Hablo desde hace años del eclipse / ocaso de Europa. Financial Times analiza el nombramiento del primer presidente de la UE desde esa perspectiva.
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«Cuando el mundo se mueve, Europa corre el riesgo de tomar el camino de la irrelevancia» [ .. ] «Los ganadores quizá sean los gobiernos y los partidos de centro derecha y centro izquierda que dominan el Parlamento europeo…»
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The European historical diagnosis goes as follows. Between 1500 and 1900 a rising Europe dominated the world, with Spain, Britain and France acquiring large overseas empires.
The two world wars destroyed Europe’s supremacy, splitting it between a US-led west and a Soviet-controlled east. The wars exposed the lethal potential of European nationalism and paved the way for the experiment in pooling sovereignty represented by the European Union.
In 1989, the collapse of communism provided an unmissable opportunity to bury Europe’s divisions forever. But now 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. Among the treaty’s main features are the creation of the full-time presidency, to replace the increasingly ineffective system of six-month rotating presidencies shared among the EU’s member-states, and the appointment of a foreign policy supremo with stronger powers than those enjoyed by Javier Solana, the post’s occupant since 1999.
As discussions of these arrangements proceeded, it became clear most governments preferred a low-profile, consensus-building chairman as president rather than a forceful, policy-setting chief executive. This preference has now been expressed in the choice of Mr Van Rompuy instead of Mr Blair.
But it hardly seems possible that Mr Van Rompuy will parley on equal terms with the likes of Barack Obama and Hu Jintao, the US and Chinese presidents. Not only is his experience too limited, not only are the frames of reference for his job too narrowly drawn [ .. ]
[ .. ] In an organisation as addicted as the EU to compromise, bargaining and sophisticated balances of power, it is never easy to pick winners and losers after an event such as Thursday night’s summit.
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But 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. National leaders have elected to pick two new EU-level office-holders who will not overshadow them. Their choices were heavily influenced by the demands of the party groups. The rest of the world is unlikely to miss the message. [ .. ] [Financial Times, 21 noviembre 2009. Tony Barber, Europe risking irrelevance as world moves on].
Las negritas son mías.
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