Thursday, July 7, 2011

United but wrong

In the appointment of the next head of the IMF, the EU has acted fast, united and decisive in pushing its own candidtate Christine Lagarde to become the new IMF Director. This sounds like good news for the struggling EU foreign policy given the experience of frequent division and ineffectiveness under Lady Ashton.

The argument of the EU to justify another grab for the IMF post was to have a competent partner in solving the Euro Debt Crisis. Is that really a sound argument? Why was that argument not made during the Asian or Latin American debt crisis? To put it more plainly, this is the equivalent of insisting that the next head of the European Central Bank must be Greek.

But the really bad news is that this time it is unity and decisivness for the wrong reason, i.e. to defend a 20th century privilege that the IMF chief should be a (West) European.

The message the EU sends to the world is this: we find it difficult to get our act together on international issues like climate change, the Arab uprising, migration, the Iraq war. But when it comes to defend our outdated privileges, united we stand.

Our unity of today will backfire tomorrow. If the future global powers in Asia and South America replicate our behavior of today in the future, we will have a tough time.

Instead we should be using our remaining influence now to set, and live by, standards of global governance which remain in the future.

If Ms. Lagarde can achive this in her tenure at the IMF, the EU's unity and decisivness today may have been worth it after all.


____
A first version of this piece appeared as an ECFR blog on 25 May 2011