So That's Who Runs Europe....

Henry Kissinger is famously supposed to have observed some years ago that if he needed to “speak to Europe”, he did not know whom to call. Well, apparently matters have become somewhat clearer in this connection in the meanwhile. A so-called “News Analysis” piece in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune (IHT) on EU attempts to “mediate” in the current post-election Ukrainian crisis begins as follows:

During a visit to Berlin last week, a senior official from Ukraine's Foreign Ministry made a direct request to German government officials: He asked them not to send the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, to mediate in the growing crisis in Ukraine.

His German interlocutors listened, according to a German official who was present, but they did not act on the request. Solana arrived in Kiev on Friday in an attempt to broker a compromise....

The anecdote – which, as we will see in a subsequent post on Ukraine, has some plausibility – speaks volumes about the manner of functioning of the EU and the real relations of power among its members. The fact that the IHT author, Judy Dempsey, would relate it with such insouciance – not pausing for an instant to reflect upon the seeming oddity of EU decisions being made by the German government – speaks volumes about the quality of the “analysis” of European news typically to be found in the NYTimes-owned IHT.