Patten sees EU sway growing despite Iraq

Surveying the world from the European Union's new offices high above 41st Street in New York, a stone's throw from UN headquarters, Chris Patten sees the EU's global influence growing despite setbacks.

The departing EU Commissioner for External Relations, an Oxford-educated Briton, is quick to admit the difficulties of forging a common foreign policy.

The aftershocks of last year's spectacular and damaging rows over Iraq still reverberate.

"I have never believed it was easy to develop coherence in European foreign policy because foreign policy goes right to the heart of what it means to be a nation state. That's one reason why the view among British sceptics that we are creating a super state is so crazed," Mr Patten told Reuters.

"But where we have managed coherence, it has made us very effective," he said in a wide-ranging interview reflecting on five years in what he called "not the most powerful job in Brussels but the most enjoyable one".

"The greatest example, which has meant we are the best engineers of regime change and nation-building, has been our enlargement policy," he said.

Mr Patten, 60, who was the last British colonial governor of Hong Kong, claims much credit for the EU in the transformation of the post-communist states of central and eastern Europe into stable, law-abiding, democratic market economies.

"It wasn't written in the stars that the dismemberment of the Soviet empire would be accomplished so smoothly in Europe, with the exception of Yugoslavia," he said.

He points to Turkey, with which the outgoing Commission headed by Romano Prodi will this week recommend opening entry negotiations in 2005, as another showcase for the EU using its magnetic pull to reshape its neighbourhood positively.

"What has promoted this historic change in Turkey? It's been the prospect of membership in the European Union."

Even in the Balkans, after wars that twice required US-led Nato military intervention, dangling the carrot of EU membership has wrought dramatic progress, he says.

The EU and Nato jointly averted civil war in Macedonia in 2001 and Brussels has been patiently prodding Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro on the road to stabilisation and reform.

"When (EU foreign policy chief) Javier Solana and I first came to the UN General Assembly in 1999, (Slobodan) Milosevic and (Franjo) Tudjman were still in office," he said, referring to the former wartime strongmen of Serbia and Croatia.

Forced from power in 2000 after mass protests over a rigged election, Mr Milosevic is now on trial at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Mr Tudjman died in 1999, opening the way for EU-driven democratic reforms in Croatia.

"While things aren't yet perfect, people are no longer murdering each other in industrial quantities," Mr Patten said.

His flawless cohabitation with Mr Solana, a former Spanish foreign minister and Nato chief, has been not the smallest of his achievements in Brussels.

When the two were appointed - Mr Solana to conduct a common foreign and security policy on behalf of EU governments, Mr Patten to manage the Commission's large external relations and aid budgets and staff - pundits forecast a turf war.

It didn't happen, largely due to Mr Patten's exquisite good manners and lack of overt political ambition, insiders say.

Mr Patten acknowledges some disappointments in the EU's quest to be taken seriously as a major international actor.

Failure to achieve progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process show the limitations of Europe's clout.

"The Iraq crisis showed that unless the bigger member states agree, we don't have a European policy," he said, reflecting on the rift between Britain, Italy and Spain, which backed the US-led war, and Germany and France, which opposed it.

Mr Patten delivered his own verdict on US policy in Iraq in a valedictory speech to the European Parliament on September 15.

"Liberation rapidly turned into a brutally resisted occupation. Democracy failed to roll out like an oriental carpet across the thankless deserts of the Middle East. Above all, peace in Jerusalem and Palestine was not accomplished by victory in Baghdad," he told EU lawmakers.

Mr Patten says he is also disappointed the EU had not developed a more consistent approach to relations with Russia, which he sees as on the road to authoritarianism.

West European leaders have vied to forge privileged ties with President Vladimir Putin, largely turning a blind eye to his behaviour at home and in Chechnya.

Mr Patten thinks the arrival of eight new EU members from former communist eastern Europe "who have good reason to know Russia well" will have a salutary effect.

Declining to speculate on where the EU's borders will ultimately end, he says with English understatement: "I'd be surprised if Turkey were the end of the story".

As for his own plans, apart from the honorific role of Chancellor (president) of Oxford University, he has a contract for two books, the first on transatlantic relations which may lead to a television series.

The former Conservative party chairman has just accepted the role of co-chairman of the International Crisis Group, an influential think-tank on the world's trouble spots.

And he plans to earn a living in corporate boardrooms after a decent interval following his Brussels stint.

Mr Patten declined an EU transitional allowance worth more than €200,000, "because I'm arrogant enough to think I can make some money".