Notes on European political culture

A new diplomacy

In the first weeks of her tenure as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy all eyes have been on the design and structure Lady Ashton gives to her new post. There are no precedents, no models. Ashton essentially starts from scratch in giving the form to the post of Europe’s Chief Diplomat. The importance of this self-invention is easily overlooked.

Diplomacy in its modern form has, for better or worse, distinctly European airs. Diplomacy is distinctly modern because it is in a way one of the basic properties of the modern state. It plays the role of embodying the a state’s character, interests, qualities, and ambitions and conversing with the embodiment of other states. But it is not simply the role of talking about the interests of one’s state, rather, in a strange metaphysical way, it is that state.

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Monsieur Van Rompuy

The President of the Council of Europe today addressed the Alliance Française, the international interest organisation for global users of the French language. Taking the floor It came 5 days after the International Day of Francophony, Van Rompuy spoke, in eloquent French, on the theme ‘Culture, globalisation and Europe: Google contra Proust?’.

It is clear If anything Von Rompuy speaks the language of Europe: universality versus particularity, universal values, human rights, evoking the European front guard from de Tocqueville to Marx. Latin traditions, Christian seditions, Aristotle, Calvin, Monnet and Benda.

The speech came one week after former French Prime MInister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, special envoy on Francophony to President Nicolas Sarkozy, had insisted that France would be ‘gentle, but firm’ in its insistence that the French language should continue to be one of the three working languages of the European Union (along with German and English), despite the latest enlargement and linguistic watering down.

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(Re)birth of European power

Europe is born! Well, reborn, or perhaps reincarnated would be more appropriate to say, January 1. The New Europe, the Europe of Lisbon, the Europe of consensus, or referenda, is born. After an extraordinary, or perhaps quite practicable, Irish volte face, the European plebiscite is a fact. What is new? And what is old?

Herman Van Rompuy is the name of the self-effacing, nearly invisible Flemish bureaucrat (‘…my personal views are irrelevant, my role is to find consensus…’) whole fill the role as the first President of the European Council. Ground-breaking and epoch-making.

As La Repubblica lamented in its leader on 20 November, just after the closed doors meeting leading to Van Rompuy nomination along side Lady Catherine Ashton as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Henry Kissinger is still without a telephone number for Europe.

The process and rationale behind Van Rompuy’s nomination are at first glance as little remarkable as his uncommon non-imposture. Yet the closed-door cocktail and handshake that led to the opening of a new era in European politics has a number uncanny of elements:

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