Warsaw meeting brings little progress in EU budget talks
The foreign ministers of Germany and France, as well as Britain's minister for European Affairs were in Warsaw this week and inevitably it was Europe's crisis over its future direction and funding which dominated discussions. Poland had invited Britain, which holds the rotating EU Presidency, with the aim of advancing the budget talks, but the idea met with little enthusiasm from the French and German delegates. In the end, the French foreign minister did not even speak to the British minister.
Held a few weeks after the French and the Dutch rejected the European constitution and ten days after the failed summit in Brussels, an annual gathering of Polish ambassadors proved a good opportunity to discuss the crisis within the European Union. By inviting government ministers from German, France and Britain, Warsaw wanted to demonstrate its readiness to play an active role in overcoming what Poland's foreign minister Adam Rotfeld describes as 'national egoism'.
"There is a need to define a kind of a new type of leadership in Europe, and that leadership should not be constructed in a way that one group of states is directed against the other one. It seems to me that very often in Poland the debate is whether we have to make a choice between Germany and France, on the one hand, and the United Kingdom on the other. We have to find a way how to reconcile these two positions because Europe cannot exist without the United Kingdom. But there is no need to say that without France and Germany Europe does not exist as well."
There was agreement at the Warsaw meeting that there is a chance to turn the crisis into an opportunity for reform and modernization. Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher of Germany.
"Europe has to go on and it will go on. Its institutions do function, though in my view they should function more effectively. We need more democracy in order to fill in the gap which became recently evident in the bloc's democratic structures."
Britain's minister for European Affairs Douglas Alexander told the meeting that while there is no ready recipe for overcoming the crisis, there is an urgent need for debate. In his address, he quoted a remark once made by president Kennedy.
"And written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity."
Poland's Adam Rotfeld seemed to have expressed the opinion of all participants when he said that it will take much time to overcome the crisis.
"It's not easy to change something which is deep rooted, well established and functioning quite well, I would say. It is not an institutional crisis. This is the crisis of the concept, the crisis of a very political nature."
While remarks by government ministers are couched in a diplomatic language, EU analysts use a more straightforward language. Piotr Nowina Konopka, president of the Schumann Foundation in Warsaw, argues that if the current crisis drags on, the whole European project may come under threat, very much to the satisfaction of Poland's and EU's eastern neighbours.
"I'm still hopeful and confident that a solution will be found because I don't see any good alternative unless somebody shares the satisfaction by Putin or by Lukashenko who were happy as never when they learned that the French and Dutch have rejected the treaty. Because that was exactly the result which was attended and warmly welcomed by Moscow and Minsk. But this is not my cup of tea."
Tony Blair recently spoke of modernization and reform of the European Union, especially in the areas of farm subsidy and social spending. It'll be interesting to see how realistic his vision is going to prove during Britain's presidency in the EU which has just started.
