Council of Ministers/Embassy/Parliament

Our Monday morning began with unfortunately limited access to coffee and a briefing on the Council of Ministers in the EU. The council of ministers is a hard entity to explain. The thing I can most liken it to in US politics is a House committee. However, unlike a house committee, the council of ministers are not elected officials. Instead they are lackeys appointed by members of the Council (the high legislative body) that are experts on certain issues like climate change, or monetary policy. The council of ministers meets over 2,000 teams a year. Each council contains one representative from each country. Members of the Commission's secretary's attend, and mediate, all of the meetings. The council of ministers is a purely political body, and they have no real power in the system. Their major purpose is to give proposals to the Council members, who can accept or reject it without any consequence. However, more often than not the Council accepts their proposals, since, as stated before, all council's of ministers are made up of experts on the policy being discussed.

Also, according to out speaker, council members have affairs with each other quite frequently, which provides for intense policy discussions. Another random fact, when discussing examples of issues the Council of Ministers may be discussing, Greenland's fisheries were mentioned as a factor in Denmark's decision to opt out of some economic agreement. This was the first time I had heard Greenland mentioned in a political forum, ever.

The afternoon sessions happened to be much more exciting than the morning one, no offense to the Council of Ministers. We were guests at the U.S. Embassy. After an elevator ride down to floor -1, and a ridiculously long wait to get through security (they checked your passport, and took away all your metal devices, including cameras and cellphones) I was ready to walk into area 51, but instead we were led to the most insignificant room we had been in all week. It was quite small with small chairs in rows, a podium, and bare white walls. We were first briefed by a member of the US mission to the EU, which he emphasized was not an embassy. His talk emphasized on the closeness and integration of the European and American economies, as opposed to the perceived competition between them one sees portrayed in the media. The US Mission to the EU has members of all the government agencies in the US, and are all apparently dedicated bureaucrats attempting to work together as much as possible with the EU to strengthen both governmental institutions. He focused most on the TEC (Transatlantic Economic Committee) which had recently made further steps towards integrating the US and EU economies for mutual benefit.

After all of the dense and highly intellectual lectures we had been sitting through all week, the next presenter was a breath of fresh air in that his speech was meant to be serious, but I actually found it hilarious. He was actually our key speaker of the day, being currently a Special Envoy to the EU, and a former ambassador (I can't say his name in print because his talk was officially off the record) and a bitter old man who seems to have lost touch with reality. He walked into the room, and without any introduction of himself asked us “Well, what do you want to know about?” Climate change was the first answer of our audience, since we heard he was an expert on it. Then, the rant began. While I found him quite entertaining, it's quite scary to think of him as the image European diplomats have of Americans if he acts in the same way as he did in our meeting. Questions were asked about Kyoto, and our refusal to sign a treaty with Europe until 2009. He lambasted all of these questions with the response that we were all clouded by the liberal media, and could not believe how Un-American we were for being so critical of out nation. He then continued to lecture in an angry tone how republicans will never get credit for climate change legislation because of the liberal media, and that the democrats don't do anything. Included in this rant were multiple jabs at the French and the British, implying that they knew nothing of American affairs. He seemed personally offended that Reagan does not get enough credit for the Montreal Protocol, and Bush the 1st does not get enough credit for the Clean Air Act. While the jokes he put in his extraordinarily partisan speech were funny, I hope he presents himself in a different manner when speaking to foreign diplomats.

This was a very long day, and our last meeting was with a member of the European Parliament. Just last week, the Parliament celebrated it's 50^th birthday, and the representative started with a quote about this occasion which I enjoyed, and figured I would put down. “At 15, you have a future. At 25, you have a problem. At 40, you have experience. At 50, you have a history.”

This parliament member, Micheal Shackleton, likened this phrase to the parliament, stating that it finally had a history. The parliament's key moment in it's 50 year history came in the early 90's when it was granted the power of co-decision. This essentially turned the European Parliament from an institution on the level of the Council of Ministers with a claim to fame that they were direct representatives of the people, to a body with a purpose. The power of co-decision granted to them in the early 1990s gave parliament the power to veto laws, and allows parliament to negotiate directly with the Council (high legislative body) and the commission (executive). With it's only mode of power being relatively brand new, parliament's main issue today is that average European citizens know absolutely nothing about them. 44% of Europeans do not know whether the parliament sits by party, or by nationality (it's by party), and, more troublesome, 90% of EU citizens do not know the year of the next parliamentary elections (2009). Their main initiative to help this problem now is to create an on-line TV station similar to CSPAN that will broadcast in 22 languages. Judging by the number of Americans CSPAN has turned on to congress, I wish them the best of luck. Off to NATO headquarters tomorrow.