Waiting For Barack.(International Edition; POINT OF VIEW)(Barack Obama in the G-20 summit)

Byline: Denis MacShane; Macshane is a Labour M.P. and was Britain's minister for Europe under Tony Blair.

Obama needs from Europe a Mozart symphony or a Beethoven 'Ode to Joy'--not a cacophony of voices.

The red carpets are being rolled out for Europe's most popular politician. In April, Barack Obama will turn up to meet his fans across the Atlantic, first for a G20 economic summit in London and then for a NATO summit in Strasbourg on the French-German border. Meantime, "Waiting for Barack" could be the title of a new play as all of Europe looks anxiously to Washington for answers to the world's intractable problems: a banking freeze-up, a job meltdown, a Middle East with no solution in sight, an Iran racing for nuclear arms, a quagmire in Afghanistan, a Russia that treats the European Union as a playpen for the Kremlin's divide-and-rule diplomatic games.

Yet Obama is the first president in decades with no experience or knowledge of Europe. His predecessor had a father who was an East Coast Atlanticist, while Bill Clinton was an Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar who played Europe like a violin. Nobody yet knows what Obama will ask of or offer Europe. But one thing is clear. Instead of a united European approach, there is a cacophony of voices as European leaders spend more time complaining about each other than finding common solutions to propose to the new president.

Since the economic crisis broke last autumn, there has been on average a European summit every three weeks. Like the Congress of Vienna, which met to decide Europe's fate in 1814 and famously danced rather than make decisions, today's European Union leaders are better at scoring points than adopting a common policy. Take Nicolas Sarkozy. In a hastily arranged television interview after mammoth demonstrations showed French discontent with their hyperactive president, he launched into a tirade against Gordon Brown's economic management. Little matter that top French economists had already endorsed Brown's fiscal-stimulus approach or that the British leader had gone out of his way to schmooze with Sarkozy after the frosty rapport between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. Sarkozy's assault on Brown made headlines in Britain and showed British-French disunity back in business.

Brown had already been irritated by the public criticisms of his fiscal boost from the finance ministers of Germany and the Netherlands--both fellow center-left politicians, as it happens. Thus it was a moment of pure schadenfreude when EU forecasts showed Germany facing a bigger drop in GDP than Britain. Briefers were quickly sent out from No. 10 to inject ...