Pity the journalist dealing with EU complexity

THERE are four presidents involved in running the EU – the presidents of the commission, of the parliament, of the rotating presidency and of the council.

Up to now there were three and reporting on their activities without confusing the reader has not been easy.

You must assume that people know something about the most public of the institutions, the commission and the parliament.

But that of the council is not so easy, since the council has a number of guises.

First it represents the member states and when the ministers of, for example, finance meet, it’s a Council of Finance Ministers.

When the heads of state and government meet, then it’s the European Council. Up to now these heads were represented for six months at a time by one of their number.

But, in an effort to streamline and give greater coherence to the job, they decided to elect a European Council President for a term of two-and-a-half years which can be extended to five years. They chose Belgian prime minister Herman Van Rompuy who took up office at the start of the year. However, our prime ministers do not like to be left out of the equation, so the rotating presidencies continue.

The PM will no longer chair the summit meetings of heads, this instead will be done by van Rompuy, now being referred to as the leader of leaders. The foreign ministers will not be chaired by the foreign minister of the country holding the rotating presidency: that is given over to the full-time person in the job, Britain’s Cathy Ashton. The finance ministers of the euro zone countries are chaired by Luxembourg prime minister Jean Claude Juncker. But the finance ministers generally and all the other ministers representing the different departments are chaired by the relevant minister from the rotating presidency state – currently Spain.

This complex situation has come about because the EU has a dual problem: one is to make the running of the EU intelligible to the public and the second is to streamline its operation.

So politicians, eternally aware of the next election, try to explain the changes by saying it’s a response to the question of who the president of the US calls when he wants to talk to Europe. The answer is van Rompuy. Luckily this writer of Japanese style poetry is not falling for such nonsense.

As he explained this week – flanked by the presidents of the rotating presidency and of the commission – the world, and Europe is more complex than that.

The only country where the president of the US could get what he wants by phoning just one person is called a dictatorship.

The problem is that we like the idea that the US president is Mr America, and what is worse is that we tend to believe it. This ignores the fact that his decisions are null and void unless he can bring along with him the other elected representatives of the American people. That takes many committees and meetings and much lobbying.

In the EU, it takes many meetings also.

Van Rompuy said that when he gets that all-important phone call, he as leader of leaders will talk to his team of prime ministers and together they will come to a decision.

In the meantime, pity poor journalists trying to write stories quoting the views of four presidents in a way that does not completely confuse the reader.