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03/08/2010

It was a week in which she was finally hoping to do everything right, for a change. She met with the new president of Ukraine on Monday and flew to Haiti the next day to visit earthquake victims. She had hardly recovered from jetlag after returning from the Caribbean before jetting to the Spanish city of Cordoba for a meeting of EU foreign ministers.

And what did Catherine Ashton, 53, the EU's chief diplomat, come home to at the end of this busy week? More grumbling.

She was criticized for arriving in Haiti too late -- more than six weeks after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has since been to Chile to survey the damage from a subsequent earthquake that struck there; for being tardy in Cordoba, after having missed a meeting with the EU defense ministers and the NATO secretary general on Mallorca a week earlier; and because, in the view of some of the attendees, she came to Cordoba equipped with shoddy material on the development of the European diplomatic service.

Her predecessor Javier Solana, known for his busy schedule, flew an average of about 6,000 kilometers (3,750 miles) a week. Ashton has recently been traveling three times as much, and yet, according to the BBC, the flying EU ambassador's reward for her efforts has been nothing but "flak" from the member states. As one top European diplomat said, a battle is underway "between political pygmies," one that is symptomatic of the EU's loss of significance on the global stage.

Awkward Smiles

For the last 100 days, Catherine Ashton, also known as Baroness Ashton of Upholland, has been the most powerful woman on the continent -- on paper, at least. As the "high representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy," the British politician represents half a billion people living in the 27 members of the European Union. Almost 7,000 bureaucrats are expected to report to her at the new European foreign service, the European External Action Service (EEAS), which will have an annual budget of several billion euros.

As recently as 2001, Ashton was the chair of the health authority in the British county of Hertfordshire. What happened after that has the dimensions of a fairytale. It sometimes seems as if Ashton feels the same way, particularly when she is standing there, smiling awkwardly and dressed in her all-purpose outfit with a colorful scarf, next to Hillary Clinton in Washington, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York or Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow. At moments like these, Ashton looks a little like Cinderella arriving at the royal palace.

The explanation for how a Labour politician whose most distinctive traits are -- in the words of former BBC editor Rod Liddle -- "Stalinist political correctness" and the "charisma of a caravan site on the Isle of Sheppey" captured the top spot in EU diplomacy is as simple as it is grotesque. The appointment of the inexperienced Briton seemed to guarantee that no one would interfere with the national foreign policies of individual EU member states, particularly the powerful nations of France, Germany and Great Britain.

But now there are growing fears, even in Paris and Berlin, that Europe may have missed an historic opportunity by choosing Ashton.

A Face for Europe

Of course, the bar was high. Together with the first permanent president of the European Council, the new position of high representative was intended to finally give the EU "a face and a voice." Both figures were to provide Europe with new foreign policy stature, placing it on the same level as major global powers, and making it constantly reachable and both capable and willing to make decisions.

But now this dream is crumbling, just 100 days since Ashton and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy took office. And Lady Ashton is doing her part to further its demise.

The grumbling was understated at first. For instance, an internal memo from the German Foreign Ministry quoted in the Guardian warned that under Ashton's leadership, Great Britain could acquire a "disproportionate" amount of influence on the diplomatic service.

Was the leaked memo meant as a deliberate warning shot from the Germans and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, delivered before the new, lucrative positions were assigned in Brussels? Werner Hoyer, a senior official at the Foreign Ministry, sought to downplay the issue by saying that, despite all the skepticism, "our position is clear: We are trying to support the woman."

The German diplomats had changed their tune by last Friday's meeting of EU foreign ministers, however. Westerwelle told reporters that the European foreign service should not be "spoon-fed by other European institutions," and that it must be "completely independent." His French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, agreed, saying: "There is still a lot of work to be done." Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger commented: "There is huge frustration among the member states that the whole issue would be steered by the Commission."

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• Part 1: Walking the Thin Line with Catherine Ashton
• Part 2: Poor Understanding of Foreign Policy