Duro Barroso was little known, or even noticed, at the time. Many accounts of the Azores meeting didn’t mention the host’s name. Last week, however, Duro Barroso was back in the news in a way that ensures he won’t be forgotten. The unassuming 48-year-old lawyer emerged from a bloody selection process as the compromise candidate to succeed Romano Prodi as president of the European Commission, the bureaucratic engine of the European Union. It was a watershed moment. For the EU, it marked the ascendancy of states that are not always in the Franco-German orbit. And importantly, it also showed that the Iraq war no longer makes or breaks the U.S.-Europe relationship.
As a teenage Maoist turned economic liberal of the center right, as a multilingual bridge-builder who is pro-European and an Atlanticist, Duro Barroso’s candidacy says much about the newly expanded EU and its shifting alliances. Coming from a country that experienced dictatorship and isolation from the rest of Europe until 1974, Duro Barroso should be sensitive to the experiences of the new Eastern European member states. As an integrationist–it’s “part of his DNA,” says Richard Whitman of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London–he will also likely be a proponent of further enlargement to Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and, ultimately, Turkey.
Beyond what it says about the EU, the ascendancy of Duro Barroso also ends the brief era of Iraq as a geopolitical “wedge” issue. Having poisoned relations between the United States and much of Europe for two years, the war is finally fading in importance. Duro Barroso supported the invasion, but not ardently. At the Azores summit, he “only did the catering,” according to a diplomat quoted by a London paper. Even so, a year ago, perhaps even a few months ago, his selection would not have been possible.
What’s changed? Relations between Bush and French President Jacques Chirac, in particular, have thawed somewhat. Last month they bonded publicly at ceremonies to commemorate D-Day, and then again at the G8 summit in Sea Island, Georgia. At the EU-U.S. summit in Ireland two weekends ago–when, tellingly, Duro Barroso was chosen for the EC presidency–both sides pushed to put Iraq behind them. “The bitter differences of the war are over,” declared Bush at the time. As Ramon Cotarelo of Madrid’s Complutense University says, “In Europe, we all want to forget what happened.”
That’s easier said than done. But events on the ground have helped matters. This time around the U.N. Security Council was spared the acrimony that so permeated the run-up to the war in the winter of 2003, and it passed Resolution 1564, setting Iraq on the road to sovereignty. Last week’s handover in Baghdad fulfilled one of the Chirac camp’s major demands. Washington has lowered its expectations of its European partners, too, walking away from last week’s NATO summit in Istanbul with only a commitment to help train Iraqi forces.
All this has made it easier for critics of the war to lay down their protest placards. Increasingly, rapprochement, not rancor, is in the air. “The trend is toward doing as much as possible to bridge the [Iraq] gap,” says Giovanni Grevi of the European Policy Centre in Brussels.
So far the flowering of good will seems to be primarily benefiting Washington. There was plenty of EU infighting leading up to Duro Barroso’s selection. France and Germany made their favorite known well before the summit: Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. But he was too “federalist” for Britain. Blair put forward the name of EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten. But Chirac vetoed Patten because, as a Briton, he represents a country that does not participate in several core EU projects (like the single currency). While Portugal, as a fully signed-up member of the EU, was easier for the French and Germans to accept, he nonetheless is more closely associated with the British camp.
Alasdair Murray of the Centre for European Reform points out that the EU presidency–which rotates from country to country every six months and is not to be confused with the EC president’s job–has been in the hands of a Washington ally for six months (Ireland) and will be assumed by more friends (the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Britain) in the years ahead. That could help further U.S. interests: the Dutch presidency is likely to be more supportive of Turkey’s nomination to join the EU, for instance, a decision that will be reached in the coming months, than would the French. Having Duro Barroso in place as well could help persuade the skeptics to provide reconstruction euros to Iraq.
Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, on the other hand, look weaker as their role in rallying opposition to U.S. involvement in Iraq begins to fade. The balance of power in Europe is shifting away from the Berlin-Paris axis, the traditional molder of the Projet Europeen, and toward issue-driven alliances and coalitions: witness Britain’s joining forces with Poland and other European free-market advocates in pushing for economic reforms opposed by France. Chirac’s term doesn’t expire until 2007–when he will probably retire, at the age of 74. But he’s increasingly under fire at home for being more focused on international issues, and on fending off ambitious Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, than on running the country. After achieving record popularity during the run-up to the Iraq war, Chirac’s approval numbers have plummeted to between 35 percent and 45 percent, depending on the poll.
Next door, Schroder similarly rode a wave of anti-U.S. sentiment to compensate for his failure to combat unemployment and economic malaise at home. But in the recent European Parliament elections, his Social Democrats scored their worst result in post World War II history–22 percent–despite his party’s ubiquitous friedensmacht (power for peace) billboards. Schroder’s party is in all but open revolt over his welfare-state cutbacks; 5,000 SPD members and unionists have quit in protest to form their own left-wing splinter group called “Work and Social Justice.” With support in his own party waning, some are speculating that Schroder may not survive the rest of his term, which ends in 2006. Even if he does, the center-right opposition Christian Democrats led by pro-U.S. Angela Merkel will be heavily favored in the next elections.
While fallout from the Iraq war is no longer distracting voters, both leaders may look for natural sources of friction with Washington–trade, the Middle East and even Iraqi election preparations–to stoke their ratings. “We are in for a rather rough ride,” says the French political analyst Dominique Moisi. Already last week Chirac publicly berated Bush for daring to suggest that the EU should welcome Turkey as a member, before more quietly agreeing the very next day that negotiations on Turkish accession were “inevitable” (following story). On trade, each side is likely to remain more protectionist than the other would like. On defense, Europeans will continue to wince at the way the United States wields its overwhelming military force and instead press for “soft power” alternatives. On economic-development issues, the “old” Europeans will continue to resist the more drastic free-market reforms favored by America. These differences mean that relations between Europe and the United States will remain in a state of flux. But it could be a lot worse.
