An affair to forget
José M. de Areilza
June 10, 2010
For all the wrong reasons, Spain has been able to attract everybody’s attention at the end of its EU presidency. This visibility has nothing to do with results and achievements. On the contrary, it is related to the terrible state of its economy and its lack of good governance. All the European analysts (and a good number of US ones) are watching closely the evolution of our sovereign debt and public deficit and the attempts to dictate from outside Spain reforms of the labor market and the financial system.
When the government launched the EU presidency program, it was supposed to be part of the solution of the crisis. But now Spain has become the favorite patient that other European countries observe and try to diagnose, as if they did not have similar problems.
Nevertheless in Spanish government circles you can still hear officials sticking to the mantra and presenting in a positive light the presidency “balance”. Just as if this had been a well run semester, like the ones presided by Felipe González and José María Aznar in 1989, 1995 and 2002.
To speak about a “balance” of this 2010 EU presidency is just one more example of sheer denial of the current state of affairs in Spain and Europe. The fact that these past six months we had to cancel summits with the US or with Mediterranean countries, that the EU patent has not been approved or that our strategy to fight domestic violence has been proven ill conceived in legal and political terms is not the issue. A few weeks ago Foreign Minister Moratinos declared without a bit of irony that the biggest achievement of the Spanish EU presidency was the creation of a European economic governance system. It is just as if a patient in hospital a few minutes before being operated told the doctors that since his case is highly interesting they owed him the future success of that delicate surgery.
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But how on earth could the Spanish presidency manage to lead the enactment of the European Patent? It was taken to the European Court of Justice a year ago by the Council itself, where it still awaits an Avis!!! It’s im-po-ssi-ble for a presidency of the Council to push through something like this until the Court has given its say.
Comment by Gordon Keck-o — July 20, 2010 @ 10:56 pm
First, I am confident that the ECJ will not declare that a EU patent system is incompatible with the Treaties. Second, in my comment I was referring to the hottest political issue in the negotiation of the EU patent, the translations of patents, a future regime should have been agreed under the Spanish presidency, but in spite of Commission proposals this dossier has not moved forward in the last six months.
Comment by JMA — July 21, 2010 @ 2:34 pm