Once again the EU is being sidelined to the margins

THE idiosyncrasies of this hybrid democracy that is the EU are once again on display in the lead up toappointing people to the new positions of president and foreign minister.

Sold as offering more democracy, the jobs do no such thing, nor was it ever intended by the member states that they should.

Complaints that the whole exercise of selecting people for the top jobs is not democratic are not really valid, as it is being done entirely by the properly elected national governments. And any grumbling about the secretive nature of the process can be rejected by pointing to the way the head of each government is selected – behind closed doors by the party members.

There are so many factors to be taken into account in choosing people for the new jobs that the process is in danger of making the public even more cynical about politics in general and the EU in particular.

In the interest of fairness countries want to strike a balance between the political colour of the person – Socialist left or centrist Christian Democrat; big country and small country; northern member states and southern; Anglo-Saxon and non Anglo-Saxon; federal-leaning and not. There have also been calls for gender equality.

Then there is the politics of the process itself – whether a person should be nominated, nominate themselves or just have their name “appear”, and the timing of all this.

The selection process is proving long and arduous. Names come and go with the Swedish presidency sounding out countries about their preference mainly through phone calls to the capitals in an effort to reach a consensus.

Some are critical of the Swedish presidency saying they should have struck when the iron was hot, naming Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy and British foreign secretary David Miliband for the jobs. But perhaps being too wedded to a view of open democracy they continued to consult member state heads and have allowed the moment to pass and must now contend with a failure to simply take control.

The reaction to a Polish demand that candidates for the two jobs should be interviewed in public by the MEPs was interesting. Most scoffed at the idea of allowing MEPs to interrogate and possibly humiliate candidates. It’s a plausible enough argument that this would result in the credibility of the person eventually chosen being diminished in the eyes of the world he or she would have to deal with in the future.

The interviews won’t happen and member states’ leaders at the special summit on Thursday will cobble together a duo and a new phase in the EU will begin. However, the question of who a foreign leader phones when they want to contact Europe has not been settled. The new president will be a chairman whose success will be based on how well they run their meetings and prepare for them in advance.

He or she will not have the stature of a EU president in the same sense as that of the US president. They will be in effect subservient to all other prime ministers. And should anybody question this they should just consider the candidates for the position so far – present or former leaders of small member states with the only big fish being the former discredited British prime minister Tony Blair. There has not even been a suggestion that Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi or even Gordon Brown would give up their posts heading up the largest of the EU’s member states to represent all.

The fact once again is that opting for a non-federal structure, the EU is sidelined to the margins of global politics, playing a supporting role to the more able of its member states.