Views from the European press

The EU story which eclipsed all others for the European press this week was the trilateral meeting in Berlin on Wednesday between…

The EU story which eclipsed all others for the European press this week was the trilateral meeting in Berlin on Wednesday between the leaders of Britain, France and Germany.

There was much speculation as to whether the EU's three most populous nations now intended to set themselves apart from and above the other 22 in what is called a directory or directoire, a term previously applied chiefly to the Franco-German political understanding.

"The notion of restricted meetings with selected participants, on established topics and with no commonly accepted rules," wrote Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini in the Financial Times, "runs the risk not only of causing fragmentation but also of renewing divisions within the EU ... An EU reduced to ratifying decisions taken in the restricted committees of certain countries would not be acceptable to the public and could not play a significant role on the international stage."

The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was even more forthright: "Europe doesn't need any directorate; it's just a big mess," he told reporters.

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But Green MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, speaking to Berlin's die tageszeitung, had little sympathy for Mr Berlusconi's position: "I find Berlusconi's protest laughable. He made no objection to such summits when he was attending them."

Nevertheless, Cohn-Bendit had his own reservations: "A large country doesn't necessarily have better ideas. It would have been smarter to invite along smaller countries - for example Luxembourg or Belgium. It would then be easier to convince the other states that any new suggestions emerging are a matter of European, not national interests."

Tony Blair's interest in the summit, according to British sources quoted by the Italian news magazine Panorama, was not to encourage his French and German colleagues but to restrain them. Blair's presence, the magazine said, "serves to dilute and control Chirac and Schröder's itch to do things and advances political realism, especially in the economic sphere, rather than the search for high-sounding constitutional solutions which please only the Franco-German axis."

Nor, according to these sources, was the British prime minister thinking only of his own country, for his long term interests lay in appearing the best friend of the weaker countries and their protection against the presumptuous and voracious duo. Blair's presence in the "enemy" camp then, Panorama argued, was that not so much of a Trojan horse as "a Trojan pony".

Not all of those excluded seemed to agree. Tadeusz Iwinski, a senior adviser to Polish prime minister Leszek Miller, told the Financial Times: "The creation of a European directorate or of a Berlin-Paris-London triangle is something that Poland does not officially recognise. I can't discuss it because that would imply that something like that exists. The European Union is an organisation of equal states."

The FT quoted Hungarian, Czech and Slovak sources, however, as saying such directorate meetings could be useful, so long as they confined their brief to preparing for decisions which would be taken by the EU as a whole rather than trying to pre-empt them.

For Henri de Bresson, writing in Le Monde, the emergence of the new triumvirate could be traced to the isolation felt by France and Germany at the time of the Iraq war when "Paris and Berlin were forced to realise ... that in the new enlarged Europe they could no longer by themselves be the motor of the Union. So the outstretched hand of Tony Blair is welcome to them."

For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, smaller countries' fears of domination by the big three were unfounded. Such meetings were certain to become the norm, FAZ argued, in a Union of 25 states. Nevertheless, the paper stated, this particular big three should not be taken as a visionary power-in-the-making, but rather a "political power coalition of passionless pragmatism", a marriage of convenience.

For La Stampa of Turin, the opinion of many in Brussels was that France, Germany and Britain had hugely varying positions on many different questions - so much so that the only thing they really agreed on was that they were the three biggest countries.

But even that, said La Stampa, had a paradoxical upside. If three nations with such separate interests could agree on something, then surely this was a mark of the strength of the European alliance.

Enda O'Doherty