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: Seville, Spain
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StumbleUponHappy summits are all alike. Unhappy summits are all alike as well, unfortunately. Here is how it works for journalists: You are herded into a vast hall, the sort of place normally used to exhibit heavy machinery. You are given gifts—second-rate brands of local alcohol, too often—plied with overcooked food and showered with reams of paper—documents with titles such as Seville Declarations on the Nice Treaty. You are allowed to watch, on a large TV screen, the various statesmen enter a nearby building, sit down, and start yakking. Then the screen goes blank.
After a day or so, there are press conferences and treaties laced with sentences such as this: "The European Council welcomed the considerable momentum that had been given to the dialogue between the Parliament, the Council and the Commission in the new partnership referred to by the Barcelona European Council and gave a favourable reception to the setting up of the High-Level Technical Group for Interinstitutional Cooperation."
So much for the romance of summitry. This is the journalistic equivalent of phone sex. All this political beef on the hoof, gathered around a table, and no immediate access. I was, therefore, quite grateful to Pat Cox—five points for his title—for inviting me to dinner on the night before the Seville summit. Cox is a member of no organized political party. (There's an American joke: I'm a member of no organized political party; I'm a Democrat.) Indeed, he is actually an independent, but includes himself in the liberal caucus.
This can mean almost anything in Europe. Denmark's toothy, anti-immigrant prime minister is a liberal. Belgium's Harry Potter-like pro-immigrant prime minister is also a liberal. Britain's leftish-elitist Liberal Democrats and Germany's Thatcherite Free Democrats are liberals, too. All this catholicity in a caucus far smaller than the Social Dems or Christian Dems. But there is a weird astrological concurrence in the works, sort of like a solar eclipse of just your block: The presidents of the European commission, council, and parliament will all be liberals for the next six months.
Cause for a dinner, if you ask me. Cause for a better dinner than the grudging assembly-line buffet we are offered in the tatty breakfast room of an elegant hotel downtown. As it happens, cod is very big in Seville. But the company is worth it. Cox is a delight, a former TV news reader who knows how to use the language and is that rare politician who admits to loving the game. "It's time to end all the endless introspection about what Europe should be," he says. "That was an understandable reaction to the difficulty involved in knitting together 15 distinct political cultures. But now it's time to simplify the system and explain it in words that the punters can understand. It's time to play the calculus of consent, to win public support for this thing. It's time to tell and sell."
I report to him Clegg's comments about America. "I asked Lamy's staff to calculate the percentage of trade that is disputed—steel, bananas, hush kits for Boeing aeroplanes, and so forth. It was 4 percent of all transatlantic trade," Cox says. "But it was 100 percent of the megaphone diplomacy going on. I think that's probably a useful metaphor for our relationship with America. You can't let 4 percent crash the alliance."
After dinner, Romano Prodi addresses the group. He is a professorial sort, quite unprepossessing, whose posture suggests that he wears suits with 50-pound shoulder pads. His most eloquent gesture is a pained shrug. He pulls the tiniest piece of white paper from his pocket and begins a quietly vehement defense of the EU. "Our fundamentals are sound. Our balance of trade is positive. Our deficits are under control. We carry the banner of free trade proudly," he says and proceeds, sadly, to the intransigence of the American government—a section he delivers staring directly at me. "Steel is a tiny thing compared to the farm-subsidy bill that President Bush signed. It makes it much harder for us to reform our agricultural policy, which we must do. After Bush did that, several national leaders came to me and said, 'Now we don't have to do anything.' " It is assumed by many people in the room that one of those presidents came from the country immediately north of Spain.
Afterward, he comes over and squeezes my neck playfully and tells me that Bush really seemed personally affronted by the steel retaliation. He imitates the whinging president: "Why are you attacking my family?" Prodi raises his eyebrows, smiles naughtily, and does one of his shrugs. I smile and shrug back.
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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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