The European Union gave U.S. nominee Paul Wolfowitz a green light on Wednesday by calling him the "incoming president of the World Bank" on the eve of a board meeting to choose a new head of the development bank.
After the U.S. deputy defense secretary met senior European finance and development officials in Brussels, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said on behalf of the EU: "We had a constructive and friendly meeting where European ministers were putting all the questions they wanted to put to the incoming president of the World Bank."
Wolfowitz, an architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, said he realized his nomination was controversial, but he was passionate about fighting poverty and would involve the EU and other stakeholders fully in the bank's development mission.
Europeans seek larger role on bank's executive
Earlier on Tuesday, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who chaired the informal meeting with EU ministers of finance or development as holder of the bloc’s rotating presidency, told Reuters the Europeans would seek a larger role on the bank’s executive.
“We have to make sure that the Millennium development goals are the basis on which the incoming president of the World Bank organizes his work,” Juncker said of the United Nations objectives to halve world poverty by 2015.
“We have to make sure that Europeans will be represented in a better way on the managing board of the bank,” he added.
EU diplomats said the Europeans would press Wolfowitz to fill two vacant vice-president positions, one with a European and the other with a representative of developing nations.
France was proposing the French head of the Paris Club of creditor nations, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, to be Wolfowitz’s deputy under this arrangement, they said.
Juncker arranged the talks in response to widespread unease among European governments. Wolfowitz’s willingness to cross the Atlantic at short notice to reassure Washington’s partners was seen as a significant goodwill gesture.
Wolfowitz's intentions, experience questioned
“We want above all to insist that he continues with the new orientation of the World Bank begun by Jim Wolfensohn ... and in particular that he makes fighting poverty its focus,” German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, who voiced open skepticism when Wolfowitz was nominated, told reporters.
EU governments have mostly avoided public criticism of a man more widely associated with the unilateral use of U.S. military power rather than with development assistance. But some non-government organizations have slammed the choice.
British-based international aid group Oxfam raised doubts on Tuesday over Wolfowitz’s fitness to head the Bank.
“Oxfam is concerned that Paul Wolfowitz has, in the past, heavily criticized international institutions and has no direct experience of development issues,” Luis Morago of Oxfam’s EU office said in a statement.
“For these reasons we are calling for a statement clarifying Mr. Wolfowitz’s position on these critical issues, and urge governments and their executive directors at the Bank to take up these issues, and the views of developing countries, when considering this nomination.”
The nomination came at a time when European leaders are trying to mend fences with Washington after the Iraq war.
Also, the ministers noted the EU was also looking for U.S. support for its candidate to head the World Trade Organization, former European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, while individual EU states also sought backing for their candidates to head the U.N. Development Program and for U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
