With the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by all members of the European Union, Europe is moving one big step ahead along its integration path, or what could better be called the  process of "European sneaky federalism". 

Europe has a president for the Council, and has  a high representative for foreign and security policy. Congratulations!

There might be lots of debate about what these labels actually cover, as well as to the cons and pros of such new positions, and JungleLaw intends to survey this debate soon. However, before one gets to evaluating the posts themselves, we have to pause a bit and notice the way these figures were put in place, because it is  indeed very distrubing, to say the least.

You may observe that they were not elected by the peoples of Europe. Neither was the president of the EU comission, nor any of the judges sitting on the all powerful European Court of Justice. Same goes for the president of the European Central Bank. That is to say, non of the officials of new Europe were ever elected by the citizenship. They were all selected.

Low-key Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy has been named the new full time President of the European Council, and Briton Catherine Ashton has been designated the EU’s first consolidated High Representative of Foreign and Security Policy. *Euronews

This brings back not so distant memories of "rule by the selected" (not elected!), who are wiser, more courages, better able and more efficient in leading the peoples to the desired destiny. Just think about the former Soviet Union, or indeed most of the history of mankind.

You may argue that this isnt the case, since we have a European Parliament, whose members were all elected by the peoples of Europe. This is certainly true, but the real question is what poweres do these MEP's have in the overall hierarchy of power in the new Europe (viz. the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the ECJ)?

But then you would argue that the Council is made up by the representatives of the peoples of Europe, all elected democratically in their home states. Indeed, all of them were elevated into power by the ususal "democratic manner " (i.e., lobby groups,   campaign funds, blackmail, etc).

Even if one would accept the argument above, one has to realize how much power any individual "sovereign" nation possesses  viz. the other member states and viz. the European burocracy standing out alone on a certain issue? How about the power of the less weatlhy states v. the rich states or the less populated v. the more populated?

No matter how much some are trying to downgrade the positions just created in Europe, the fact remains that Europe has just selected its 2 top officials, its President (notice the label) and its foreign minister.

These two persons were voted in by the heads of states of the European Union on 19th of november 2009. There was no list of nominees presented to the public before they were voted in to their office. News reports were circulating about favourate candidates, about secret ambitions of the "big threes" to put in office low profile people in order to keep control of the situation. The information the 500 million Europeans had about their future president was all leaked tips or just speculation. The whole process was thus quite secretive for some reason.

Even worse, news reports two days prior to the European summit, the unofficial nominees who later got the job were said to have appeared at the secretive Bilderberg meeting held in Brussels, with the participation of prominant business and political figures from the EU and the USA (Kissinger? probably he was there to see for himself the "man to call in Europe"...). [see Times Online: Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian Prime Minister, broke his silence before Thursday’s summit to choose the president — but only at a meeting of the secretive Bilderberg group of top politicians, bankers and businessmen.}

The Times reported that European wide taxes were apparently high on the first president's agenda: "His office released parts of his speech in which he talked of funding social welfare from new green taxes and went on to discuss “financing levies at European level”, which his spokesman said later was similar to Gordon Brown’s call for an international tax on financial transactions" - according to the Times.

I am curious to see how it will look like living under the new "president". Espesically so, since the president has already signed his first decree on behalf of the new European Council, modifying the rules of procedure of the European Council. Among the changes:

"Meetings of the European Council shall not be public." In addition, "Without prejudice to the provisions on public access to documents, the deliberations of the European Council shall be covered by the obligation of professional secrecy, except insofar as the European Council decides otherwise." (2.12.2009 Official Journal of the European Union L 315/55)

As a consequence of the above, the only thing Europeans will have access to are presumably the decisions of the Council addressed to them (or as the new procedure states: decisoins not addressed to anyone ).

One should start wondering about this new alarming obsession with secrecy in this new "democratic" Europe.

On a more optimistic note one may hope to see the florishing of a "culture of leaking" among any of the fdelegates attending the meetings. According to the new rules, each delegation to the meetings of the Council (i.e., each member state) may not consist of more than 20 delegates. That is already about 500 persons, and one would hope that at least one of those will have the guts and integrity to satisfy the right of the European public to know about the processes of its governance.