It is interesting to recall that recently Tony Blair converted to Catholicism. rwb

Tony Blair speaks during a news conference in Beijing Aug. 20, 2009, where he was for climate talks. Will Blair be the first president of the European Union?

Analysis: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair plots a course to take the job as EU President.

LONDON — After eight years of trial and many errors, the European Union took a giant step toward establishing a constitution over the weekend when voters in Ireland ratified the Treaty of Lisbon.

The Irish electorate comprehensively rejected the same treaty a little more than a year ago but was given a do-over opportunity. This time voters came up with the right answer. The Irish electorate's change of mind didn't come because there were guns pointed at their heads. Minds in Ireland were concentrated by the collapse of the Irish economy over the last year and a half, and reassured by commitments that certain issues, such as abortion and taxes, would not be dictated from Brussels. A smallish nation suddenly realized its economic future lay with membership of a deeply-flawed but remarkable economic, and increasingly political, club.

So now, once Polish and Czech leaders sign on, the EU's operations will be streamlined and for the first time it will have a "High Representative for Foreign Affairs."

The Europeans will also have a real president. The office will no longer be distributed on a rotating basis among the government chiefs of the EU's members. Nor will they have to call the office of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

What power the office of EU president will have is not spelled out in the treaty. Still, it's a cool title and no less a person than former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has made it clear through his spin machine that he wants the job.

British bookies make him the favorite to get the job. And if the odds maker makers are right, Blair will have a chance to shape and define the leadership of the European Union.

The back story: The European Union was born of historical necessity. Three times in 70 years Germany had invaded France. The escalating destruction wreaked across Europe by the conflict between the two nations left continental leaders looking for a way to put the two nations in harness economically rather than in violent competition.

In the early 1950s a visionary French civil servant named Jean Monnet laid the foundation for the European Economic Community. Out of Monnet's idealism came the EEC, which was established by treaty. Treaty by treaty the EEC grew into the EU, which now has 27 members.

It has been a uniquely successful international organization in many ways, the most obvious being that for almost 65 years there has been no war on this most blood-soaked of continents. It used potential membership of the club to end fascism in Portugal, Greece and Spain. Taken as a whole the EU is the world's largest economy.

The organization has used this clout to negotiate incredibly favorable trade deals for its member countries and it has allowed farmers to stay in business through its massive subsidies to the agricultural sector — all this for dues that are about 1.25 percent of a country's income. The EU then provides grants back to countries based on their needs. Ireland received more than it paid in for decades, which allowed it to build the transportation and technological infrastructure that drove their economic miracle.

But the idealism of the civil servant Jean Monnet was also a kind of original sin. Bureaucrats, most of them far less conscientious than Monnet, ended up running the show via the European Commission, the administrative arm of the EU, headquartered in Brussels. With each successive treaty there tended to be a top down imposition of the bureaucrats' vision on the union. As decades wore on resentment of Brussels bureaucrats became part of the weave of daily life around Europe. Whenever politicians needed an easy target, they kicked the faceless Brussels civil servant. In some places this resentment was transformed into political ideology. Britain's Conservative Party has become defined by its "Euro-scepticism."

Return to the present: After the fall of the Soviet Union there was a rush to bring the former Eastern Bloc nations into the EU fold. An organization that had six founding member countries nearly doubled in size in the span of a decade. The EU was becoming unworkable, so the bureaucrats decided to write a constitution that was ready for ratification in 2004. Whatever its good points the constitution demonstrated more than anything the gap between the civil servants and the people of Europe.

I am one of the few people who read the constitution in its eye-crossing entirety. Imagine if a bunch of graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the Wharton School got into a room and decided to update the American Constitution for the 21st Century. Then, without public consultation of any kind, wrote a document of several hundred pages of buzz words and technocratic jargon and acted like it was the obligation of the rest of the country to simply rubber stamp the document. Now you get a feel for how the treaty was written and, more importantly, how it was sold across Europe.

It was a train-wreck waiting to happen and the crash was ugly to watch. The French were given an opportunity to vote for ratification and they turned it down. Then the Dutch did the same. It was back-to-the-drawing-board time. The constitution was mildly re-written and turned into the Treaty of Lisbon.

Re-naming it a "Treaty" was a good bureaucratic maneuver. As in the U.S., in most European nations treaties are ratified by the legislative branch of government not the general electorate. The exception was Ireland and the Irish voted no when first asked. The moaning in Brussels was audible from Warsaw to, well, to Lisbon. Then came the economic apocalypse and the Irish saw the light. EU membership was critical to the Irish economic miracle of the 1990s. The Irish need a bit more of the miraculous economic help that EU membership does undoubtedly convey.

Inside the jargon, the Lisbon Treaty offers some common sense solutions for managing the business of the enlarged EU. The real headline in the Lisbon Treaty is that job Tony Blair wants so much: President of the European Council of Ministers (President of Europe for short). Not that the citizens of Europe will have a vote on who fills the position. No, the presidency will be decided by a qualified majority of the member states, heavily influenced by the most populous — Germany, France and the U.K.

Blair's strong interest in the presidency is providing Britain's Conservatives with more ammunition to beat up on the EU. London's Mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative and former Brussels-based journalist, wrote in Monday's Daily Telegraph: "A spectre is haunting Europe, my friends. That spectre has a famously toothy grin and an eye of glistering sincerity and an almost diabolical gift of political self-reinvention." Johnson then asks in all seriousness, "In what sense will the views of the 'President of Europe' be related to the views of the British people?"

It is a reasonable question, one that an elected politician would think to ask, but not necessarily one that an unelected bureaucrat might think had to be answered.

Despite the new treaty, the flaw at the heart of the European Union's organization — its over-reliance on unelected civil servants, the "democratic deficit" — still remains.

Tony Blair, the EU president no one really wants

The reluctant vote in favour of further European integration by the Irish this weekend may usher Tony Blair into a new role as titular head of the European Union — despite most of Europe being reluctant to have him.

The former prime minister is the leading candidate to become the European Union president for a want of alternatives rather than any enthusiasm.

With the Irish having finally ratified the Lisbon treaty, all that remains is for the Czech and Polish presidents to sign it and authorise the creation of two new key posts in the EU hierarchy: the president of the European council of heads of state, popularly known as the EU president, and that of high representative for common foreign and security policy, in effect a foreign minister.

The Swedish prime minister, who holds the rotating presidency of the EU, indicated last week that he wanted the president and foreign minister to be appointed by the end of this month.

Blair owes his 6-4 odds for the job to the fact that the offices will probably be divvied up between the social democrat and conservative blocs among the EU heads of state. Although Blair appears to be disliked by all parties, especially by his supposed allies on the left, he may end up being elected because of the lack of another suitable candidate from the social democrat group.

Only two other possible social democratic candidates have emerged — Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister, and Felipe Gonzalez, a former prime minister of Spain — and neither has the international clout of Blair. The same is true of the potential conservative candidates Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, and Jan Peter Balkenende, his Dutch equivalent.

The president will be elected by all 27 EU leaders, but the attitude of France and Germany is crucial. French diplomats last week indicated that Blair remained the preferred choice of President Nicolas Sarkozy, putting the ball into the court of Angela Merkel, the newly re-elected German chancellor. Blair is disliked intensely by Berlin for his role in the Iraq war and his perceived failure to contribute to Britain’s European integration.

“The only thing he cared about during his premiership was the City and that mentality has led to the current global crisis,” said Michael Gahler, an MEP from Merkel’s Christian Democrat party. “He is good at making speeches but he does not deliver.”

However, the Germans consider the post of the president to be far less significant than that of the foreign minister, who will also be vice-president of the commission and, in effect, be able to shape a common foreign and security policy and have leverage over commissioners addressing other areas.

Although her party’s favourite is said to be Juncker, Merkel, like Sarkozy, will be concerned with keeping at least a relatively pro-EU British politician in the spotlight.

There is also no love lost between Merkel and the Tory party after the schism in the conservative bloc of the European parliament orchestrated by David Cameron’s party. The pleas of William Hague, the Tory shadow foreign secretary, in an interview yesterday that appointing Blair was “the worst way to sell the EU to the people of Britain” will have fallen on deaf ears in Berlin.

If appointed, Blair would have a cabinet of up to 20 staff members as well as the thousands of EU civil servants. Under the Lisbon treaty the president’s powers are limited, however, and the office largely ceremonial: the incumbent will chair the sessions between the heads of the 27 EU member states, where decisions are made only by consensus. Not being a head of state, he will not be equal among them.

Other duties will include representing Europe at presidential level, according to the Lisbon treaty. He would receive €270,000 (£247,00) a year and be eligible for an annual housing allowance of £37,000, plus other perks.

Blair’s instinct would naturally be to expand his remit and assert himself against the commission. But the presidential term of 2Å years, renewable once, provides little time in which to act.

One last factor is standing in the way of Blair and the EU leaders. While the Czech and Polish parliaments have ratified the Lisbon treaty, it awaits the signature of their respective presidents. Lech Kaczynski of Poland has announced that he will complete the process, but his Czech counterpart, Vaclav Klaus, is refusing to do so.

The Eurosceptic Klaus is understood is to be planning to hold out until after the British general election next year. If the Tories are elected and the treaty remains unratified they have pledged to hold a referendum. It is widely expected that would lead to the treaty being thrown out.

The whole process would begin again. One reluctant Czech would have scuppered the ambitions of Blair, and of the EU integrationists.

Tony Blair, the EU president no one really wants

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