Stuttering start for revamped European Union

(BRUSSELS) - Sidelined at the Copenhagen climate talks, bickering over helping Haiti quake victims, struggling to define its own leadership, the EU has made an uncertain start to its new era under the Lisbon Treaty.

The reform treaty, which came into effect on December 1 after a long and fraught gestation, aims to make the growing European bloc more efficient with a stronger, more united voice on the world stage.

Since then the bad news has been accumulating for Europe, according to Jean-Dominique Giuliani, head of the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Foundation think tank.

"It is urgent to put matters right," he warns.

The UN-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen opened last month just days after the Lisbon Treaty came into effect.

Europe entered those talks having set an ambitious target for greenhouse gas cuts which it hoped would be a model for the rest of the world. EU officials left the talks marginalised.

"Those last hours in Copenhagen. China, India, Japan, Russia, the US, each spoke with one voice, while Europe spoke with many, different voices," incoming EU commissioner for climate action Connie Hedegaard complained last week.

The jury is also out on whether post-Lisbon Europe, with its first permanent EU president and a beefed-up foreign policy supremo, can respond to the growing challenges of globalisation.

British peer Catherine Ashton, who recently assumed the new foreign policy post, has endured something of a baptism of fire.

Criticised by EU parliamentarians for being too vague on major global issues, the high representative for foreign affairs took more flak last week for not rushing to quake-hit Haiti.

Ashton defended herself, arguing that she would only be taking up valuable space on a plane. "I'm not a doctor, not a firefighter," she told the assembly which is beginning to wonder exactly what she is.

"The Haiti drama is the first test for the new European architecture," France's European Affairs Minister Pierre Lellouche told the Figaro newspaper Friday. "We could have hoped for a shorter reaction time, a greater visibility from the start."

Ashton's problems are in part caused by the Lisbon treaty structure designed to simplify and streamline things.

Several observers are instead seeing the kind of "four-headed dragon" described by one MEP.

Certainly Henry Kissinger seems no closer to an answer to his famous question: "Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?"

Should he ring Ashton, or the so far rather quiet EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy? Perhaps EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, who has just embarked on a second five-year term? Or what about the rotating EU presidency, currently held by Spain?

And that's not to mention Jerzy Buzek, the president of the European Parliament, the one and only EU elected body.

So far the impression is of a competition between the various institutions and office holders.

Last week Barroso took to waving a copy of the Lisbon Treaty in the European Parliament as he read out clauses underlining his powers.

That was days after Rumiana Jeleva, Bulgaria's candidate for a seat on the EU Commission, was forced to withdraw due to opposition among lawmakers, as the European Parliament flexed its muscles.

"What we are seeing at the moment is a battle for influence," said Lellouche.

Van Rompuy, who has maintained a low profile, will be hoping his hour will come at a crisis economic summit in Brussels on February 11.

In the meantime Spanish Prime Minister Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been making frequent and sometimes unwelcome declarations, despite the fact that under the Lisbon Treaty the rotating presidency is handed a lesser role.

He upset his European partners by suggesting a binding system to force EU nations to follow the same economic policy.

Despite the EU's ever closer integration it remains an alliance of 27 very different member states.