Maastricht Monnet Lecture
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Maastricht Monnet Lecture European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly “Will the EU survive another 25 years?” 9th February 2017 Good evening. Thank you for the invitation to address you here this evening. Maastricht is a particularly important place for the office of the European Ombudsman as this is where it was born, back in 1992, following a European Council meeting that cued the Maastricht Treaty, a meeting I covered at the time as a journalist, and so it’s very nice to be back here again. For today’s lecture in honour of Jean Monnet, I picked the pressing and intriguing topic: Will the European Union survive the next twenty five years? But I’d like to begin by introducing you to the last group of well informed people who made confident prediction about future political events. While preparing this talk last week I found it hard to focus solely on our Union as my eyes kept being dragged to my smartphone or TV and the latest news from Washington. It’s of course impossible to consider the so called existential 1 crisis of the EU without considering the bizarre playing out of the new Trump administration in the White House. Not even the Atlantic Ocean is likely to protect us from its destructive nihilism. Ted Malloch, a man reported as being under consideration as the next US Ambassador to the EU, said in a recent interview, "I had in a previous career a diplomatic post where I helped bring down the Soviet Union. So maybe there's another union that needs a little taming." Last week the European Parliament political groups called on the EU not to accept Mr Malloch’s appointment with two political group leaders calling his comments on the Union an ‘act of outrageous malevolence’ so, if President Trump does go ahead with that appointment the showdown will be instructive vis a vis future relations. When I first sat down to write this talk last week, Donald Trump had just fired his Attorney General , accusing her of ‘betrayal’ given her refusal immediately to regard as legal the executive order banning certain categories of people from entering the United States and the detention for ‘extreme vetting’ of others. The firing was not quite as dramatic as it may have appeared given that she was shortly leaving office anyway but the use of the word ‘betrayal’ was revealing. It’s the language found also in the Brexit debate in the United Kingdom highlighting the ever sharper and uglier divide between the two sides and the equation of honest dissent with a type of national treason. And it’s dangerous. Two days later, on prime time TV, President Trump, Apprentice style, introduced the winner of the Supreme Court appointment run-off. The new judge is predictably conservative just as, an Obama appointment would have been predictably liberal. This peculiarity of the US justice 2 system makes it difficult for some western democracies to lecture others on judicial independence but, as is clear from the court challenges to Trump’s executive order vis a vis entry to the US from certain countries, it may be the courts that will ultimately decide the fate of the Trump revolution, or insurgency, as some commentators have called it. One can only hope that the US judges, and particularly those in the Supreme Court, are having many sleepless nights as they wrestle with their conscience. Arguably of more interest than Trump’s judicial appointment is what he did immediately after his announcement spreading his arms wide and asking for affirmation of the surprise nature of what he had done. Those of us with children will recognise the phenomenon. He did it several more times in the course of the week, opening an address at a military base with a comment on his election victory and then, incredibly even by his own standards, asking the audience at a prayer breakfast to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger, his successor on The Apprentice and whose audience numbers, much to Trump’s delight, have yet to match his own. He looks like an excitable child – a seventy year old seven year old as one commentator called him – someone who’s not alone been given the contents of the world’s biggest toy shop to play with but who can get the world to watch as he does it. And we do. Several US mainstream media outlets now carry live coverage of the daily White House press briefings on their opening website pages, further testimony to Trump’s successful subversion of the role of President from calm head of state to entertainer in chief. Even the normally sober Euronews channel went live to his address at the military base. 3 The White House “is distilling Donald to his essence,” his biographer, Michael D’Antonio said last week. “If he could have commanded the attention of the world media every day of his life in the past he would have. The fact that the press corps is captive in the White House and can be dragged into these executive order signings is, for him, like mainlining heroin”. Trump is of course, rich pickings for writers, both pro and anti his incumbency, evaluated by every professional type from journalist to psychiatrist with the word ‘narcissist’ most commonly used to capture the essential Donald Trump. For Trump there has been no transition. His reality TV studio has simply been relocated to Washington DC. He is motivated solely by his desire to be front and centre of every play and to be extravagantly admired for being so. In a street interview just days after 9/11 Trump did not look like a man stunned by the tragedy of what had just happened, telling the interviewer instead about the ‘hundreds’ of his staff members that he had personally ordered to clear up the rubble and seek out the dead. Parents are often told that a child who is misbehaving is attention-seeking. The grown up child that is Trump is the proof. And world leaders trying to figure out this administration, should know that this is the prism through which it must be seen. Playing the game by the old rules no longer applies. Trump, and his closest advisors, thrive not just on unpredictability and surprise but on disruption. It’s what they get their kicks from. 4 And the really clever ones, such as the now chief strategist Stephen Bannon, will attempt to leverage Trump’s aching desire for constant, global, attention by feeding him the lines and the policies that not alone will have the media salivating, but which will also advance Mr Bannon’s, nativist, misogynistic, white, protectionist, world view unless of course, the world moves to stop him. This is a White House fuelled by weapons grade testosterone, with little sign – to date – of a counterbalancing force. The trouble will arise for Mr Bannon only if the President considers that Steve, and not Donald, is getting too much of the world’s attention. The internet is currently awash with cartoon images of Trump as Bannon’s puppet, a characterisation of the relationship unlikely to please the President. But Trump will also seek to be a success. He will want a second term and he will try to achieve that precisely on the terms laid out during his campaign. Trump’s supporters were said to take him seriously but not literally, the opposite of his opponents. Now we see both sides were wrong, Trump really did mean it literally. And he will not try to win over those who did not support him as to do so would weaken his base and his gambler’s instinct will lead him to bet only on the Trump faithful. We do not yet know the limits of the disruption he will attempt and quite how effective the checks and balances of the American constitutional system will be. But keeping a steady gaze on the Trump psychology as opposed to the old rules of the diplomatic game will be critical for the EU already coping with high levels of both internal and external disruption. Many leaders will find themselves morally and ethically compromised by Trump, the extent of the compromise 5 determined by their trade or economic or defence or other dependence on the United States. In my own country, Ireland, our Prime Minister has been urged by some not to attend the traditional St Patrick’s Day event with the President. Yet Prime Minister Kenny is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t given our high dependence on US investment and high migration rates to the United States. Even the Mexican President took a few days to decide not to go to the US to meet with Trump after all, Chancellor Merkel obviously feels strong enough to give him a lecture on the Geneva Convention while the UK Prime Minister, desperate for future trade deals after Brexit condemned the executive order only after political and media pressure to do so. Yet we have to guard against hypocrisy. Extreme vetting did not begin under Donald Trump. The actions of Obama in restricting visas lacked the crudity and implicit racism of Trump’s executive order but the idea that under Obama the US administration somehow ran its immigration programmes to the highest ethical and human rights standards is a myth. And few people questioned visits to the White House while Guantanamo Bay was in operation – as it still is – even if Obama did meet with significant political opposition to his attempts to close it – or while the US was freely using European airports to refuel its so called rendition flights, flights suspected of bringing people to foreign sites to undergo at the very least, extreme interrogation.