Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ In Italy they had largely had to make their own way to Brussels. Furthermore, from a position of influence in the 1970s, in Britain after mid–1980 the CBI found itself isolated from government in a way unprecedented in post-War history – yet still having to defend UK membership on the UK political stage, as if it were an open issue.⁵¹ (Operations of these networks are considered in chapter 10.)

      In spite of the problems which national peak organizations encountered at home, their European counterpart UNICE was not their preferred choice for activity when it came to trying to influence the Council of Ministers or the Commission.⁵² On the one hand, their members could use the sectoral bodies which already represented each industry; on the other, they could form new organizations of leading industrialists, such as the European Round Table or the group around Guido Carli, governor of the Bank of Italy, which included important heads of banks such as Alfred Herrhausen (Deutsche Bank). The heads of large companies, many of them French, members of AGREF, the association of larger, private sector companies, notably less protectionist and conservative in their own outlook after Mitterrand’s 1983 turnabout, now looked to links with MEPs in the Parliament, such as the Kangaroo group, or developed their own specific companies’ commercial strategies: of which the Albert Report and Wisse Dekker’s report on behalf of Philips (Netherlands) are prime examples.

      But whatever the mode of activity (which in the case of national organizations frequently overlapped), the central issues remained the same: abolition of non-tariff barriers and establishment of the internal market. The CBI’s European Steering Committee had indeed held this in its sights continuously from as early as August 1974, and from March 1977 was working closely with the French Patronat. Again, if it is fair to generalize from CBI records, governments used these peak organizations to achieve similar national ends, which in itself encouraged them to address Brussels more directly.⁵³ But on the whole, these semi-public efforts took care to keep industry’s initiatives free of the political vortex during the confused infighting among member states in the period 1979–83.

      Much of the industrialists’ work overlapped. Wisse Dekker remained a leading member of ERT while drafting his report, Europe 1990, with Philips’ backing. According to the CBI, 90% of their proposals coincided with his. Europe 1990 also foreshadowed the internal market White Paper in 1985, but since it was begun in the recession under the guidance of firms in the front line of exposure from American and Japanese competition, it was set in a defensive mode, tinged with protection. Fears of the social consequences of 10–12 million unemployed at a time when trades unions’ bargaining strengths in Brussels appeared to be reviving, conditioned its aims of reducing costs without hitting either wages or salaries. So many Ministries of Labour, Commission officials and MEPs felt soured by the way that the Vredeling Directive had been emasculated by a combination of industrial federations, UNICE, and the American Chamber of Commerce’s European Committee,⁵⁴ that they were prepared to listen to ETUC arguments about the ‘transaction costs’ of ignoring the social partners – that is, predisposed to avoid electoral unpopularity and industrial relations conflict.

      The CBI (which had fought Vredeling all the way with support from its government and Conservative MEPs) could see that its 10% divergence from the Dekker Report lay not only in its labour market policy but in important questions about how to address all non-tariff barriers together, how to incorporate financial markets, and how far to liberalize and deregulate, rather than erect new barriers where the Euro-borders met the outside world. How effective all this was in the general array of influence bearing on the Single European Act in 1985 is a question for the next chapter: here it should be noted that it aroused the interest of all the allies against Vredeling, among American firms, in the long-established European Committee of AmCham, and also among Swiss firms such as Nestlé and Ciba-Geigy, which were already habituated to working in the EC.

      Older pressure groups joined in, under new banners: Jean Monnet’s Action Committee, which he had dissolved in 1975, was refounded in 1979 by Leo Tindemans and Max Kohnstamm, primarily to campaign for European union, but it included industrialists whose main interest was the internal market. When in the second half of 1982 the European Parliament produced a resolution for European Union, the Commission responded with its own proposals for reinforcing the internal market. At the Copenhagen Summit in December, heads of government were finally persuaded to call on the Council of Ministers ‘to decide on the priority measures to reinforce the internal market’.⁵⁵

      Of this, Arthur Cockfield would remind them, in his foreword to his White Paper on establishing the internal market, three years later. At the time, it led to a modestly constituted Internal Market Council and the beginnings of a concerted plan by DG3, together with officials of the largest member states, whose outward face could be read in a host of Commission papers arguing this as the only way to recover competitiveness;⁵⁶ and (since EMU was always a contingent matter) currency and monetary stability. Under the German Presidency the plan gathered momentum,⁵⁷ and at Council level culminated in the ‘solemn declaration’ on EC Unity at Stuttgart 19 June 1983.

Soon afterwards, in September, once the drama over French restraints on the entry of Japanese VCRs had been resolved, the French government produced a memorandum Vers une espace industrielle Européenne. A Commission mandate of sorts now existed to prepare something more specific for the Athens Summit in December. But too much Council time was being consumed by the acerbic British budget question (from which the French government took advantage to delay Spanish accession, reform of the CAP and structural funds). The hostilities which had attended the messy EMS general revaluation in March had also not entirely disappeared. The European Parliament was dissipating its energies on dreams of European Union inspired by Stuttgart (which Thatcher regarded as itself an illusion⁵⁸ and which Mauroy also condemned as eroding the national right of veto). Systemic reform depended that summer on three assumptions: that West Germany would not drop its opposition to increasing the Community’s revenue by 1 % on VAT until the reform process had actually started (even at the risk of the EC’s temporary bankruptcy), that the British would not shout too loudly, and that Greece would handle its first Presidency competently.

      On these assumptions and inspired by Stuttgart, senior officials in the Commission such as Fernand Braun (DG3) and Paolo Cecchini, Maurice Carpentier, Peter Klein, and Riccardo Perissich, prepared something more dynamic and far-reaching than Commissioner Narjes’ long catalogue of directives-in-waiting since the mid–1970s (which was not actually published until mid–1984). They were able to capitalize on work done in some Departments of Industry, notably in Bonn, London and Paris and on the technical harmonization and the implications of Cassis de Dijon, so that by October, Narjes could outline ‘a more general common approach’ on mutual recognition, rather than total harmonization, to the Internal Market Council. Since Britain, France and Germany now had the clearest policies in this area, Cecchini invited top officials from the Economics Ministry in Bonn, the DTI, and the French Industry Ministry to meet him at the Chateau de Namur, 15–16 October, and here, under very informal Commission auspices, a text was agreed and immediately translated into the three languages. This was fed indirectly to the Steering Committee texts for Athens, as a prototype ‘declaration for the internal market’.⁵⁹ It was lost of course, in the Athens debacle, illustrating both the powers and limits of sub rosa Commission work. But its substance emerged eventually in the EC resolution, 7 May 1985, which indicates the strength of such little-seen trends.

      There had been no reason before Athens to think these preparations inadequate. Greek demands had already apparently been appeased with a careful devaluation of the drachma and a scheme of transitional financial support. Greece now took 16% of the regional development fund budget. No fewer than seven special Council meetings took place to sort out in advance the reforms of CAP and the structural funds, together with forms of EC-wide cooperation on the technological challenge to competitiveness, a balanced package involving increased revenue, better budgetary discipline, and prevention of future imbalances to meet the British criticisms. Such a comprehensive package might conceivably have been steered between the British Scylla and the French Charybdis.

      Instead СКАЧАТЬ