Top EU liberal politician laments EU absence at Prague summit

Apr 8, 2010, 12:23 GMT

Brussels - One of the European Union's top liberal politicians on Thursday lamented the EU's absence at a major US-led summit in Prague, saying that the exclusion undermined the EU's efforts to boost its global profile.

The EU is trying to increase its influence worldwide, but officials warn that the bloc will be marginalized unless member states coordinate their foreign policies more effectively.

'At a time when the EU is struggling to shape its foreign policy structures to have more influence on a global level, this meeting represents a 'lose-lose' situation for both the EU member states attending ... and the EU,' the head of the liberal group in the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, said.

Verhofstadt, who served for nine years as Belgium's prime minister, is regarded as one of the most influential liberals in Europe.

On Thursday, on the sidelines of an historic arms-control summit with the Russian president in Prague, US President Barack Obama called a dinner with the leaders of 11 states in Central and Eastern Europe, 10 of them EU members.

But he did not invite either the president of the council of EU member states, Herman Van Rompuy, or the bloc's foreign-policy director, Catherine Ashton - the two officials who are meant to represent the bloc as a whole around the world.

Coming on the back of Obama's decision to skip a planned EU-US summit in May, the failure to invite top EU officials to Prague caused concern in Brussels, where some see it as proof that the US does not see the EU as a useful partner.

'Building a coherent trans-Atlantic relationship and framing lasting solutions for European security requires EU involvement. This dinner points yet again to the fact that the EU needs to make a common foreign policy a reality so that President Obama knows whom to call or who to invite for dinner,' Verhofstadt lamented.

However, EU officials downplayed the matter, saying that this was a bilateral issue between the US and the countries in question.

'The fact that they can have this dialogue is certainly positive ... There are regular contacts between the US and member states: we don't have to intervene in all of them or be invited to all these meetings,' European Commission spokesman Olivier Bailly said.