International Herald Tribune: With eyes on him, will Blair take the EU lead?

International Herald TribuneWith eyes on him, will Blair take the EU lead?

The problem with Tony Blair now grabbing Europe's leadership is not so much that the opportunity isn't there, or European interest lacking, but Britain's own real doubts about it - a sense that there's insufficient popular support here to make the move, and that, ultimately and genuinely, Britain and the European Union are less than a perfect fit.

Weird, but if you held up London and Paris press accounts of last week's botched EU summit side by side, you saw inverted, counterinstinctive images of European reality. This side of the channel essentially focused on the prospect of more intra-EU arguments to come, a tortured six-month EU presidency when Britain takes it over in two weeks, and a Europe that in two flailing days in Brussels once more showed itself as a swamp demanding Blair's caution if not contempt.

But beyond Calais, it was Tony Triumphant. Blair had savaged Jacques Chirac, and had shown, it was said, that the old French-German axis of power in Europe was dead. Not to mention Gerhard Schröder, whose vital signs were faint, Le Monde insisting he and Chirac were so disabled they had fallen beneath comparison to La Fontaine's fable of mutual assistance involving a blind man and a paralytic.