Europe united against foreign affairs chief

PARIS - She is Europe's most powerful woman. But that's just in theory.

Just 100 days into her job as the European Union's first foreign affairs chief, Baroness Ashton has been variously characterised as a stooge, a pygmy, a jellyfish and a charm-free zone. Can she survive?

"Catherine Ashton is now the European figure that everyone loves to hate," says the Brussels newsletter Presseurop.

"Just three months into her mandate as the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the question begs as to whether Catherine Ashton is heading for the exit."

Ashton, 53, is tasked with setting up and heading a diplomatic corps, the External Action Service (EAS), to give 500 million EU citizens a single voice on the world stage.

But in her first weeks in office, Ashton has been ripped into for failing to attend a Nato defence ministers' meeting (she went to a presidential inauguration in Ukraine instead), for flying belatedly to earthquake-hit Haiti and ignorance of world affairs.

But her biggest vulnerability is in the EU's turf battles.

Ashton has written three working papers proposing how the new institution would operate. Her vision is under attack on pretty much all sides and Brussels insiders say her hopes of getting the organisation approved by the end of April are dim.

Behind the scenes, they say, the EU's executive, the European Commission, is fighting to cut back EAS control over key areas such as development aid and nobble plans to take over the commission's existing diplomatic structures.

Critics are dismayed, for the EAS is supposed to be independent of the commission and of the Council of Ministers, the EU's other decision-making giant.

"There is huge frustration among the member states that the whole issue would be steered by the commission," Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger said last week. "It is very clear that we cannot go on like this."

Ashton's critics say she refuses to put up a fight because she is weak and has a conflict of interest - she wears two hats as foreign policy chief and vice-president of the commission.

Some of the bigger member states, meanwhile, are setting down markers that they expect Ashton not to tread on jealously guarded areas of national sovereignty. Smaller states, meanwhile, are demanding their share of the spoils.

Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia are clamouring for jobs for their nationals in the EAS, which is expected to wield staff of up to 7000 people and a budget of several billion euros.

At present, the 27 member states are publicly supporting Ashton, not least because it was only last November that they overwhelmingly named her to the job, along with a mild-mannered Belgian, Herman van Rompuy, as president of the European Council, which gathers heads of state.

The pair were ideal consensus candidates and thus were no threat to member states.

Just nine years ago, Ashton was chairwoman of a health authority in Hertfordshire, a county north of London, after being elevated to the House of Lords by Prime Minister Tony Blair, an old friend she had met while working for non-governmental organisations.

After a succession of junior ministerial appointments, she was parachuted into Brussels in October 2008 as Britain's EU commissioner to replace a Labour Party heavyweight, Peter Mandelson, who returned to London to support Blair's successor, Gordon Brown.

Just over a year later, she was named the EU's first foreign affairs chief, an unprecedented responsibility.

If Ashton has won praise for organisational skill in past jobs, enemies say she has no background in diplomacy, no charm, nor any reservoir of support among the EU's heavy guns. These would give her a natural seat at the top table alongside Hillary Clinton and other big hitters.

"Never elected by anyone, anywhere, totally unqualified for almost every job she has done, she has risen to her current position presumably through a combination of down-the-line Stalinist political correctness and the fact that she has the charisma of a caravan site on the Isle of Sheppey," commentator Rod Liddle wrote in the conservative British weekly the Spectator.

The German news weekly Der Spiegel points out: "Her detractors claim she doesn't have enough dedication, stature or experience. But the EU's leaders chose her precisely because she lacked those qualities."

Ashton pleads for patience and says differences of opinion in any organisation are normal.

"It's just happening here in a much more public way as you try to turn the bare bones of the [Lisbon] treaty ... into what we actually do on the ground," she said.

Others see the problem is rooted less in personalities than in a fundamentally flawed design.

Ashton and van Rompuy's jobs were created under the Lisbon Treaty, which was approved last year after a rollercoaster ride.

But complaints are growing that, instead of streamlining decision-making, the treaty has simply added more layers, leaving the world unsure as to who, exactly, speaks for Europe.