EUROPE : EC Partners Find British Leadership Sadly Lacking : Politics: Major’s clumsy handling at home of Maastricht Treaty is at the heart of the criticism.

When Britain took over the European Community presidency in July, Prime Minister John Major’s government expected to put its positive stamp on EC activities.

But on the eve of a British-hosted EC summit, which opens here in the Scottish capital today, Britain’s leadership has been criticized and beset, and Major can only hope to keep the summit from crumbling.

The British had planned--in the standard six months at the EC helm--on steering the group toward accepting its views for a looser political union and widening community membership; they also had hoped to somehow get Denmark back aboard after the Danes in June unexpectedly rejected the Maastricht Treaty, the accord that would advance European unity.

Major and British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd had hoped to show their colleagues that Britain is indeed serious about the 12-member EC, that it is a team player that genuinely wishes to be “at the heart of Europe.”

But along the way, British leadership has gone awry, particularly in the domestic handling of the Maastricht accord.

Many of the troubling events of the past six months, of course, have not been of Britain’s making: a recession; a run on the pound, which resulted in London’s pulling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the fallout from Denmark’s Maastricht Treaty rejection and France’s narrow approval of the accord.

But some of Britain’s EC problems have been self-inflicted, notably Major’s weak, shifting positions on the treaty, political observers say.

Although ratification of the treaty sailed through Britain’s Parliament early on, Major seemed to lose his nerve after the close French vote, political analysts argue.

Specifically, Major allowed right-wing, anti-European members of his own Conservative Party to dictate what happened next with the Maastricht accord. He decided to hold an unnecessary parliamentary vote on the treaty--which only squeaked through.

Having won the vote, Major promised fellow EC leaders at a Birmingham summit in October that he would press forward with complete ratification of the Maastricht agreement to get that step out of the way.

To the dismay of his EC partners--and reportedly his foreign minister--Major then announced that he would not call for a final vote on the accord until after the Danes hold their second referendum sometime next year. That move caused a crisis of confidence among European leaders about Major’s credibility.

“Some Europeans were beginning to wonder whether Margaret Thatcher was so bad after all,” commented one foreign diplomat in London. “You generally knew where she stood.”

Major and his aides also were less than diplomatic in handling Spain and the other “Club Med” countries of Southern Europe--which are net recipients of EC subsidies--by refusing even to hear their complaints.

(Major offered extra subsidies for infrastructure improvement projects to the EC’s four poorest nations--Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece. But Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez rejected the offer, clouding prospects for the EC summit’s success, the Associated Press reported Thursday.)

Meantime, Norman Lamont, Major’s chancellor of the exchequer, is widely thought to have bungled his dealings with the Germans over getting the Bundesbank to lower interest rates. That failed effort has left a bitter aftertaste in both Bonn and London.

Major, confronting so many problems, may not have had the time to work out coherent policies on EC issues, such as admitting new members sooner rather than later, many analysts say.

As one EC observer commented about Britain’s vaunted diplomatic machine, “The British presidency is like a Rolls-Royce without a steering wheel.”

Britain has much to repair at the summit today and Saturday, particularly in the key task of working out a formula under which Denmark can conduct a new referendum on the Maastricht Treaty--without alienating all the other countries that are approving the accord as is.