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton. Jose Manuel Barroso and a pantheon of other Euro-greats spoke. They were all articulate and intelligent. But ultimately “there was no there there.” Von Rompuy seems to be known best for his ability to write haiku. Barroso for trying real hard. And Ashton for fully mastering very thin briefing books.
Finally, the Europeans are again uncertain about their US crutch. They have found Barack Obama is not as enthusiastic about them as they had expected – because the EU continues to be so bad at going beyond words. So the Europeans went on and on about how they were sacrificing in Afghanistan, how the two sides of the Atlantic shared values and how they all shared genes, names and a few World Wars. But no one, including the attendant US diplomats, addressed why Obama skipped the last EU-US summit (reports had it he said “nothing much happened at the last one”).
So the forum proved a wonderful feast for the palate and a confirmatory one for the cerebrum. The oysters were indeed good, if mildly gritty (Euro-decline? Climate change?). Brussels was pleasant, but there seemed to be more Gypsy beggars on the street and more shuttered shops since my last visit some seven or eight years ago. But I didn’t feel like exulting as I walked about. I have a soft spot for the Belgians. After all, they invented cricket – even if they have since forgotten the fact and the game.
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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