Roxburgh's Europe: October diary

Angus Roxburgh resumes his monthly diary - a wry and personal view from Brussels on events in the EU.

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I'm worried that the city of Strasbourg gets a raw deal in these columns.

So this month, let's have three cheers for lovely Strasbourg, with its asparagus festivals and magnificent lop-sided cathedral, and hiss boo for Luxembourg.

For, unbeknownst perhaps to many citizens, the EU invented not just the Strasbourg travelling circus, which takes members of the European Parliament to the Alsatian capital for three and a half days a month, but the Luxembourg circus too.

Every October (and every April and June) all ministerial EU meetings are held not in Brussels but in the wastelands of the Kirchberg plateau in the Grand Duchy.

They are held, moreover, in a dingy Soviet-replica tower block. Or rather, they normally are, but the block is currently closed for refurbishment, the Luxembourg custodians having apparently found some spare cash to do it up. Perhaps their friends down the road at Eurostat helped (see below).

During the renovations, one might have thought the ministers could have met in the purpose-built Brussels HQ of the Council of Ministers, as they do nine months out of 12.

But no, the Luxembourgers, determined to cling to their months in the EU limelight, have commandeered a conference centre as a temporary home for the Council.

So this month, six sets of ministers - finance, foreign, transport, agriculture, employment and environment - from 15 countries (accompanied by their delegations of Brussels-based ambassadors and officials) descended on the EU's smallest country for deliberations which everyone knows would be easier to conduct in Brussels.

The Brussels diplomatic community is as fed up of the shuttling as MEPs are of Strasbourg.

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Proper European capital

Yet another reason, you might think, to concentrate all things communautaire in Brussels.

Two people who agree with that sentiment are Romano Prodi, president of the Commission, and Guy Verhofstadt, prime minister of Belgium.

At the beginning of the month, Prodi reproached Brussels for not turning itself into a proper Capital of Europe. Verhfostadt responded with a 133-point plan to do just that.

It's a plan for the redevelopment of the so-called European Quarter, which the authors say should "reconcile the people of Brussels with Europe and involve Europeans in the fate of their capital". Now there's a task.

One can only hope it doesn't involve pulling down the few old Bruxellois town houses left standing by earlier developers.

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Enterprising horse play?

Before we leave Luxembourg, however, let us not forget that it is home not only to the Council of Ministers, some of the time, but also to a bit of the European Parliament (its administrative offices, conveniently situated halfway between the actual debating chambers in Brussels and Strasbourg).

Questionable payments were made to "equestrian clubs"

Then it has the EU's translation services, the Court of Auditors, and the European Court of Justice.

And Eurostat, the EU's troubled statistical agency, where auditors this month said 4.5m euros had gone missing in "a vast enterprise of looting" by senior officials in Luxembourg.

According to a leaked report, contracts and records were missing, questionable payments made to "equestrian clubs", and slush funds used to "get jobs done".

All this on top of the scandal already surrounding Eurostat's director general, who is currently under investigation over allegations of double accounting and secret bank accounts.

I think this is all perhaps a little too much for little Luxembourg to cope with. Next year Malta (population 394,000, compared to Luxembourg's 453,000) joins the EU. Time, surely, to hive off an institution to the Mediterranean island (at least for a month or two per year).

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Good neighbours

Highlight of the month was the debut of Chancellor Schroeder's new spokesman, Herr Chirac, at the Brussels summit.

"It's not difficult," he explained in fluent French, for the benefit of non-Germans in the audience, "because our views coincide on everything."

So could he imagine France being represented by the Germans if Chirac, like Schroeder, had to leave an EU gathering to attend a key parliamentary vote back home?

"Bien sur," shrugged Herr Chirac.

Not bloody likely, chorused the French press. Last time we had a German in charge...

No, no, no, let's not go down that road.

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Spat of the month

And diplomatic spat of the month was at Nato, during the Brussels summit, when it suddenly dawned on the US ambassador Nicholas Burns, that Europe has been hatching devious plans for defending itself without American help.

Too much kilt wearing and poetry for Mr Burns?

"It'll be the end of Nato!" he fumed, and demanded an emergency meeting of ambassadors, at which the Germans and French somehow managed to pretend their plans for an EU military headquarters were totally compatible with American interests.

What puzzles me is why it took Mr Burns so long to notice what was going on. I suspect he's been spending too much time as his alter ego - Nicholas Robert Burns, occasionally seen wearing a kilt and attending raucous whisky-fuelled festivities in honour of his namesake, Scotland's national poet.

All the camaraderie has clearly blinded him to the festering national and anti-American feelings still alive in Europe.