Joe Klein's European Listening Tour
Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.
Today's itinerary: Brussels, Belgium
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StumbleUponThe discerning reader assumes, no doubt, that I'm going to trash the European Union. "You Americans tend to think we're just a bunch of limp-wristed wusses," says the brilliantly succinct Chris Patten, who is a minister or, er, a commissioner of foreign, or is it external, policy for the—the ... well, let me consult this little chart here. There are the three EU C's: the commission, which is the famed Brussels bureaucracy; the council, which is composed of the 15 EU countries' leaders; and the convention, which is trying to reform all this (Bonne chance, Monsieur le Président Giscard D'Estaing). There is also the European parliament, which seems a straightforward enough notion and is thus relatively powerless, and, quietly, the European Central Bank, which used to be called the Bundesbank, although no one would ever admit it.
There are three presidents, maybe four, if you count Giscard. There is Romano Prodi of Italy, who is the president of the commission. There is a president of the council, who rotates every six months—I should say the presidency rotates among the 15 national leaders: At the moment it is Jose Maria Aznar of Spain. In a few days, it will be Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark. (To complicate matters, both men have very dark hair and very deep tans, more teeth than regulation, and an aversion to immigrants; Aznar does have a moustache, thankfully.) There is, finally, the president of the parliament, Pat Cox of Ireland.
Back to Patten: There are two foreign ministers. Javier Solana is called—are you ready for this?—the secretary general of the council of the European Union and high representative for the common foreign and security policy. And Chris Patten is—trumpet clarion here—the European commission's commissioner for external affairs. Please commit all these terms and titles to memory. They'll come in handy on the riotous road ahead.
No, I don't want to trash the EU ... but, splutter, splutter, here I am driving through Brussels, a major thorn in the tiara of denatured cities of the world (along with Atlanta, Brasilia, Birmingham—Midlands or Alabama, take your pick—and far too many others), and suddenly here's a big fat metaphor on the way to Pascal Lamy's office: a beautiful old beaux-arts building shuttered and surrounded by rubble, about to be knocked down for yet another glass curtain-wall atrocity, yet another repository of in-boxes and out-boxes. Here's your badge, and check your soul at the door. Brussels! I don't mind trashing Brussels.
Lamy doesn't have any doppelgängers. He is the only trade commissioner the EU possesses, I think, and a very good one. He's done a wonderful thing, perhaps the deftest thing the EU has ever done: He has boggled George Bush on steel imports. I am filled with admiration in advance: I was browbeaten by Bob Zoellick, Bush's future trade negotiator, at the Republican convention in 2000, about what a halfhearted free trader Bill Clinton had been. Zoellick is a smart fellow, but wrong: Clinton had been entirely principled on trade, and at some cost, standing up to the trade unions that form the core of his party, passing the North American Free Trade Act (which no Republican president could have done).
By contrast, Bush slapped 20 percent tariffs on steel imports. This was, I am sure Zoellick would argue, a highly principled move that had nothing at all to do with the livid, steaming, and sadly anachronistic clots of steelworkers who live in West Virginia, which Bush won narrowly in 2000, and western Pennsylvania, which he lost narrowly. Lamy, therefore, stands athwart the Bush administration's defense of that most fundamental American political right: the right to buy the next election. Lamy has threatened a list of reciprocal tariffs on products in carefully selected American districts, most in the rust belt but some in Florida, too—grapefruits, to be precise—where the president has a brother in power.
So I'm prepared to be impressed. But sitting in Lamy's reception area, I'm staring numbly at the wall art: three rather weird silk-screen tableaux of European conferences. The Schuman Declaration of 1950. The Treaty of Rome in 1957. The Nice Treaty ... well, there's a sign that says the art on that is, appropriately enough, not yet done: Nice is where the Euros agreed to add 10 Eastern European countries to the union, and that is not yet done, either. But what's up with all these summits? Maastricht and Rome and Amsterdam and Copenhagen and Nice and Dublin and Dublin again and Tampere. (Later this week, I'll hie to Seville for the latest). Lloyd Bentsen, the former treasury secretary and Democratic senator from Texas, once said of Clinton, "He's the meetingest fellow I've ever met." Clearly, Bentsen hadn't met many Eurobureaucrats.
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Notes From the Fray Editor:
As Klein's listening tour wraps up, he has come in for much more grumpiness for traveling around Europe "on someone else's dime." Still, Faustus's post on the ICC started a nice little debate between Bracque and j thatcher here. And the post by Cato the Censor began an interesting argument about diversity, conservatism and what used to be called "The American Progress."
Notes From the Fray:
One thing that occurred to me while reading about the differences between the US and Europe is our conservative movement here. Our conservatives seem to have more ideas than nationalism. Our conservatives also seem to be much more vital, and have opinions and prescriptions on a whole range of problems.
Although I am not a conservative, I can appreciate the importance that strain of thought has had upon the US. I think that we were trapped in our own version of anomie during the Carter administration. For reasons that are not at all clear to me, the conservatives seem to have gone into hiding in the 1960's, and didn't really re-emerge until the late 1970's. While I don't think that Reagan really did anything of note as President, I do credit him with re-vitalizing the conservative movement. The conservative revival, which seems to have crested and is now beginning to wane, will in turn have rejuvenated the liberals, who were in great need of rejuvenating.
-- Cato the Censor
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(7/5)