eurealist.co.uk

Has anyone else noticed that Javier Solana has been in the news a lot this week; was what I was going to write, but Jonathan Lockhart has beaten me to it.
Jonathan Lockhart’s Notebook:

“Just who is guiding Javier Solana?

Javier Solana has been in the news a lot recently. Mr Solana is the European Union’s ‘High Commissioner for the Common Foreign and Security Policy’, although many lazy journalists - if laziness is the explanation - have taken to referring to him as the EU’s ‘foreign minister’. That will certainly be the case officially if the EU’s statebuilders get their way.

But if his job is to represent the so-called Common Foreign and Security Policy, it presumes that there is a common policy to represent. Jack Straw, the UK’s foreign secretary (while we still have one) is in no doubt that the powers of the putative EU foreign minister are clearly defined and assures us regularly that even under the new constitution Britain will keep its veto on foreign policy.

That is not true, and here’s why.”