Tony Blair: conviction without courage

Fate has decided that Tony Blair will have the chance to save Europe from itself. Yet his gamble to let the recent budget talks in Brussels fail suggests that the British prime minister is ill-equipped for that task. In the past he had the conviction to push through the creation of “New Labour” and fight for the liberation of Iraq. But at home he always lacked the courage to stand up for Europe. And in Brussels he has yet to find the right tone for his considerable powers of persuasion.

With a reviled French president and a hapless German chancellor entering the twilight of their political careers, Tony Blair could now become the pre-eminent European statesman. Soon he’ll be the sole survivor of the proponents of the “Third Way” and the only one who can point to a model of economic and social policies that shows signs of success.

Also in openDemocracy on the future of the European Union in light of the French and Dutch referenda and the failure of the Brussels summit:

Krzysztof Bobinski, “Poland’s letter to France: please say oui!” (May 2005)

John Palmer, “After France: Europe’s route from wreckage” (May 2005)

Aurore Wanlin, “European democracy: where now?” (June 2005)

Theo Veenkamp, “Dutch sign on Europe’s wall” (June 2005)

Simon Berlaymont, “What the European Union is” (June 2005)

If you find this material valuable please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation so that we can continue our work and keep it free for all

Where Bill Clinton let his libido ruin his legacy and Gerhard Schröder could never form a coherent political project of the centre-left, Tony Blair had the personal discipline and the right political strategy to win his third mandate in May. But the zealotry that might have brought him the grudging respect of even his adversaries on the question of Iraq seems to be the wrong approach when it comes to the stalled integration of Europe. To reconcile the diverging dynamics of the European Union would require political risk-taking at home and leadership by example in the negotiating chambers of the EU, not the “know-it-all-attitude” Tony Blair has put on show during the union’s deepest crisis.

When the British government prepared for its last EU presidency in late 1997, continental journalists and politicians heard all the right words about New Labour’s emerging enthusiasm for Europe. Gerhard Schröder, then still premier of the state of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), believed it and wrote in the weekly Die Woche that “England’s role at the margins of Europe belongs to the past.” But when one asked higher officials in Number 10 and the British foreign office about a referendum on the single currency (euro), one received only excuses from a government riding high in public esteem.

Since then the handful of pro-European commentators in the British press, from the late Guardian columnist Hugo Young to the scholar-journalist Timothy Garton Ash, have chronicled the cowardice of Tony Blair and his coterie towards Europe. As it turns out there was hardly anything “new” in Blair’s approach to Europe; he followed other British prime ministers “in often putting the claims for transatlantic solidarity ahead of those of European unity”, as commentator Peter Riddell wrote in the Times. Thus the traditional British ambivalence about Europe went unchallenged and remains so.

To that lack of leadership on Europe, Tony Blair has added a manichean worldview – a strange construct of Gladstonian, fundamentalist and neo-conservative beliefs – that locates the United Kingdom “adrift in the middle of the Atlantic” (Hugo Young) instead of anchoring it near the European coastline. Tony Blair keeps talking about building a transatlantic bridge, but the European publics fail to see this figment of his illusions.

He may have found some temporary partners in “Old Europe” who admired his personal commitment to the liberation of Iraq, but he lost them again with his uncompromising stand on the British rebate and the Common Agriculture Policy. Blair’s missionary zeal is not the way to form a European consensus for anything, neither for war nor for a common budget.

It’s a pity, because this could have and should have been Tony Blair’s finest hour in Europe. To those of the German and French left who still prefer to see the British model as one of pure neo-liberalism, he could point out that New Labour has adopted many Scandinavian ideas to soften the successful liberalisation of its labour markets. Just circulate Peter Mandelson’s 13 June speech to the Fabian Society among German Social Democrats and they will hardly find anything objectionable. To those resenting Turkish immigrants and Polish plumbers, the Blair government could point to the exemplary economic and social adaptability of British society. In the continental discourse of the disenchanted a sane United Kingdom voice for continued EU enlargement is badly needed.

Do you agree with Rolf Paasch? Please post your view in the forum attached to openDemocracy’s “Europe: after the constitution” debate

The only problem is that nobody will listen to Blair’s convincing arguments, even more so after the Brussels EU summit on 16-17 June; hardly ever has a European leader ever damaged his (or even her) case so much through stubbornness and self-righteousness as Britain’s prime minister. It will take more than a few reconciliatory speeches during the UK’s EU presidency from 1 July to lend his arguments and convictions new credibility.

If Tony Blair had not wasted all his considerable political capital on following George W Bush into Iraq, but spent it instead on promoting a stronger British role in Europe, he could now be claiming the place in history he so desperately seeks. Instead he seems destined to leave office in a few years time as a leader who established Labour as the party of government, but at the same time lacked the political courage and the diplomatic skills that it would have taken to convince Europe that he knows the Third Way.