John Palmer (London): With a sigh of relief, but also with an increasingly nervous scan of what may be coming over the international horizon, the European Union enters 2008 - a year which will put the durability of European integration to some demanding tests.
The relief comes from the likely prospect that the EU Reform Treaty - the re-written version of the blighted "Constitutional Treaty" - will be ratified by all 27 EU Member States by the year end or very shortly thereafter. There are still some difficult obstacles to be surmounted - not least ratification by the UK Parliament and Ireland's referendum. But in both cases approval seems distinctly more likely than rejection and nowhere else is there a realistic prospect of the Reform Treaty being rejected.
The deadline for the provisions of the new treaty to begin to come into force is June 2009 when the direct elections to the European Parliament will be held. But already in 2008 we will have a good idea whether the emerging European political parties will live up to their new responsibilities by selecting their candidates for voter approval as the next President of the European Commission.
Meanwhile jockeying for pole position for some other key European jobs is already under way. President Sarkozy is openly touting Tony Blair's candidature for the new post of permanent President of the European Council. But many EU governments, with bitter memories of Blair's role as George Bush's point man in Europe over Iraq and the "war on terror", have other ideas. The prime ministers of Denmark (which now wants to join the euro and scrap all its historic "opt outs"), Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and Luxembourg , Jean-Claude Juncker, appear to be favourites. It is widely assumed that the current EU foreign policy supremo, Javier Solana, will become the new de facto EU foreign minister.
During the first three months of 2008, the Union will face a critical test as it manages Kosovo's move to EU supervised independence. It will also send a substantial peace keeping force to protect Serb and other minorities in Kosovo and deter the hardline nationalists in Belgrade from trying to reignite ethnic conflict. Meanwhile Solana - working with, amongst others, Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency - will try to secure a diplomatic agreement with Tehran over its nuclear energy strategy in ways that limit the Bush Administration's last ditch efforts to create a war fighting climate, as all EU leaders await the judgement of US voters in November's Presidential election, on which the long term future of the Atlantic alliance may depend.
At home the EU faces the backwash from economic recession and the banking credit crisis which began in the US. These will be particularly tricky challenges for the single currency euro group which has now been joined by Cyrus, Malta and Slovenia. The euro is becoming a global reserve currency but - partly as a consequence - the euroland economies face the problem that the strength of the single currency against sterling, the dollar, the yen and the yuan will make export led growth more and more problematic.
2008 may - as a result - see a fundamental review of how a sustainable, socially cohesive European economic growth strategy should be pursued. With the Anglo-American ultra neo-liberal economic model increasingly discredited, we may expect more attention to focus on how to extend Nordic economic strategies (which balance being highly competitive with maintaining strong social welfare and advanced environmental policies). Maybe this issue will provide material for the coming democratic debate on the future direction of the European Union.
