Bruno Waterfield has an update on the status of the President of Council. Will he be the supremo of Europe, or will the Commission claim that title for its own president. It’s half past eleven at night here, and I can only regard the whole sorry process with amusement.
This isn’t the right response of course. Half of me is wondering that Europe never managed to emulate the extraordinary thing that happened in Philadelphia two hundred years ago. European people have done wondrous things, politically, bringing down tyrannies and saying great things about freedom and democracy. But Europe has never equalled or built on the enlightenment ideals of the US constitution, and these events seem to show that it never will. Accountability and transparency are habits European societies find too hard to learn, apparently. Europe doesn’t do democracy.
Questions over the new President’s role, the size of his political team, and who should control a new “European External Action Service” will provoke a ferocious power struggle.
The European Commission is deeply concerned that the new post and a foreign service will pull the orbit of power from EU to national bureaucrats and diplomats.
Some governments also fear that the new EU diplomatic corps will suck in national diplomats with a mission creep that could undermine national prerogatives and turf.
“There are questions of where it is going institutionally, how big it is, to what extent national diplomats go in, or how they are seconded,” said another high-level European government source.
This is all important stuff. It is all being decided behind closed doors.