Meloni listed eight Ukraine peace formats in a month. Europe still can't say who picks up the phone

Somewhere in Rome on Thursday, a prime minister sat down and did what Brussels has avoided for a year. She counted.

Giorgia Meloni's letter to European Council President António Costa reads less like diplomacy and more like a diary of a continent that cannot find its own phone. In roughly a month, she writes, there was an "informal" meeting of national security advisers in Miami that Europeans learned about properly "only subsequently, from US sources". Then Oslo. Then, during a Nordic Council session in Helsinki, Finland's Alexander Stubb and Norway's Jonas Gahr Støre stepped out for a "national" phone call with Vladimir Putin. Then a Coalition of the Willing of 37 states was summoned to Berlin for 19 November. But first, on 12 November, a "Berlin format" meeting, "with a composition that differs yet again from all the others". Meanwhile technical talks in Brussels. Meanwhile "an unspecified European presence" at the US-brokered Ukraine–Russia talks in Abu Dhabi. And, somewhere in between, an informal summit in Dublin.

Eight rooms. No chair with "Europe" written on it.

The 'Eurosceptic' wants one voice. Imagine that

Here is the irony Brussels will not enjoy. For years the Italian prime minister was cast as the problem child of European unity, the nationalist who would wreck the common line. On Thursday she was the one begging for a common line. "By projecting the image of a Europe that is all over the place," she wrote, according to POLITICO, "we're doing nothing but serving the interests of those who want this war to continue." The Financial Times summed it up in one word: "disjointed".

She is right, and not only because the list is embarrassing. The European Union already has two jobs created precisely to end this confusion. Article 15 of the Treaty on European Union tells the President of the European Council to ensure the Union's external representation on foreign and security policy "at his or her level". There is a High Representative on top of that. The Lisbon Treaty was sold as the answer to the question usually pinned on Henry Kissinger, who later said he was not sure he ever asked it: who do I call if I want to call Europe?

Seventeen years later, the answer is: depends on the week, the city and who booked the room.

Clubs are not a strategy

Defenders of the current muddle will say the formats exist because they work. The E3 of Britain, France and Germany can move faster than 27 capitals. Britain and Norway are not in the EU but matter enormously for Ukraine's security. Finland has a long land border with Russia and every right to talk to its neighbour. Fair points, all of them, and Meloni's own letter concedes the first two: she wants any decision made "following consultation with the United Kingdom, Norway and the other European partners concerned".

But a club is not a mandate. When officials from the E3 sit down with the Americans and Ukrainians in Brussels, as they did this week, who exactly are they speaking for? Not Italy, the bloc's third-largest economy, which POLITICO reports was left out of Miami in October and out of Brussels this week. Not Poland in one format, but Poland in the next. When Italy did get into Oslo, its seat came in place of France, not alongside it. That is not European unity. That is musical chairs, played during a war.

The cost is not hurt feelings in Rome. It is leverage. The Kremlin reads guest lists. Washington reads them too. A Europe that sends a different delegation to every meeting is telling both that nobody on this side of the Atlantic can deliver a yes or a no. "All of this is making us less credible," Meloni wrote, in Euronews' rendering. She is being polite.

Yes, she has a domestic motive. So what?

Let us be fair to the cynics. Meloni is under pressure at home. Euronews notes that the opposition accuses her government of international irrelevance, and that some forces, including inside her own majority, want military help for Ukraine to stop. Being left out of the room is bad politics in Rome. A letter that demands a single European seat also, conveniently, ends the humiliation of not being invited.

But self-interest and correctness are not opposites. "I am not asking for a seat for Italy in this or that format," she wrote. Her government has pushed for an EU special envoy since January, and France, Austria, Czechia and Luxembourg have said they like the idea. Her Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has said the priority is "a spokesperson who can negotiate". The idea has been on the table for ten months. The only thing that has multiplied in that time is the formats.

The calendar is the punchline

Now look at the dates. The Ukrainian and Russian delegations meet in Abu Dhabi on 10 and 11 November. EU leaders discuss Meloni's letter, if Costa puts it on the agenda, in Dublin on 13 November. She wants a formal decision at the December summit.

So Europe will decide who represents it after the talks at which it wanted to be represented. That is the Brussels method in one sentence: insist loudly on "a seat at the table", then argue about the seating plan once the meal is over.

One voice, but whose?

There is a trap here for conservatives, and it is worth naming. "One voice" can easily become one more Brussels power grab: a Commission envoy nobody elected, answerable to nobody, negotiating away national interests in the name of unity. That is not what Europe needs, and it is not what the letter asks for. Meloni is asking the European Council, the room where elected heads of government sit, to decide "once and for all who sits at the negotiating table representing the European Union, and with what mandate".

That is the right order. Capitals agree the red lines. Capitals pick the negotiator. The negotiator reports back to capitals. The E3, the Nordics and the coalition feed into one channel instead of competing with it. Britain and Norway are consulted as partners, not left outside the door. And the mandate is written down, so the public in Rome, Warsaw or Helsinki can see what is being promised in their name.

None of this is glamorous. It means fewer photo opportunities in Miami and Oslo, and fewer leaders getting to feel like peacemakers on a Thursday afternoon. It also means that when Europe finally gets its chair, someone is sitting in it.

Love your country. Question the leaders who keep creating new formats instead of one answer. Meloni has written the list. Dublin should answer it. Abu Dhabi will not wait.