Supersarko leaves the podium

France and the European Union

Even as he vacates the European Union presidency, the French president contemplates a comeback

AFTER six months of high drama and showmanship, the French will hand the rotating European Union presidency over to the Czechs on January 1st. Often, even fellow Europeans scarcely notice who is at the helm. But few can have missed the chairmanship of France’s hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy. After a presidency mainly preoccupied with the Russia-Georgia war and global economic meltdown, what has Mr Sarkozy’s energetic, abrasive, impulsive brand of diplomacy really amounted to?

In terms of their set-piece ambitions, the French achieved much of what they aimed for. In July Mr Sarkozy launched a Union for the Mediterranean, bringing together leaders of 43 countries from the EU and the sea’s rim. It now has a base (Barcelona) and a co-presidency (France and Egypt); its five deputy secretary-generals include an Israeli and a Palestinian.


At the recent EU summit in Brussels, Mr Sarkozy also persuaded his colleagues in record time to accept binding rules to reduce carbon emissions by 20% by 2020. On France’s watch, the 27 EU members signed up to an “immigration pact”. Britain and France, the EU’s two biggest military powers, even made modest progress on common European defence: a British-led anti-piracy force off Somalia, the EU’s first joint naval operation, is now cited as an example of the sort of ad hoc military arrangement that the EU should be able to put together at short notice.

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