OPINION:VIEWED FROM continental Europe, popular British attitudes to the European Union span an impressively narrow range from ignorance and suspicion to condescension. More puzzling, however, is the occasionally stupendous ineptitude of British negotiating tactics at the EU table.
The nation that prides itself on a Rolls-Royce diplomacy appears triumphantly capable, at critical moments of EU history, of driving itself straight into a ditch. This is what happened in Brussels last week when David Cameron, the UK prime minister, found himself outnumbered by 26 to 1 at a summit of European leaders.
British diplomatic defeats in Europe are scarcely the fault of the highly trained policy specialists in its foreign office. After all, diplomats in the modern era are there to advise elected political leaders, not to substitute for them. The advice of the specialists can be, and sometimes is, listened to, but largely ignored.
That said, the EU summit in Brussels stood out for the way Cameron and his Downing Street inner circle appear to have excluded from their calculations whatever advice Britain’s professional diplomats were ready to supply. Responsibility for the isolation in which he found himself lies squarely with Cameron and his entourage’s closest members: William Hague, foreign secretary, and Jon Cunliffe, the prime minister’s European affairs adviser, who has a hard-edged treasury rather than a silky diplomatic background.
In a broader sense, responsibility for the debacle lies with the anti-EU diehards that make up a larger and more vocal element of the Conservative parliamentary party than at any time since Britain joined the old European Economic Community in 1973.
Their influence is all the greater because Cameron depends on them for his House of Commons majority.
Neither he nor his advisers appeared to grasp, in advance of the summit, how spectacularly a last-minute attempt to exploit the euro zone’s debt crisis to extract regulatory concessions for the City of London would backfire on Britain. In everyone else’s eyes, the point of the summit was to approve swift, forceful steps for preventing the euro zone’s collapse – a scenario with immeasurable consequences for the world economy.
The summit was not about granting more opt-outs to a nation that had no intention of joining the euro zone and, in other respects, is semi-detached from the EU.
Still less was it about helping Britain to throw a protective cloak around its financial services sector, which mainland European opinion holds responsible for detonating and prolonging the world financial crisis of 2008.
Precisely because this European view of the crisis is exaggerated, Cameron might have received a more sympathetic hearing in Brussels – but only if, before the summit, he had engaged in a patient, determined effort to build support for the British case among other EU countries. Instead, he waited until the summit to present his fellow leaders with the detailed British demands.
This gave Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, a golden opportunity to outfox Cameron and to advance a long-cherished goal of reorganising euro zone economic governance along French lines.
Cameron, failing to win special protection for the City of London, exercised a British veto on the EU treaty change needed to accommodate closer fiscal and economic integration in the euro zone.
At this point, the only way for the other EU countries to proceed was by means of an intergovernmental treaty: precisely what Sarkozy wanted. As the colourful English expression has it, Cameron was done like a kipper.
For its careless preparation and misreading of the European mood, the British stance was comparable to that adopted at the November 2009 summit that appointed the EU’s first full-time president and its new head of foreign policy.
Gordon Brown, Cameron’s Labour predecessor, ended up accepting the latter post on behalf of Catherine Ashton, a Briton with negligible foreign policy experience who, before the summit, had not even figured in the British government’s thoughts.
One small consolation is that British diplomatic disasters in Europe go a long way back. In 1623 the future King Charles I put on a false beard, called himself John Smith and rode to Madrid with the aim of marrying the king of Spain’s sister. He rode back empty-handed. – (Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2011)