The EU was poorly led in a testing year

Europe’s leaders will have to have a better 2012 than they did 2011.

What has been missing most from the European Union during 2011 has been leadership. Leadership, even of the political kind, comes in different guises and is hard to define, but most people notice its absence. For the EU, 2011 was a year of drift and indecision.

What passed for leadership was some strange hybrid creature that the chattering classes in Brussels, Paris and Berlin referred to as ‘Merkozy’. The neologism was neater than the reality: in practice, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the German chancellor and French president, were nothing like close enough to merit a shared name. They may have pretended to be in step, but they were perpetually at odds, disagreeing over how to tackle the eurozone crisis.

Whichever end of 2011 you look at, you could hardly call the Merkozy leadership a success. In the first week of February, the pair presented their prescription for combating the eurozone’s debt crisis. Their counterparts from the other member states reacted with cold hostility, annoyed both by the content and the style of the Franco-German diktat. If this was an exercise in leadership, it was leading by bad example.

Earlier this month, the Merkozy team launched its latest attempt at leadership. They admitted that they had been wrong to demand a haircut on government bonds from the private sector – something that Merkel had been pressing for since the Franco-German summit of October 2010 through to the summer of 2011. This was leadership in retreat – and it was not an orderly retreat. And the result of this month’s summit is the promise of an inter-governmental treaty, which – if it ever materialises – will be too little, too late.

In between those two summits – heights of ignominy – what passed for Franco-German leadership was largely ineffective. At other meetings of EU leaders and of the G20, the Merkozy axis failed to deliver and perpetually prevaricated. Effective leadership often requires an ability to see (and communicate) the big picture: that simply did not happen. The financial markets, and the EU’s international partners, became increasingly doubtful as to whether the eurozone had grasped the enormity of its problems.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, might have provided leadership, but he struggled to do so. The Commission’s failure to stop demands from Finland for extra collateral from Greece in the summer was symptomatic: the Commission had lost sight of its duty to stand up for the EU’s common interest. More positively, Barroso and his officials provided some creative thinking as to possible solutions, but politically they were out of the game. Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, may have had his title burnished during the course of the year – promoted to a vice-presidency and given explicit responsibility for the euro – but he is no leader.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment, because it is institutional as well as personal, was Herman Van Rompuy. If nothing else, the role of the president of the European Council is to speak truth unto power and Van Rompuy evidently failed in that duty. If the outcome of the last European Council is counted a failure – and it should be – then Van Rompuy must share in the blame. He did not prepare the ground adequately for the proposal that he himself advocated – a change to a treaty protocol. Instead, he allowed himself to be bounced into an inter-governmental treaty, on the rebound from rejection of Merkel’s preferred option of full-scale treaty change. Van Rompuy has had an intensive two years’ training in how best to ride the twin horses of the eurozone apocalypse, Merkel and Sarkozy, but he still contrives to fall off.

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Ironically, the most important contribution on EU leadership over the past year came from someone who is not a government leader. In a cogent and powerful speech last month in Berlin, Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, put the case for Germany to take the lead in Europe. Merkel has not yet heeded the call. In 2012, she must do so.