Human touch
Solana once again demonstrated his charisma, embracing hundreds of colleagues and journalists, exchanging jokes and laughing at anecdotes from the good old times. This lasted into the small hours at a cozy farewell event hosted by the 'Autoworld' car museum in Brussels.
Only with newly-appointed European Council president Herman Van Rompuy did Solana find the time for a lengthy, thoughtful private discussion, with the Spaniard spending the majority of the evening among the jovial crowd.
'Infernal' schedule
Close friends and collaborators said Solana had over the years managed "unbelievable" flight schedules and an "infernal" number of meetings with foreign representatives, several of whom are considered to be the "least likeable" people on Earth. The fact that "he never sleeps" had helped him acheive this, they said.
Indeed, on a number on occasions, Solana asked collaborators to provide him with books and reading material, it emerged, with his "huge appetite" for information leading him to cite as an excuse that he could not sleep.
Kosovo war 'the worst time'
Solana, formerly a leftist militant who secretly joined the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in 1964, campaigned against his country's NATO accession. In May 1982, Spain joined the Atlantic alliance following a referendum.
Recently, Solana told EurActiv that in his fifteen years as a high-level international representative (from 1995 to 1999 he served as NATO secretary-general and from October 1999 until 30 November 2009 as EU's High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy), his "worst time" had been the 1999 Kosovo war.
From 24 March to 10 June 1999, NATO conducted an airborne bombing campaign against the then-Yugoslavia, in response to atrocities and ethnic cleansing carried out by Yugoslav forces in the mostly Albanian-populated Serbian province of Kosovo. Over 38,000 combat missions were carried out by NATO planes, and a number of civilian targets were hit by mistake, tirggering strong resentment.
As NATO secretary-general at the time, Solana was loathed by Serbs, and during the Kosovo war, toilet paper adorned with Solana's face was on sale in the streets of Belgrade.
Antonio Missiroli, director of studies at the European Policy Centre (EPC), told EurActiv that it had not been easy for Solana, taking account of his background, to lead NATO in its first large-scale military operation in 1999: indeed, NATO's largest conflict since not only the Cold War but the establishment of the alliance back in 1949.
Attacks from all sides
"Let's not forget also that the way the Kosovo war was waged generated a number of tensions inside the alliance," Missiroli said, recalling the period of the 'Quint', a permanent telephone conference between the foreign ministers of the US, Britain, France, Germany and Italy, who negotiated targets for the Serbia bombardment. This had in his words antagonised the Pentagon, which said at the time that "we do not want a war by committee".
"Kosovo was to a certain extent an end and a beginning. The end of the unhappy decade of the Yugoslav wars, as it was the last one, but it was also the one that saw NATO take the lead in military terms, and it was the beginning of a different period in which NATO started to look elsewhere, and Solana took on a different job," he said.
"Certainly, for a personality like Solana, the tensions during that period related also to the fact that there were objections to the legality of the war operations in Kosovo [NATO did not have the backing of the UN Security Council after Russia had threatened to veto any resolution authorising the use of force], but this contributed to his decision to accept the offer that was made to him, to move to the EU as HR," Missiroli explained.
When Solana was appointed the EU's High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy after the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty, member states basically replaced the position of a mere "senior diplomat" with the figure of Solana, Missiroli recalled.
"What happened is that when the treaty entered into force, in the middle of the Kosovo war, the member states decided to appoint, first a senior political figure, but also the outgoing secretary-general of NATO, in order to add credibility vis-à-vis the Americans, but also in terms of operational experience. So in one go, the decision was to shift from a top diplomat to a senior political figure, without changing the treaty," the analyst said.
Solana, said Missiroli, was extremely successful at fleshing out his job description with content without going beyond what the treaty said or did not say. He was also extremely successful at giving a voice and a friendly face to European foreign policy, the analyst told this website.
Looking for 'Pattana'
It is only on this basis that EU leaders decided to proceed with plans to create a European External Action Service, the idea being that the Union needed a 'Pattana' figure – someone who would combine the qualities of Solana and Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong and a European commissioner from 2000 to 2004, Missiroli recalls.
According to insiders, Solana and Patten are known to have got along very well together, which was not exactly the case when Benita Ferrero-Waldner took over from Patten as external relations commissioner. Another reason for Ferrero-Waldner being on the defensive against Solana was a decision dating from the signature of the Constitutional Treaty that Solana would take on the new High Representative's job in November 2006. Because the Constitutional Treaty never entered into force, Solana could not become the EU's first ever double-hatted High Representative.
Searching for deputies?
Solana managed to make a virtue out of necessity, as he has a very slim staff working for him. This was played by him as an asset rather than a handicap, because it allowed him to play the role of a roving diplomat, proving that he was more appropriate for his job as he saw it rather than to head a bureaucracy, the EPC director said.
Solana's main achievement was the creation of Baroness Ashton's job, Missiroli concluded, adding however that due to the fact that Ashton will have to combine the travel schedule of Solana with the bureaucratic duties of a commissioner, her job description will be "nearly impossible" to complete without hiring deputies.
