Mr. Bean,
The Spanish EU Presidency And The Next Six
Months
Spanish diplomacy, authorities and the press
have repeatedly insisted, with a certain
degree of optimism, that with Madrid holding
the six-month presidency of the EU,
Latinamerica will be a priority. Any
of the three trade and cooperation deals
stalled (for years) but latent, with
Mercosur, the Andean Community and Central
America could fructify in the next six
months or advance to a consensus take-off
position.
However the European press does not share
that optimism given the challenges faced by
EU and the stubborn statistics plus the fact
that Spain will have to instrument the
complexities of a new creation, the Lisbon
treaty.
The Financial Times gives a clear picture of
prospects and the scarce-time agenda for the
presidency of a country that has lost the
allure of the past and belongs to the EU
most-sick economies club:
“By any standards, it was an unfortunate
beginning. Spain’s six-month presidency of
the European Union, which got underway this
week (January first), appears to have been
subject to an attack by computer-hackers. On
its first day, web-surfers navigating to the
special presidency website found themselves
staring at photos of Mr Bean, the hapless
British comedy character who (some claim),
bears a resemblance to José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister.
Mr Bean is famous for his stumbles and
mishaps – and Spain is also looking
accident-prone at the moment. On the
previous occasions that Spain has assumed
the presidency of the EU, the country’s mood
was very different. Both the González and
Aznar governments were presiding over a
booming economy that infused the whole
nation with a certain swagger. But Spain has
been hit very hard by the global recession.
Unemployment is close to 20 per cent and the
all-important construction sector is on its
back.
Perhaps Mr Zapatero is being distracted by
his domestic travails, because the work
program that he has proposed for the Spanish
presidency is remarkably anodyne, even by
the undemanding standards of most European
Union presidencies. The now un-hacked
website claims that the EU’s new Lisbon
treaty will be the “focus of the Spanish
presidency”. Since the treaty has just come
into force – and puts into place a complex
structure that combines the rotating
presidency Spain has just assumed with a new
permanent presidency – it is understandable
that the Spanish see getting this new system
to work as a priority.
All the same, if the Spanish presidency
genuinely does concentrate on making the
Lisbon treaty work, it would be making a
mistake that is all too typical of the
European Union: concentrating on the
fine-tuning of institutional arrangements,
at the expense of dealing with real-world
problems that trouble European citizens.
Of these problems, by far and away the most
important is the economic crisis. Growth is
still feeble across Europe – and Spain is no
exception. During the Spanish presidency,
European governments will have to try to
agree whether – and how fast – to withdraw
the fiscal stimuli that were put in place
last year. The next six months could also
see a full-blown fiscal crisis in Greece or
Latvia. Dealing with these challenges,
without any unfortunate Bean-like mishaps,
will be Mr Zapatero’s biggest challenge over
the next six months”.
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The hapless British comedian
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