WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- This weekend Europe picks its Thomas Jefferson, the man whose name is destined to ring through the ages as the bard and sage and architect who drafted the immortal prose of the founding document of the other free and prosperous superpower.
That's the theory. In reality, a fairly squalid deal will be reached at the Belgian royal palace of Laeken, where the European Union's 15 heads of government are holding their summit.
It will hinge on whether a bunch of food scientists find themselves based in Naples, Italy, or Helsinki, Finland. And it will decide which superannuated politician gets the job of making sure this high-minded European Constitution does not go so far as to threaten the power of the national governments.
Sadly, there is no Jefferson, and little prospect of any decent prose at all. But a chairman has to be appointed to run the convention (British suspicion of Europe's federalists means it cannot be called a Constitutional Convention) that is supposed to draft the institutional reforms required to equip the 15-nation EU to become the 25-nation EU of 2005.
There are a number of candidates for the job. The first, most qualified, most experienced and most passionately European, is Jacques Delors. A former French finance minister (who managed President Francois Mitterand's sensible 1983 U-turn away from doctrinaire socialism), Delors was for a decade the most energetic and visionary president the European Commission ever had. He pushed through the single market rules, the Maastricht Treaty that catapulted Europe from being a sleepy customs union into a prototype superstate with its own single currency and foreign policy.
Naturally, with qualifications like these, he won't get the job. He's far too dangerous. Besides, he would need full-hearted French endorsement to get it. President Jacques Chirac is suspicious of too much Euro-federalism, and is no fan of Delors. Fellow French Socialist Lionel Jospin, the prime minister, should support Delors but won't.
First, this is Jospin's chance to pay back Delors for a supposed slight back in the early 1980s. Second, since Chirac will veto him there is no point in Jospin wasting his vote, so he'll support Chirac's candidate and maybe bank the favor. Third, Jospin did not spend his life becoming a leader of France in order to give the power away to some European federal system based in Brussels.
So Jospin and Chirac have agreed to support as France's candidate a former president of the 1970s, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who is now front-runner because the Germans have agreed to go along with the French choice. The Brits will probably back him, too, recognizing in the proud and imperious Giscard one of these Frenchmen who can be relied on to spout high-minded federalist guff about Europe while in reality looking after the national interests of France.
That's fine with Tony Blair, since London has national interests too and deep suspicions of a European constitution. And Blair's preferred candidate, Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, is not about give up his premiership for the job of herding the convention's 750 assorted dignitaries, lawyers, trade unionists and businessmen and non-governmental organizations into some kind of consensus.
But Giscard may not get it, for there are two other candidates. The first is Italy's former Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, a keen federalist and genuinely nice man. That rules him out. Italy's current premier, Silvio Berlusconi, has too many anti-federalists in his coalition government to back Amato, but will instead use him as a bargaining chip, dropping the Amato nomination to get what Berlusconi really wants.
That brings in the next candidate, Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, another decent man who did a masterful job of negotiating the end to the Kosovo war. Ahtisaari is pro-European, but no wild-eyed federalist, and both the Brits and Germans could back him if Giscard falters. But the Finns also want their turn at the EU trough, their chance to bring jobs, prestige and a sizable EU budget to their country.
Both Italy and Finland want the EU's biggest new pork barrel, the European Food Agency, to be based in their country. Hundreds of well-paid scientists and administrators, lots of international conferences and fine dinners (and lots of chances to promote Tuscan wine), along with the inevitable coterie of agri-business lobbyists, outside labs and think-tanks amount to quite a prize in these recessionary days.
For a poor region of Italy, it amounts to an instant injection of a well-heeled and cosmopolitan middle class. A thousand such officials, on an average $100,000 a year, means an instant housing boom and an annual $100 million income boost.
But then as Jefferson recognized, the essence of being a politician is the chance to spend other's peoples' money. That's probably the only Jeffersonian legacy that will linger in Laeken this weekend as the Europeans horse-trade their way to giving Giscard the job, the Finns the Food Agency and Berlusconi something else. Something more high-minded may take place, but don't bet on it.
As Jefferson himself noted in an 1815 letter to a European correspondent, "I fear, from the experience of the last 25 five years, that morals do not of necessity advance hand in hand with the sciences."
