Constitution-less EU fumbles for world voice

Javier Solana has lost the spring in his step.

Leaning on a barrier in the United Nations to ease his aching back after a week of intensive diplomacy, Europe's ex-future foreign minister looks as if he has had the stuffing knocked out of him.

Since French and Dutch voters rejected the European Union's draft Constitution in referendums three months ago, the veteran Spanish diplomat's prospects of becoming the single voice and face of a coherent European foreign policy have gone up in smoke. And it shows.

"Solana was really looking forward to being Europe's first foreign minister," said one of his senior aides, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It was a body blow."

If the Constitution had come into force in 2007 as planned, Mr Solana was guaranteed the job of EU foreign minister, embodying the 25-nation bloc on the world stage and running its worldwide diplomatic staff and multi-billion-dollar aid budget.

Appointed in 1999 and reappointed last year, he has written a European Security Strategy, set up a military staff to run peacekeeping operations and appointed a network of special envoys in trouble-spots. But like Moses, he will never set foot in the Promised Land.

Instead, Europe is condemned to lumber on for several more years, perhaps indefinitely, with an unwieldy system of foreign-policy-by-committee in which a posse of officials huddle together on the European side of every table.

If it does eventually get a foreign minister, it will likely be too late for the 61-year-old former Spanish foreign minister and former Nato secretary-general, whose term expires in 2009.

Mr Solana keeps up a punishing travel schedule, juggling Middle East diplomacy, trouble-shooting in the Balkans, crisis management in Ukraine and Central Africa, and peacekeeping in the Indonesian province of Aceh.

But when the EU met other powers at UN headquarters, many meetings were once again conducted by its so-called "troika".

This actually involves four officials representing the government that holds the bloc's six-month revolving presidency, in this case British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw; the incoming president Austria; the executive European Commission; and Mr Solana as the EU's foreign policy "high representative."

No wonder interlocutors are bewildered. A former US envoy to Brussels quoted US President George W. Bush as having asked staff before his first meeting with the EU "troika" in 2001: "Which one of these guys speaks for Europe?"

Mr Solana was just two years away from becoming the answer to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's apocryphal question: "When I want to talk to Europe, whom do I call?"

The setback to efforts to build a more coherent foreign policy came, ironically, just as the Bush administration, after a first term marked by unilateral action and rifts with France and Germany over Iraq, had come around to working with the EU.