oneworldtalk

European Union hopes for a new era in relations with the US were thrown into chaos on Wednesday when the holder of the EU presidency condemned American remedies for the global recession as “the road to hell”.

Barely a week before Barack Obama is due to arrive in Europe on his first official visit as US president, Mirek Topolanek, the Czech Republic’s prime minister, put the 27-nation EU on a collision course with Washington.

….Mr Topolanek said EU leaders had been disturbed at a summit in Brussels last week to hear calls from Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, for more aggressive policies to fight the global downturn.

“The US Treasury secretary talks about permanent action and we, at our spring council, were quite alarmed at that . . . The US is repeating mistakes from the 1930s, such as wide-ranging stimuluses, protectionist tendencies and appeals, the Buy American campaign, and so on,” he told a European parliament session in Strasbourg. “All these steps, their combination and their permanency, are the road to hell.”

…… Relations between the Obama administration and Mr Topolanek’s government have been delicate in recent weeks because of signals from Washington that Mr Obama may reassess plans to deploy parts of a US anti-missile shield in the Czech Republic, a project to which the Topolanek government has been committed..

The blunt comments by the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the union, came just a week before a crucial meeting of the Group of 20 that was called to show global solidarity in fighting the recession. The comments were greeted with embarrassment by many Europeans who believe that the Czech leader does not represent a European consensus.

What made the situation even more trying for those who hope that the European Union might find a common voice in this crisis was that Mr. Topolanek’s own governing coalition collapsed on Tuesday. The Czech opposition party, which favors bigger increases in domestic spending during the slump, won a no-confidence vote on his leadership.

….Mr. Topolanek’s remarks were considered impolitic, with the German leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, telling him, “You have not understood what the task of the E.U. presidency is,” and describing his comments as “not the level on which the E.U. ought to be operating with the United States.”

xxxx Mr. Topolanek’s comments during a speech to the European Parliament underscored unresolved differences. The country holding the revolving presidency is supposed to speak for Europe as a whole, and Mr. Topolanek will go to the Group of 20 meeting in London as the European president. The Group of 20 comprises 19 industrialized and emerging countries and the European Union. Numerous other Europeans are to attend, including the head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and the leaders of individual countries like France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain.

Mr. Topolanek will also host Mr. Obama in Prague a few days later at a United States-European Union summit meeting.

This month, the European Union (EU) parliament passed a resolution on the Tibet issue, urging the Chinese government to resume dialogue with the Tibetan spiritual leader in exile, the Dalai Lama, for "real autonomy for Tibet". However, a Chinese government spokesperson immediately rejected this, saying the call was interference in China's "internal affairs".

….This raises the question of why the EU parliament would endorse
such a resolution when it was bound to be rejected by China, especially in the current economic climate, when the EU wants to build closer relations with China?


…. The EU's criticism toward China is therefore more part of this long-term strategy, to expand its soft power, than out of any real concern over human rights in Tibet. For the EU, no other human-rights issue has a better leverage on China than Tibet. The Tibet issue has ethnic, religious and cultural dimensions, and led by the Dalai Lama, exiled Tibetans are well organized in their opposition to Beijing.

It is exactly because of the sensitivity of the Tibet issue that Beijing carefully guards itself against what it sees as foreign intervention, particularly after it became common knowledge that the US Central Intelligence Agency had a hand behind the armed Tibetan rebellion in 1959.