Back to the future of EU energy

Throughout his long life and many books, the famed Austrian-born management guru Peter Drucker returned often to a theme in his advice to political leaders: Focus on one thing.

At last Europe has a leader, such as it is. OK, most of us have never heard of Herman Van Rompuy. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. For the tortuously delayed ratification of the Lisbon Treaty finally allowed the European Union’s tribal factions to come together on a common chief last Thursday. By happy circumstance, I write this column from the very city that lent its name to the grand treaty creating Rompuy’s new job. What better place to opine on THE BIG THING that should dominate this continental leader’s agenda? It is energy.

One should not have to remind the EU’peans that this is what their confederation is really all about. But I will anyhow. In 1952, when war-weary European states came together to form what became today’s EU, they called it the “European Coal and Steel Community.” Many histories hold that in their wisdom, they wanted to keep the tools of war-making above sovereign politics. This is the noble version of history. The more practical (and truthful) version of EU history is that the driver was ensuring that sovereign politics did not screw up access to the coin of the era’s industrial realm: coal. Tariffs, politics, games around coal would derail post-war recovery. And so these six countries took the biggest step in policy innovation since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This act of statecraft was more profound than the establishment of the League of Nations or its successor the United Nations. It was smarter and more forward-thinking than America’s Marshall Plan. Because what these pioneers did in 1952 is put a new intellectual ball into play. This was the notion that sovereignty can be pooled or shared without being surrendered. They did so to ensure their economies’ access to energy.

More than 30 years ago I visited the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Getting in, and getting out, required hours and reams of pre- and post-visit paperwork. Yesterday I got on an airplane in Budapest, flew two and a half hours to Paris, ran between connections and then flew on for another two and a half hours to Lisbon. Two ticket agents asked to see a passport or other form of ID. But that was it. I strolled up to a taxi stand here without ever encountering a customs official or anyone with a stamp pad. This seamless continent is a marvelous achievement. So are health standards and agricultural support and regional R&D and the Erasmus program of exchange students. But who remembers that it all began to protect energy policy from the vicissitudes of sovereignty?

The EU has no energy policy today, save the standards it produces in search of an environmental policy amid naive hopes to curtail global climate change. The EU will enter next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen in search of a common environmental policy. And then it will be up to various state governments to cobble together energy policies in response. Most politicians will extol the mirage of “energy independence,” even in countries with populations equivalent to that of a good-sized Istanbul neighborhood. Which is analogous to ordering a national vaccination campaign against swine flu and then promising that each municipality will quickly brew the vaccine in its own laboratory. Nonsense.

A real battle with global climate change requires by definition pan-national, pan-sovereign strategies and policies. It requires complex innovations in energy generation, energy storage, and designs in just about everything to create “negawatts,” the clever term for conservation. Wind energy probably makes sense for many of Greece’s islands. It will make a lot more sense if those islands have access to Turkey’s power grid on listless days. Reduction of coal burning in coal-rich Poland probably makes sense. It would make a lot more sense if Poland had access to the Czech Republic’s uranium reserves or France’s nuclear waste storage facilities. Are Europeans worried about politics clogging up the gas pipelines from Russia, Central Asia and potentially the Middle East on which their energy security depends? They are. But the most logical step, to bring virtually the entire existing and planned pipeline network into the European Union’s own tent, is not on the agenda. Enlarging the EU to finally include Turkey would be the single best thing to happen for both European energy security and hope to curtail climate change.

It all adds up to just one idea. And I will concede it is a big one. The European Union can assure its future, if its new leader can just grasp and understand the union’s past. Too bad Peter Drucker wound up an American. How different the future might be if he had stayed in his native Austria.

David Judson is the editor-in-chief of the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review.