Okay, well, it’s not what we could have hoped for.

I won’t voice further everyone’s doubts about Van Rompuy and Cathy Ashton, who comes as the more surprising of the two.

Jon Worth and Julien Frisch have already made clear all the uncertainties with the new nominations. But it’s a new -if grey- morning over Europe and I want to see the good side of things.

First of all, I’ve been thinking for a while in the top-jobs media frenzy that everyone has been too tempted to only look at whether the candidates were ‘famous’ or not. Let’s face it, this is what everyone means when they say ‘high-profile’.

Well, the nominees are not. Once this had seeped in, I found myself, waking up this morning, thinking this could also work. Let’s face it, whether famous or not, the Council Prez’ and the High Rep weren’t going to steal the limelight from Sarkozy and Merkel anyway, were they.

The fact is that everyone I can find who knows anything about Catherine Ashton says she’s very no-nonsense and competent. I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Certainly if she turns out to have some of the iron that she has shown in trade negotiations, she could nail the job better than a more flamboyant, but less down-to-earth High Rep.

The truth is we can’t know for sure until her first big test, Copenhagen. How she deals with the Climate Conference will show to Europe how she approaches her new job, but arguably I think she could be the right person in these negotiations, and play Europe’s cards well being dealt a very bad hand.
Don’t get me wrong, Ashton isn’t going to save the summit, but she could lay the groundwork to have ambitious and binding reduction targets next year. The treaty isn’t going to come this year anymore, but Ashton could prove a good player in Copenhagen.

The other area of foreign policy where I think she goes in with an advantage is Iran. Because of the US’ lack of willingness to speak with Tehran, the EU has been leading the negotiations with Iran, and Solana, with a less important role, was already in practice the West’s chief negotiator, so it’s likely that Ashton inherits that job too.
And for that, being a virtual unknown could make a positive difference. She could well come away from the Iranian negotiations with more success than in the previous years simply because of her consensual style.
I certainly find this more credible than if we ended up with a personality of the kind of Bernard Kouchner, a dashing swash-buckler out to right the world’s wrongs. This was the perceived image of Massimo D’Alema, rightly or wrongly, and I think it was his undoing.

It is also very important that the new High Representative leads a foreign policy based on Global Justice and development, and we will soon launch a campaign to encourage just this: watch this space. But there is no reason to think that Ashton couldn’t do that.

In short: wait and see. We could still be surprised by Ashton. To come back to my original point, the personality and the style may matter much more than candidates’ CVs. The fact of the matter is that this is a treaty-formed position, and is set to become an institution.

I don’t buy into the style-of-the-first-holder-ever-after theory, it simply does not tick in day-to-day politics, where you often see different people behaving differently with the same job!
I think in ten or fifteen years’ time, how the High Rep’s office will look won’t depend on Cathy Ashton, but it will come down to more nitty-gritty things like the budget it controls and what prerogatives it has under the treaty. I think we will find that the constitutional provisions for the High Rep’s job will make it a big job.

About the Council President

I’m writing less about Herman Van Rompuy’s nomination to be Council President as it was widely expected and everyone can have come to their own conclusions.

In the end, for a nomination that happened behind doors, and doesn’t even depend on parliamentary approval, it’s not a bad choice. Going with a middle-aged Belgian poet may not be the most courageous decision the EU has ever made, but the feeling I have about his presidency is that he will be a safe pair of hands.

What we need for these two-and-a-half years from the Council Presidency is two things: clearing up what this job is about in the first place and making it more democratic, and getting the Council to be more effective; in practice, to agree on more things, especially in Foreign Affairs where unanimity will still be required.

As far as the definition of his job is, he might be setting up one good practice: the EU shouldn’t be governed by its council. A federalist at heart in his native Belgium, Van Rompuy knows what the difference between supranational and intergovernmental institutions is.
And he knows that if Europe is to become a force to be reckoned with, that momentum can’t come from the National Governments, or the institution that represents them, it has to come from supranational institutions.
One think he will do is to prevent the Council becoming even more the central decision-maker in the EU. And that’s a good thing.
In fact, being a strong supporter of parliamentary systems rather than presidential ones, I think that this will give a chance to give another go (say in 5 years with an new EC president) at making the President of the Commission the proper ‘Prime Minister’ of Europe, which I think will be a much better institutional arrangement for the future.

In fact, 10 or 15 years down the line, I could quite imagine the president of the council becoming a more German-style Bundespräsident, while the limelight would go to the leader of the executive: the EC president, whose nomination process will be made much more transparent once European Parties are forced by the Lisbon treaty to put forward a candidate each before the EP elections.

This does not mean that the way he was nominated is agreeable. The Council President should be chosen more democratically, and be answerable to the Union’s supranational institutions. European Alternatives has launched a campaign on this issue, calling on the new Council President, among other things, to appear for a Parliamentary Question Time.
But maybe van Rompuy is exactly the right person to democratise the post: at the very least he is not a strong believer in the Council’s opaque decision making, and this is a start.

The other issue for the Council President will be to get leaders to agree on more things in order for them to be done. He will have a strong hand with all the new fields decided at QMV.
But the most crucial areas are the ones still decided at unanimity: Foreign Policy and Taxation. In both of these, being a consensus-builder among a usually very divided council will be very effective. In Foreign Policy in particular, there is no point having a high-profile person holding the job to present the council’s position, if the council is too divided to have one.
A word about taxation, which is fundamental in changing the approach to European integration: Van Rompuy has been making all the right noises about the need for the EU to raise its own revenues. Maybe we’ll see an evolution on this in these two and a half years?

In any case, I find that pro-European and blogging commentators have been harsh on these two. Of course they’re not the sexiest EU-team we could have dreamed of.

But let’s see who they are and what their style is: this will be much more important than their much-debated CV one or two years down the line.

Copenhagen is a chance for this new leadership to prove themselves. That’s exactly what Baroness Cathy asked for yesterday. Let’s give it to her.