Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ of Greek inexperience in the Presidency, and Pasok’s factious demands for yet more cash support, together with Papandreou’s erratic chairmanship, shattered Summit conventions and these tenuous agreements. But it should be added that other heads of government also played disingenuous roles:⁶⁰ with the French Presidency coming up, Greece was not to have the glory. Nevertheless the fiasco was so total that it proved impossible even to draft an agreed communiqué.

      Confusion among member states did not necessarily imply total failure. Within six months, under the French Presidency, all these questions had been brought into line, largely by Mitterrand, now at his peak, yet ever conscious of the need for West German backing. France and Germany were finally able to meet even Britain’s demands. But the passage was hard despite the fact that Commission, Parliament and most member states were within reach of each other. After Mitterrand’s speech on federalism at Strasbourg in May 1984, and Lord Carrington’s swift riposte on the budget, it needed the spectre of EC bankruptcy in March and Mrs Thatcher’s refusal of the ‘best offer’,⁶¹ before ministers finally conceded guaranteed thresholds on CAP farm prices, in order to phase out slowly the onerous MCAs.

      At the Fontainebleau Summit of 25–26 June (just after the European Parliament’s second direct election) the deadlock broke on the CAP and the budget reforms, together with Britain’s contributions.⁶² Germany, which was to pay most of the debit, won a special subvention for German farmers. ‘Own resources’ were increased to the necessary 1.4% on VAT revenues, leaving loose ends to be tied up in Dublin in December with a final cash subvention for Mediterranean agriculture and the acceptance of an – as yet unformulated – integrated Mediterranean programme.

      That in turn removed the southern French farmers’ objection to Spanish accession.⁶³ Spain’s and Portugal’s negotiations, so long delayed by pretexts, were rapidly concluded in March 1985 and the Treaty of Accession was signed in June, providing for entry on 1 January 1986. Meanwhile meetings with EFTA ministers saw the beginning of negotiations on the European Economic Area which, however difficult at times, began what was to be a steady enhancement of mutual economic relations over the next five years. The EC itself came closer to a standards policy, and simpler border formalities with the adoption of a single Community Customs document. France and Germany declared that they would abolish border checks,⁶⁴ and set off on the road to what became the Schengen agreement.

      But the impetus went further. The Council at Fontainebleau appointed two committees to examine the EC’s future: one chaired by James Dooge (an Irish senator) on institutional affairs, the other by Adonnino (an Italian parliamentarian) on the prospects for a ‘People’s Europe’. The latter – a sop to the Parliament and its draft Treaty of Union – implied, however vaguely and rhetorically, the existence of a European citizenship and European representation. Fontainebleau thus meant more than Mitterrand’s re-establishment of his own and French leadership in Europe: it cemented the Franco-German core, so that Spanish and Portuguese entry could at last be agreed, it ensured that Jacques Delors (though not Mitterrand’s first choice) would become Commission President from 1 January 1985, and it removed the barriers against Iberian extension by promoting a package of reforms acceptable to all (even to the Dutch who disapproved of Germany’s payoff). But above all it restored momentum to a more widespread European process.

      What had begun in 1982 at several levels of individuals, firms, associations, member states, and Commission officials, had been brought into a conjunction. The aims of once-divergent bodies and their leaders coincided sufficiently, as a result of these accumulated trade-off and incremental agreements, to make possible the convening of an inter-governmental conference on the internal market in 1985.

      It may not be possible until the documents are available to say certainly which of the actors was the prime mover or indeed whether the explanation should focus on circumstances rather than participants. Quite possibly it will depend on which segment of the wider process is examined. As can be seen from the next chapter, claims can be made for each of the main players. What matters more is that the combination of external challenges to the EC, the 1973 oil shock and strategic fears, the harsh recession and a pervasive disillusion with the system as it had stagnated, led to the entry of more and more players to the arena, while those already in it found a deeper commitment necessary. Their networks expanded and became denser, more continuously effective, notably in industries most threatened by foreign competition: cars, textiles, chemicals, electronics and steel producers. Similar developments, bringing in the same players, were taking place concurrently in many, if not most, national political systems.

      Large and multinational firms had sought influence at the EC’s centre but had not been present on this scale before the 1970s, nor switched so much of their corporate resources from national to Community level. Financial institutions, which already watched the process, would follow once the internal market was seen to involve services and monetary union (EMU).⁶⁵ They did not of course outweigh member states or Community institutions because they were not competing on the same level, nor usually for the same ends, but as the temporary failure at Athens demonstrated, the conjunction of all these was needed before regeneration could take place in the annus mirabilis of 1985.

      New linkages were growing among the states; between France and Italy, France and Ireland, Germany and Italy, and in the core of those countries whose currencies followed the DM. Some even believed it possible that Britain might become a normal partner. A new world economic boom had started, which seemed matched in political terms by the arrival in power of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985: Gorbachev, whose aims had been hinted at earlier, both by his own speeches in England in December 1984, and in Russia by the fact that he had been manifestly the candidate of Yuri Andropov and those reformers who envisaged regeneration arising from a reborn Soviet state.

      When President-Designate of the Commission Delors visited each of the other nine members’ capitals in the late autumn of 1984, he put four proposals (rather in the Monnet manner, ‘Europe is in a mess – where do we start?’) Only on the internal market were there signs of general consensus. Whatever conjunction existed at the EC centre (i.e., whenever ministers and heads of government met) was not yet matched in their domestic contexts. The process was neither secret nor predetermined: it operated on many levels with disjunctions, and moved like evolution itself, in fits and starts – more fits at IG level, more starts at official. Some hopes turned into dead-ends, like the Adonnino report; others, like the Dooge Report or the new language of ‘cohesion’⁶⁶ proved unexpectedly fruitful. There was no prime mover, and there were no obvious state boundaries within which the game could take place. But the players, wittingly or not, had begun to create them.

4

       Making the Market: The Single European Act, 1980–88

      Like cooling steel, recent history sets easily into patterns which then resist remoulding. The combination of media reports, expert and specialized commentaries, interviews, articles and memoirs, leads to a received wisdom which successive generations of political scientists, contemporary historians and biographers advance piecemeal. Some seek for a synthesis from which to theorize, others highlight what they take to be particularly significant episodes or individuals. At present, the consensus suggests that the Community experienced a great regeneration around 1985 with the Single Market White Paper serving as its dynamo; then, in a mood of euphoria, member states and the Commission took a leap at Maastricht, which they knew to be contingent on the internal market, only to find themselves isolated from their national publics and from each other. Recession and political disarray followed hand in hand.

      Chapter 3 suggested that a variety of players at different levels of activity were engaged, as early as 1980–81, in a struggle to break out of the inertia which had blanketed EC activity since the first oil shock. But what were the aims of СКАЧАТЬ