by Nick Archer, Ambassador to Denmark.
What a difference six months make! The British Embassy Warsaw’s first Presidency blog, which I have just re-read, exuded can-do, optimism, celebration, naturally reflecting how the Poles looked forward to their time in the chair.
Beginning a Presidency now, in the crisis atmosphere created by the continuing travails of the euro and the eurozone, feels very different, both for the country – I suspect – and for this Embassy.
Will crisis management leave any time for low-key but necessary work to complete the single market and put the foundations in place for renewed growth across our continent? What are the upsides of doing a lot of unglamorous work shorn, now that the Lisbon Treaty is in place, of the grandstanding opportunities formerly afforded to a Head of Government and Foreign Minister? Can a small-country Presidency have any impact when the Big Boys are rampaging around as we have seen one or two do recently?
The Danish answer to such questions is, I think, do what you can and as well as you can. Play to your strengths – a respected bureaucracy, that Scandinavian reputation for probity and fair-dealing, the relative absence of national baggage, the realism of the veteran as opposed to the over-enthusiasm of the first timer – and emerge with the consolidated respect of your peers and some worthwhile, if not headline-worthy, achievements.
So that is where this Embassy is, too. Succumbing to the temptation to misquote Hamlet in my pre-Presidency scene-setting reports to London (as nearly all Ambassadors here do succumb in some context or other) I lighted on some words of Gertrude’s: ‘more matter with less art’. The team here has spent recent weeks and months getting its collective head around some pretty challenging matter – the ‘Revision of the Sulphur in Marine Fuels Directive’ sounds something of a show stopper. We’re now all ready to move from preparing the Presidency to helping the British government make a success of it as it unfolds, in myriad such subject areas.
But when will somebody fire the starting pistol? Or have I just not heard it? Tuesday morning I was in white tie at the Palace for the Diplomatic Corps exchange of new year greetings with Queen Margrethe; our greeting to Her, and Her’s to us, both made reference to the Presidency, but the first Council here (Justice and Home Affairs) is not until the last week of this month; what happens between now and then?
This blog, to which many of my Embassy colleagues will contribute, aims to give you a real sense of how a Presidency feels in real time, with stops and starts as well as the set-pieces. I hope you enjoy it enough to become a regular reader.