Ian Black: Jenin Rattles Prodi's Baby

Steaming hot coffee, pain au chocolat and freshly cut flowers on a sparkling white tablecloth make for a good start to a drizzly Brussels day, with Romano Prodi in pensive mood about Europe, his native Italy and - unusually but inevitably - the Middle East.

Breakfast chat with the president of the European commission in his 12th floor headquarters meanders gently from the general strike against Silvio Berlusconi's labour reforms, through the challenges of eastwards enlargement, to the elections in France and Germany that are paralysing so much urgent EU business.

But it was Europe's faltering role in the wider world that was preoccupying him last week. And not only because he had been unable to broker an end to Israel's siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (the genial, square-jawed professor of economics is also a devout Catholic), where Palestinian gunmen were holed up with Dominican priests.

Prodi had called for a meeting of the EU's association council with Israel - hinting mildly that preferential trade arrangements could be affected by Ariel Sharon's West Bank offensive. The European parliament went a step further, urging that the agreement be suspended. Both demands were quickly rebuffed by the member states, whose decisions have to be unanimous. Yet the governments were divided: France and five others condemned Israel at the UN human rights commission, while Britain and Germany voted against. Faute de mieux, all 15 carried on backing Colin Powell's "mission impossible" to secure a ceasefire and an Israeli pullback.

Prodi concedes this was not an impressive performance for an organisation seeking to play a more coherent global role - and anxious to temper, if unable to challenge, America's unassailable hegemony in the post-September 11 world.

But the problem, he explains - and this is the point at which non-converted eyes start to glaze over - is that the commission does not have exclusive competence in this area; governments refuse to use Jean Monnet's sovereignty-pooling "community method", even though parliament's "healthy" instincts show that public opinion is way ahead of them. "If we don't have a common foreign and security policy," Prodi insists, "we shall always be in this situation. Every country will follow its own agenda and instincts."

Heath Robinson institutional complexity (and ensuing disarray in foreign policy) contrasts unhappily with clarity in trade, where the commission's Pascal Lamy wields real power, and government ranks are closed in outrage over the tariffs George Bush has imposed on foreign steel imports. Ditto for Mario Monti, the cartel-busting Italian who can block global mergers without worrying unduly about reactions in Washington or Tokyo, never mind Paris or Berlin.

It is a sharp reminder that in the running battle between globalisation and the European nation state, sovereignty is eroding far faster in economics than in politics. The commission has proposed that the 15 pool their representation on the IMF board to boost their joint voting power to US levels. That may not happen. But no one even dares suggest Britain and France surrender their anachronistic seats on the UN security council for a single EU seat.

Prodi points to modest advances in policy towards the Balkans and Russia. Europe, he says with a grandfatherly twinkle, is a baby, not the dwarf it is so often called. But he still had to watch helplessly as the Israelis trashed the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority, paid for by European taxpayers. Private muttering about the "Likudisation" of US Middle East policy only highlights the sense of impotence in Brussels.

Such musing reinforces the impression that the gap between the EU's international aspirations and its performance is so wide that the aspiration itself must be called into question. Pio desiderio - Italian for wishful thinking - is no way to raise a child.

Only a crisis, Prodi argues - like a Marxist certain that contradictions will produce their ineluctable magic - can bring the changes that national governments are reluctant to concede today, just as it took Osama bin Laden to force through the highly integrationist measure of an EU-wide arrest warrant.

Up to a point, Professor P: it may be true of market liberalisation or budgetary coordination to make the eurozone function efficiently. But that begs the question of what qualifies as a crisis. If death and brutality in Jenin and Jerusalem have not made it, perhaps it will take a US war on Iraq to galvanise Europe into taking more united and effective action.

i.black@guardian.co.uk