One week after David Cameron marginalised Britain from the EU mainstream by refusing to endorse the eurozone's emergency measures, there is still shock and disbelief in Paris and Berlin. Nicolas Sarkozy has been pretty acerbic about perfidious Albion, which is maybe not particularly surprising. There have been centuries of mutual mudslinging across the English Channel and much of the British Press has blamed last Friday's débacle on Sarkozy rather than on Cameron.
French TV current affairs programmes are still chewing over what they see as Cameron's crazy decision, a judgement based on the view that putting the UK firmly outside the main circle of decision-making in Europe can only accelerate Britain's precipitous decline from global power to a small-to-medium sized entity floating somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, but failing to be granted a permanent berth by the United States. It's not hard to discern amongst some French commentators a certain Schadenfreude.
In Germany, in contrast, the feeling is one of genuine sadness as well as bafflement. But as a senior member of the German Foreign Ministry told me the other evening, Berlin has decided to keep schtum on the matter, fearing that any German comment would only inflame nationalistic sentiment in Britain. As it is, some British newspapers have delighted in banner-headlining the word Achtung! And some British Eurosceptics (though maybe one should more accurately call them Europhobes) have been quick to assert that Angela Merkel is bent on taking over Europe with the assistance of Nicolas Sarkozy. In some of the Continental Press, too, those two prominent Heads of Government have morphed into a single entity: Merkozy.
Yet it remains true that both Germany and France would have preferred that Britain be part of a triumvirate of major EU states helping to shape the future of the EU rather than their being a duopoly. Cameron's removal of the British Conservatives from the centre-right Europarliamentry grouping, the EPP, shortly after becoming party leader made that unlikely. His Brussels Summit 'veto' (as it is being widely described in the British media) has now made that impossible. Deputy PM Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, as junior partners in the Coalition Government in London, face a daunting challenge in trying to row Britain back from the uncomfortable place into which Cameron has steered the country.
This situation provides the worst crisis so far in the 18 months of the Coalition, though both parties have every reason to ensure the Coalition survives. The way that Cameron mishandled the Brussels Summit -- even keepng some of his LibDem Cabinet colleagues in the dark about what he intended to do -- shows that he does not really understand Coalition politics, which are an extreme rarity in the UK in peacetime, but the norm on the Continent.
Moreover, and probably more seriously, Cameron clearly does not understand consensus politics, which is how the EU operates and indeed the only way in which a grouping of 27 - soon to be 28 with Croatia accession - can operate. In consensus politics, there is negotiation and compromise and everything of import is agreed before any vote is taken. But David Cameron took British style adversarial politics to the Brussels Summit, forcing a confrontation in which he was bound to be the loser.