Opinion: China has a President Hu, now Europe chooses President Who?

LONDON, U.K. — Two weeks ago, after eight years of politicking, voting — including one do-over to make sure the right result was achieved — the European Union’s Treaty of Lisbon was finally ratified.

One of its key provisions was the creation of the post of president. For once the people of Europe were genuinely interested in the doings of their union. Thursday night the EU’s first president was named and the EU went back to sleep. The winner is: Herman Van Rompuy, prime minister of Belgium.

Haven’t heard of him? Neither have most Europeans. One who has, Marie-Noelle Lienemann, a socialist member of the European Parliament, described Van Rompuy as "tasteless, odorless and colorless."

Well, he is a bit more than that. He is an economist by training with a long career in Belgian public life as a member of the right-wing Christian Democrat Party. A year ago when he became Belgium’s prime minister his bifurcated nation was on the verge of splitting apart on ethnic lines and his emollient — or dull — personality is credited with dampening the tension between the Flemish and Walloon populations in the tiny country. Whether that same emollience is what the EU presidency is really all about no one is sure of.

The Lisbon Treaty is vague about what the president is supposed to do, besides chair summits of the EU’s 27 member states. But there has to be something else important because the job pays unbelievably well. Van Rompuy’s salary will be between 300,000 and 350,000 euros per year. At the current rate of exchange that is up to $100,000 more than U.S. President Barack Obama makes … and Van Rompuy doesn’t have to worry about 3 a.m. calls about nuclear triggers going missing in Pakistan.

Beyond the money, the very vagueness of the job description made it an attractive proposition for a number of former leaders of European countries including British Prime Minister Tony Blair who wanted the job — badly. Blair wanted to shape the presidency in his own image and give the EU a much larger presence on the world stage. Currently the organization’s main international function is to provide large sums of money to underwrite diplomatic deals reached by its biggest members: Germany, France and Britain.

The process of elimination which led to Van Rompuy’s appointment represents all that is institutionally wrong with the European Union. The EU’s democratic deficit has often been noted. President’s are usually elected by the public — not this time. The deal giving Van Rompuy the job wasn’t cut in the traditional smoke-filled back room. Rather German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy — neither of them a smoker (in public anyway) — had dinner on Wednesday night to decide who they would back from the field of possibilities.

The political leader has not been born who would voluntarily give away a bit of authority. Neither Merkel nor Sarkozy wanted a president who might outshine them — so Blair’s chances were scuppered. Then the German and French leaders’ thinking turned pragmatic. Both are from center-right parties and so they would back a center-right politician for the job, preferably one with a low profile from a small country. Van Rompuy fit the bill.

The other important position created by the Lisbon Treaty was high representative for foreign and security policy. For balance, a center-left politician was required and as Britain has a center-left government, a Brit was appointed to the position, but again not a star. Cathy Ashton, Baroness Ashton to give her her proper title, currently the EU’s trade commissioner was Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s nominee for the post. It was an elegant solution to the problem of hurt feelings over Blair not getting the top job.

The Merkel-Sarkozy decision was rubber-stamped at a gala summit dinner Thursday. Only a cynic would say, Too bad France and Germany couldn’t divvy up Europe that way a hundred years ago instead of fighting about it … it would have saved the planet World War I and World War II. But, of course, that is precisely the reason why the EU was founded: to harness the two continental powers together rather than allow them to pursue their rivalry at the point of a gun.

Anyway, consensus to the point of meaninglessness is the hallmark of the EU President Van Rompuy, who summarized the approach this way, "Every country should emerge victorious from a negotiation." This is another way of saying every EU policy must allow the current political leader of a member state to save face — a surefire recipe for lowest common denominator thinking.

The sad figure in all of this is Tony Blair. He truly wanted the job and not just because giving speeches for reported six-figure fees is not enough to occupy him in his retirement. Blair wanted to turn the presidency into the opposite of what it has become — an important position representing Europe’s 400 million plus people in the fast changing globalized environment.

That is a very legitimate desire. But there was one overriding reason Blair was never going to get the job: His support for the war in Iraq and his inexplicable, unswerving loyalty to former President George W. Bush. It is not possible to overestimate how deeply his actions were resented by the French and German governments and most of the population of Europe. Now the 56-year-old Blair will have to find some other way to fill up the remaining decades of his life.