The European president Herman van Rompuy offers a tempting target for jokers. But his call for the imposition of a common economic policy, backed up with surveillance and punishments, has a decidedly sinister ring
Herman van Rompuy, the president of Europe, hasn?t enjoyed the kindest press. In Britain at least, the ?richly comic? ?blustering Belgian?, a ?garden gnome? and ?dwarf? ?straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan? has been treated as a sort of joke created largely for the benefit of tabloid headline writers.
Mr van Rompuy may never come to match, say, Vince Cable in the glamour stakes ? but people who knew him in his previous job always warned that the ?Mr Nobody? gibes were misplaced. As Belgian prime minister, Mr van Rompuy helped to bring together his notoriously divided country, and sharply reduced its budget deficit. Now, he has similar steely ambitions to unite and discipline Europe.
Last week, in Berlin, Mr van Rompuy proclaimed an EU leader?s strongest message of federalism yet. He said that after the financial crisis, ?the national and the European interest can no longer be separated: they coincide? today, we have to act on [that] fact? in every [EU] member state, there are people who believe their country can survive alone in the globalised world. It is more than an illusion ? it is a lie.?
Mr van Rompuy?s ?action on that fact? is something he and his supporters call ?European economic governance? ? essentially, a political semi-union giving the EU sweeping new powers to impose economic policy on its members. As he put it bluntly in Berlin, ?one cannot maintain a monetary unity without a political union??
Three weeks ago, almost unnoticed in Britain, a taskforce chaired by Mr van Rompuy called for a ?fundamental shift? in this direction, with a ?wider range? of sanctions, fines and other punishments for countries that do not follow economic prescriptions laid down by Brussels. Ultimately, some suggest, economic governance could mean the harmonisation of tax and benefit levels, and forced redistribution of funds from rich to poor EU countries on a scale far greater than now.
Fully fledged economic governance would apply only to members of the euro. But the van Rompuy taskforce also recommended that ?all EU member states?, Britain included, should be subject to ?deeper macro-economic surveillance?, including an ?enforcement framework? of ?corrective? measures ?designed to enforce the implementation of remedies? for countries that stepped out of line. One of the members of the taskforce was George Osborne, Britain?s Chancellor of the Exchequer.