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Update 8: January 2006: Blair’s Presidencies: the G8 and the EU

Britain held two important Presidencies in 2005: of the G8, the group of leading industrial nations, for the whole year and of the Council of the European Union for its second half. Judging the ‘success’ or ‘failures’ of Presidencies, especially of such short-lived ones, will always be a contested matter. But measured by the aims set by the British government itself the results were deeply disappointing. (For the official British view of the two Presidencies, as well as invaluable documentary briefings, see: www.g8.gov.uk and www.eu2005.gov.uk). In respect of the G8 Presidency the UK government established two priorities: development in Africa and tackling global climate change. In respect of the EU Presidency the UK also established two (linked) priorities: financial change, for which read reform of the EU budget, and reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The politest summary of progress on these four objectives is that it has been limited. Indeed there is a distinct pattern to the outcomes: it involves the postponement of difficult decisions in order to reach short-term agreement. Thus the British Presidency did indeed broker a deal on the EU budget in December 2005, at virtually the last moment, but at the price of postponing tackling the problem of the CAP apart from the promise of a review in the future.

The reasons for these failures may be ascribed, as critics of the government have done, to failures of British diplomacy, or even to the personality of Mr Blair. But the failures are actually more revealing for what they tell us about the character, not of Blair or the British, but of these Presidencies of multinational institutions. Most Presidencies ‘fail’, and they fail for recurrent reasons.

• Long-term problems, short-term pressures. The problems are long term, but the pressures on leaders are short term. A classic case was provided at the Gleneagles G8 Conference in July 2005 – the great set piece occasion of Britain’s presidency. The terrorist bombings in London of 7 July occurred during the Conference, requiring that the Prime Minister interrupt his Presidency to return to London. More important, the emergency created by the terrorism understandably consumed the government’s attention at a critical stage of its Presidency. Almost all the problems facing any G8 Presidency require long-term attention. The real problem therefore is not the ‘failure’ of any particular Presidency but the adequacy of an institutional structure that allows any single nation only one year to focus on the problems, and the capacity of the G8 as a group to ‘carry over’ between Presidencies the institutional memory consistently to address them.
• Multinational problems, national interests. The problems that Presidencies are supposed to tackle are multinational, but interests affected are national. The case is well illustrated by EU budgetary politics. Britain as President had a powerful interest in brokering an agreement on a new EU budget. There is also a widespread consensus in the EU that the balance of spending is too biased to agricultural support, and not sufficiently weighted to support for high-tech economic development. But the UK government also had a powerful national interest in opposing one key part of Budget reform: in defending the British ‘rebate’ – an agreement dating from the 1980s that returns a large amount of the UK’s contribution. Meanwhile, a coalition of EU members with powerful farming organizations, like Ireland and France, while subscribing to the rhetoric of reform, fears CAP reform because of pressure from these domestic interests. Hence the mix of piecemeal changes and postponement of examination of radical changes that marked the final agreement in December 2005. The big problem revealed by the British Presidency is much larger than anything that concerns Britain alone; it concerns the ability of the EU decision-making system to address serious problems of a long-term nature.
  

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