Europe's leadership

After Lisbon

The European Union is likely to choose weak leaders. It needs strong ones

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Readers' comments



Have the editorial desk of The Economist been tricked by the federalist power grabbers inside the EU machinery?

A “strong” Council President will expand the power of the office and set a process in motion with increasing demands for a directly elected president. A directly elected president would have much larger democratic legitimacy. This would be the final steps toward the monster super state that would engulf the remaining sovereignty of the nation states and transfer all substantial power to Brussels. Then we can kiss freedom and self determination goodbye.

Another consequence of a directly elected EU President is a dramatic increase in the weight of the large EU countries such as Germany and France. A popular EU wide election campaign will try to please the German and French voters first. In an election with 100s of millions of voters the real influence of smaller countries such as Denmark or Estonia will be negligible.

PS. There is no need for a narcissist Blair style movie star in the office. Once appointed, the Council President will have the institutional power to speak for the EU and be considered a peer by the US and China.






The UK as a 'central player part' of an EU which is structured as: an aligned- TO VARYING DEGREES AND LEVELS- association of independent, sovereign nations would be but one of many international bodies in which the UK can, in the future, maintain and improve its historic constructive role worldwide...

But, a UK as part of a 'Lisbon Treaty facilitated' 'EU superstate', made up of surrender monkey, amalgamated 'former-nation-states' would eventually end up being trammeled by Continental ego's and memories-of-empires aspirations run-amok...

The EU was not conceived to eventually become a 'superstate political body', striding the international stage as a 'lock-step unit'- made up of amalgamated nations...

Its main purpose was intended to be, as a group of loosely, and to varying degrees aligned nations*, that by its existence, acted as an obstacle to a repeat of the worst of Europe's past:

- never ending wars;

- ethnic and racial intolerance/pogroms; and

- subjugation of/inappropriate profiting from overseas peoples via badly administered colonies and Empires...

* in social, economic and legal policy areas...

Unfortunately, should the UK allow itself to be part of the intellectually dishonest lie that is the Lisbon Treaty- GETTING OUT LATER WOULD NOT RETURN TO THE UK THE HIGH STANDING AND BROAD INFLUENCE THAT IT NOW HAS...

A 'superstate' EU will loose the most productive functional characteristic that has been a prominent part of the various EEC/EU models existing until today: the abilities of INDIVIDUAL EU MEMBER NATIONS to counterbalance each other and to act as checks and balances to stop less than desirable policies/laws from coming into force and/or to amend them...

Amalgamation of EU member nations' militaries- as the Lisbon treaty is leading towards- is unnecessary and in many ways represents an improper and overreaction by those with slighted egos to the 'world order' results of WWII'...

Constructively coordinating EU member and other nations' militaries can be and is regularly done capably through NATO...

Once the 'base' 'political unit' of the EU changes from what it has been for over 5-decades: 'individual member nations' to 'individual adults'- ALL member nations will have allowed themselves to be subjugated to a political governance structure that, down the road- could legislate or act in ways that would not be agreeable to or in the best interests of individual 'member' nations' peoples- and not in the world's best interests- but nothing will be able to be done by the EU's respective 'member' nations- other than damagingly attempting to get out of the 'superstate EU'...

The EU needs leaders who recognize the immense dangers to the world represented by a 'superstate EU'- and who are ethical enough to publicly acknowledge that there is more than one potential structural-model for a future EU...

The betterment of EU member nations' citizenry ought to be the paramount objective of 'EU leader'... not the scoring of 'international points' by a superstate EU!!

There ought to be an EU- but not an EU that by its existence extinguishes the sovereignty and world-role of its member nations...

Roderick V. Louis,
Vancouver, BC, Canada


We don't need show-offs like Tony Blair. We need a person who represents the European Social Model not the free for all capitalist models found in Britain and the USA.


A 'president' appointed through popular vote would have no more power than under the present situation. After all, it is the heads of member states who call the shots. This job is comparable to that of a public company secretary. Why someone totally unacceptable as Tony Blair would want it remains a miracle. The only reason I can think of are the perks associated with it, the travelling expenses and another 'bestseller' at the end.


It's worth bearing in mind Stephen Reynold's letter in the FT on Nov.4, which points out "the two possible meanings of the French term “président”. It can of course refer to a head of state, with all the powers that this implies, in which case the correct English translation is indeed 'president'. However, the term is also used to refer merely to a chairman, for example of a board of directors.

Having consulted the relevant section of the Lisbon treaty in French (the language of its progenitor, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing), it seems clear to me that it was this second sense of 'président that was intended: the role and powers are very similar to those of the chairman of the board of a French company. Unfortunately, the English version of the treaty falls straight into the faux ami trap and uses the literal translation 'president', with all that this implies for the power and prestige of the job.

If the job had carried the less glamorous but more accurate title of “Chairman of the Council of Ministers”, one cannot help but wonder whether we would have had all this fuss." After all, the real power will be in the hands of the EU Foreign Minister.

An Smaointeoir

Election by popular vote is not all its cracked up to be (witness the roots of the financial crisis). it favours short-term popular thinking rather than the longterm necessary. It offers binary choice - with imperfections.

In any case which EU country picks their Prime Minister?

Maybe the fact that the EU commissioners are not elected is a strength. they can push ahead with the unpalatable, something popular democracy has failed to do.

Unknown candidates seem more desirable precisely because they are unknown. but they are a gamble at best. Lets go for the known rather than the unknown, the inspired rather than the bland, for teh statesman rather than the functionary.

Blair is a leader & a statesman if obnoxiously self-satisfied (qualities that often go hand in hand - poor Gordon is an example of the opposite: brilliant but definitely not a leader). A bland president will make us all more dissatisfied with the EU. This is what has happened the UN.

While there is much to improve in the EU it has done pretty well - there is a lot to be proud of and grateful for: economic strength, good balance of social/economic; fall of the iron curtain (would it have happened with out a strong europe?).

Its too easy to pick one or two items to 'prove' something is flawed. Lets take a bold step and pick a real mover and shaker.

and as for the UK being a great country in the 21st century? sorry its past its best. just as america will be in the not too distant future. Just as the UK gave us parliamentary democracy and the US gave us the idea of the rights of man, let EU have the leaders that will provide an example for future generations


I repeat once more the old joke about the proud father watching a military and saying his son was the only one in step. All the others were not.
That's how I feel.
This leader and a few previous comments show the misconceptions about the European Union.
Let me condense my views on it:
-The EU is being built not by politicians and fudge producing
institutions but by the European peoples who, for a few decades
now, have intermarried, interbred, inter traded, inter made
friendships, inter whatever you do in a normal life.
-As such, the EU doesn't suffer from a democratic deficit as many
professional commentators and politicians claim. Institutions come
after events not before and are shaped by a vague but firm overall
-The EU is a completely new experiment in human History. It is
ambitious too: to bring peace to a continent torn by violence in
the past, a free, reasonably just and with a minimum of solidarity
to avoid pockets of destitution.
-The vast vague undefined majority of the EU citizenry will not
tolerate the EU being another power block or a menace to the
existing ones. They'll be happy to look at the rest of the world as
a source of culture, a collection of nice places to visit, a source
of materials not obtainable in Europe or, at the most offending,an
export market.

So the rules applicable to current politics almost everywhere are also almost useless. USA (or even Canadian) citizens don't have to fear loosing their hegemony. The European Union, sorry editor, does neither need strong leaders that can can pick phones to talk to world grandees nor assertive ideologues.
The best guess for, and from what I've seen at citizen's level, the most wished for European future is a large and, if possible funnier, Switzerland.
A no nonsense, decent, honest citizen with as much star power as the one year only Swiss Confederation Head of State will do us nicely, thank you.
Both for president and head of diplomatic services (I haven't yet had time to learn their correct titles. Have you?).
And just a final thought: have you ever thought that all the above can be the explanation for the lack of interest in European elections? Our institutions are just being shaped by an "cloud computing" consensus. When they will have real power- it'll be some decades before they do - then we'll take European elections seriously.


Sorry, in my previous post a "neither needs" was written the wrong way round. It should have been "needs neither" as you will notice. If you have the patience to read it all.


Throw the Eurosceptics a bone. Elect an EU parliament and President. Then, with elected power, federalise away.


Where is the bone? The EU parliament is an elected body, the 'President' is not. But then he has no real power. Where is the problem?


There is something incongruent in The Economist's mantra of having an internationally renowned grandee (T.B.) to provide flair and gravitas to the EU taking its place as a recognised player in the world. This line of thinking weaves into the job description for the office just being created a desire for almost visionary qualities that go far beyond the formal powers of that post.

If TE feels so free to imbue the new post with powers envisioned only by itself why is it such a stickler to form and procedure when it comes to other, arguably equally weighty matters? Such as whether a small, miserably informed minority in a small country, Ireland, should have the veto on the EU progressing from a laughably imperfect status-quo based on a hackneyed treaty bartered in Nice to at least moving forward from that low base for its many millioned citizens?

If the externalities of the "président" office suffice to make the editors salivate so grandly why the niggard nitpicking over the form in which a huge majority of Europeans made their assertive voices heard over, in comparison, a negligible mass of wilfully mislead nay-sayers?

Maybe it is that The Economist has its own agenda when it comes to Europe. I just suspect the motives and I cannot suare the enthusiasm it shows to fill the president post with such allure while it denigrates almost all else that goes with a united Europe in the EU. Maybe one has to hail from England to understand the schism. Or be the voicepipe for conservative America that The Economist has fallen over itself to become.


"[...] the voicepipe for conservative America that The Economist has fallen over itself to become."

Really? I'm not an expert, but I definitely don't think so.


The President is not the problem, s/he will be a figurehead and can be a monkey for all I care as I do not recognise the legality of the Lisbon Treaty/EU Constitution. Of course they will want a weak figure particularly one that is in it for the perks, as that will reflect and validate the reason why the rest of them are there.

nothing better to do

The issue for The Economist is more simple than becoming the voicepipe of conservative America. The issue is that TE doesn't know what it stands for any longer and its approach to the EU best illustrates that. Over and over again TE berates the EU for not doing enough to combat energy security, climate change etc etc but then opposes every effort to give the EU the powers it needs to combat such issues.

TE has an instinctual dislike of the EU like most English people because the UK does not have a dominating influence on the EU (as per the Germans and French). The UK is cut out of the core decision making of the EU - not least because it has tried to undermine the EU at nearly every turn.

But much more importantly for TE is to work out what it stands for in general and not just in relation to the EU. America's domination of world politics ended soon after the new millenium and is starkly illustrated by the ongoing Iraq War.

TE hasn't worked out a world view for itself since this transition began. It is long overdue for TE to figure out what it stood for and why so that it can begin to make logical and consistent analysis of current global issues rather than passing off weak and contradictory analysis that is based on an old world order and old world order tastes....


...small, miserably informed minority in a small country, Ireland, should have the veto on the EU progressing...

May be this 'small miserably informed minority' in Ireland instinctively knows oppression when it sees it. What about those 'small and miserable' countries of France and Holland who rejected the EU constitution, which was then rejuggled and renamed the Lisbon Treaty? Had the Lisbon Treaty been put to the vote of all member states the outcome would have been quite different. The EU could not have nobbled all the countries who would have rejected it as they did in the 2nd referendum in Ireland and the Czech Republic for that matter(or could they!?) I must be missing something about when and how 'a huge majority of Europeans made their assertive voices heard' over the form of the EU, the Lisbon Treaty or the President. And by the way, in all the years I have read the Economist is has never been anything other than pro EU. Of course, criticism is not something that got the EU where it is today as can be seen by videos of EU parlamentarians walking out when they hear something that does not suit them.

City Slicker

We certainly do not need Tony Blair in europe because:

1. Blair is a failed labour politician that has got lucky. He did not achieve what he set out to do. New Labour already oozes irrelevance given the new circumstances. It set out to believe in monetarism and free market capitalism, and by now these intellectual crutches are suffering.

Tony's right wing brand of politics seems to not be right enough for the average brit judging by how the Conservatives are likely to be the next government in the UK although theya re the intellectual fathers of this crisis. It was the great idea of deregulation that brought about the financial crisis.

Increasingly the excesses of the right wing ideologues like Tony Blair (no mistake here) stemming from the time of Reagan have pushed the emergence of a feudal flavour of capitalism to be found in economically prosperous but culturally and democratically backward and stifling states like Malaysia or Singapore. Note that corruption is endemic in this sort of regime. Its a fusion of tame consumer/citizens, propaganda, really low quality of democracy and essentially a well disguised oligarchy with some democratic traits (yes it sounds quite like china or malaysia).

Because there are no ideas or ideals in the debate, the debate becomes irrelevant. People don't vote so the extremists get bigger and bigger shares. Also a public fed a diet of tabloid news is likely to be far more susceptible to extremist politics. The stifling consensus where whatever one votes they get the same policies has brought about stability but also an erosion of democracy and brought about the politician who is popular not because he wants to do things that you as a citizen agree with, but because you like his dress sense, or you would like to be as rich as him. Berlusconi is in that mould at least partially.

Ironically globalisation and competition is now forcing European and American states to lose any flourishes of democracy and free speech they developed in the past to revert to gameshow host type of leaders (e.g. Berlusconi, Zapatero, Blair, Bush). The citizen is economically free (kind of because corruption and priviledge is playing its part to skew even this). But policy is strictly set and permanent and not something that an elected leader can change. The countries that this is entrenched in the most are the US and the UK.


Does anyone else see the irony in having the EU capital in Brussels and its first president a Belgian?

The country can barely keep itself unified, yet will lead a unified Europe.



If member nations don't like the way the EU appears, its structures or its heading-in-the-superstate-direction as a consequence of the Lisbon Treaty, there are more alternatives than only leaving the EU...

Moving to get rid of the very structure that most threatens to facilitate the creation of a superstate- the elected EU Parliament- is one of them...

Another is reverting the EU Parliament's structure back to its pre-1990's format so that EU MP's weren't elected, & instead were again appointed by their respective member nation governments, with ALL EU member nations allocated equal numbers of EU MPs- perhaps (10) or so.

The primary 'political base-unit' of the EU for more than 50 years has been 'individual EU member nations'.

For most of its history, individual country's belonging to the EU & its precursors, such as the European Economic Community (EEC) were the only enfranchised 'bodies' that were enabled to vote on EU legislation-like issues (laws, directives, standards, etc)...

While this structure existed, it functioned- however indirectly- to prohibit the formation of an EU superstate.

Once an elected 'EEC/EU Parliament' was formed in the 1990's- with its primary political base-unit the 'individual people' living within the EU's member countries- it opened the door to- & unavoidably encouraged the slide towards- an EU superstate...

By its existence, an elected-by-EU-member-nation-citizenry EU Parliament is fundamentally & irrevocably in a dangerous conflict of interest (competing roles) with the other primary political unit of the EU: its member nations' governments...

More to the point, the EU Parliament (having authorities over & effects on member nations exercised by its MPs votes- who are separated-from-their-respective-member-nations'-governments control or direction) will (through votes) make decisions on issues that- by their nature- put the EU Parliament into an oppositional relationship with EU member nations' governments & their positions on issues...

The unavoidable result will be the EU Parliament- & its extensions such as EU civil servants & the like- continually (bluntly, or surreptitiously or illicitly) attempting to shift the balance of power within the EU's structures so that the EU Parliament can take primacy over member nations' governments... and 'win' against member nations (or their extensions, like cabinet ministers/civil servants, etc) whenever there are differences over issues between the EU Parliament/'Commission' aka 'cabinet'& member nations' governments...

Shifting the power balance in the EU Parliament's favour can only be done by reducing the powers & authorities of member nations'/their governments, which is unequivocally represented by the highly surepetitious Lisbon Treaty (aka 'EU constitution')...

Whether or not there ought to be a referendum in the UK (or any other EU member nation) on the constitution-in-disguise Lisbon Treaty- is not as important as UK politicians/stakeholders & their counterparts across the Continent planning cohesively- for strategies for how to deal with its aftermath...

In reaction to the Lisbon Treaty, leaving the EU might be an obvious impulsive objective for some EU member nations, such as the UK- but this would be short sighted & counterproductive...

Instead, working with Continental allies, disseminating a succinct, easy to understand proposed alternative future EU structures would be constructive...

To be sellable widely across the EU, an alternative EU structure ought to describe a 'legitimately simplified', palatable but still functional EU...

This could be defined as an EU without its own Parliament or at least without an elected one, & an EU in which member nations are guaranteed- in a codified treaty- their integrity & basic nation-state decision making apparatus, & not to be penalized for opting out of things such as the Euro, foreign policy positions, etc...

An EU without the moderating, rationalizing and constructive effects of the UK at its centre would be far more of latent threat to world stability than an EU in which 'an independent, sovereign UK' plays a central role...

Roderick V. Louis,
Vancouver, BC,


you are mixing up countries with personalities. 'Belgium' is not running the EU, and New York is not running the world (although trying hard) because the UN is located there. Bush was an idiot but you cannot blame the whole US. Whether Blair is the right choice or not, the UK is the most sceptical member state and can thus have no leading role.


Mr Louis, you have some interesting thoughts but they are bypassing reality. Once the Lisbon treaty comes into effect (soon enough) there will be no change to the existing structure of the EU for quite some time. With a large number of member states and unanimity no longer required, attempts by individual members to change the ball game will not work. When the Lisbon treaty will eventually have outlived its parameters all current politicians will have gone, and public opinion will have changed according to experiences made. Therefore, to propose anything different at this point is a waste of time, and nobody in charge would be listening anyway.



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