French EU plans

Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate for the French presidency has said that the UK needs to choose between Europe and America. The Daily Telegraph says she had plans for new EU constitution, to be embedded in a new treaty.

Britain would be asked to sign up to the new treaty, but if it rejected calls for increased protectionism, an EU foreign minister, convergence on tax rates and moves to create a European army, then France and her allies would agree a treaty among themselves..

The EU constitution is dead in the water since the French and the Dutch peoples rejected it but that will not stop the Euromaniacs trying again and again until they get their way.

Europe or America? As they say in polite society, F the French.

Tags: European Union

The EU and Afghan reconstruction

At a meeting of the European Foreign ministers, the British and Dutch asked the EU to contribute more to building up Afghanistan's police and judiciary. This seems to be a follow up from an earlier request by NATO for the EU to make a greater contribution to the civilian reconstruction of Afghanistan. The response has been sadly predictable.

According to the International Herald Tribune, the French were lukewarm and would agree only to a (yet another) fact finding mission.

"It seems to me that before launching into such an operation, it would be a good idea to be a bit more clear and to not do something is not coherent or logical," said French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. "That is why I gave my agreement to a fact-finding mission and that's all for the moment."

Translation: France will evaluate the possibility of trade deals and will join in only if it is both safe and potentially profitable.

Online - Pakistan summarises the EU's contribution to Afghanistan reconstruction to date, and provides a candidate for amazing comment of the week:

...a European Commission spokeswoman brushed aside the criticism, from NATO, saying the commission had a record it could be ’very proud of’ in Afghanistan.

'We made a pledge back in 2002 to spend one billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) over five years. We have overshot that target in the work that we have done in Afghanistan,’ said Emma Udwin, spokeswoman for external affairs.

’We have spent very substantial amounts of money given our overall budget and we have been very effective in making that money work in the interests of the population,’ she said.

That record would seem to be a number of fact finding missions, some ineffective Afghan police training by Germany and, from Italy, even less effective reform of the Afghan judiciary. Neither is the financial contribution all that impressive. The total EU budget is somewhere in the region of just over 100bn euros a year.

Tags: Afghanistan. European Union

NATO ask for EU help in Afghanistan.

In a wonderful example of wishful thinking, NATO has asked the European Union to make a greater contribution to the civilian reconstruction of Afghanistan. According to the Washington Post the request was made after a meeting with the UN, the World Bank and the EU.

"Particularly the EU has a great opportunity to make a significant and very timely difference in the area of the judiciary and the police," NATO's top civilian representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Daan Everts, told a news conference.

"The goal is wide open. They just have to kick the ball," he said...

...there was an acute need to train and equip judges and police and to build administrative capacity -- areas of EU expertise.

The EU is more likely to kick the ball in its own net, so the best NATO can hope for is funding. The last thing Afghanistan needs in the imposition of EU-style administration from an organisation which is a textbook example of an over-staffed dysfunctional bureaucracy, in which fraud and corruption are out of control. Moreover, it is becoming clear that European police forces cannot control Islamic extremists in their own backyards, but it might be fun to see them trying to police the Taliban, on their own turf.

Update 3.11.06 @13:30

There is now more details of the meeting on the NATO website, including an audio file (with so much reverb it could have recorded underwater) and a transcript of the press conference, and also video interviews with Everts and a World Bank official.

Tags: Afghanistan, European Union, NATO.

European Defence Agency Vision

The European Defence Agency has been running up the white flag. This glorified subcommittee of the Council of Europe has presented defence ministers with its 20 year vision of European defence and security. As befits such a grandiose endeavour (even Stalin only planned 5 years ahead), the document has a grandiose title: An Initial Long-Term Vision for European Defence Capability and Capacity Needs. There the grandeur stops.

Underlying the report is a pessimistic analysis of a Europe with neither the political will nor the military capability to defeat its enemies; a Europe in which maintaining a largely pacifist, ageing population takes priority over military and defence expenditure. The Daily Telegraph has a concise summary for those who cannot face wading through the 28 pages of the full report. (Direct pdf download here.)

In places, the 73 paragraph document is virtually meaningless verbiage, full of the latest fashionable jargon, which paragraph 43 will serve to illustrate:

43. Synergy. In the future, joint forces composed of land, air, space and maritime elements will increasingly use precision firepower, intelligence and focussed [sic]logistics in order to deliver military effects in a more discriminate way. And the capabilities of other agencies and actors, including non-governmental organisations, will contribute to the management of conflict. The media, with its increased reach and effectiveness, need increasingly to be taken into account. Synergy between these different capacities will create the effects necessary for mission accomplishment within acceptable levels of risk, while minimising undesired effects. Synchronisation across organisational, institutional and component boundaries moves the joint force from traditional de-confliction and coordination procedures to the integrated, comprehensively-planned operations required.

"Focussed"? Perhaps they should be more discriminate and deconflict their spell-checker.

The one clear message is of defeatism: in future, victory will not be achievable and the best Europe can hope for is to achieve some sort of compromise (paragraph 35):

In cases of intervention by force the main task will be to gain control of the dynamics of conflict, reduce its destructive power and break the cycle of violence. The objective is not “victory” as traditionally understood, but moderation, balance of interests and peaceful resolution of conflicts – in short, stability.

Defeatism at the outset. One inference is that, if a society cannot defend itself by defeating external enemies, it is unlikely to have the will to defend against the enemy within. Read in that context, the Vision can be interpreted as a long-winded, almost embarrassed, conformation of Mark Steyn's penetrating analysis of European society and its defence failings.

Tags: European Union, European Defence Agency.

Euro collapse

Daily Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks the impending collapse of the Euro could be the way ahead for Europe.

Those of us who have been thundering ever since Maastricht that EMU is a woefully misconceived idea that will destroy the very Europe it was intended to cement, can only say: welcome to the club. In truth, it is a well-kept Brussels secret that many of the EU's own experts fear the euro will blow apart in the next nasty recession, with Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Spain shaping up as prime candidates for ejection.

As The Daily Telegraph's Brussels correspondent, I used to meet for furtive lunches with a Commission economist who was so worried about the coming smash-up that he had switched his savings into "hard" currencies, choosing foreign accounts beyond EU reach. I joke not. He knew, from his ringside seat, that the single currency had been thrust on Europe by the Delors crowd for entirely political reasons in the face of vehement warnings from the pros at the Directorate of Economic and Monetary Affairs.

The question now seems to be not if the Euro will collapse but just how much economic and social damage will occur before the unrepresentative EU political elite finally bows to the inevitable?

As suggested in Evans-Pritchard's article, the collapse of monetary union could, in the longer term, lead to the unravelling of the single market. To which we can add, if the single market unravels that will surely hasten hasten the collapse of political union. Suddenly Europe's future seems brighter than it did.