Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ and a stable exchange rate within the ERM. Mitterrand had two years in hand before the next parliamentary elections, four years before the presidential one, and he could rely on West German understanding that any attempt to break out of the ‘lourdeur des affaires communautaires’ could be successful only if France and Germany were conjoined.

      In French eyes the project had four facets. Firstly, having accepted the ERM and the need for convergence, France should, if the ERM was to function properly, look beyond mere stabilization accompanied by periodic, often traumatic realignments, to a tight alignment of parities as the way to eventual Monetary Union and a single currency.⁵ Secondly, the social element should be enhanced but given an appropriate market-led ethos, more acceptable to West Germany and Britain than the original ‘workers’ Europe’.

      Thirdly, the Parliament’s reopened debate on European Union should be assimilated – but by member states at Council level – in order to restore the EC’s institutional coherence. This ran counter to long-standing opposition to any increases in the Parliament’s competence by the Conseil d’Etat, Paris bureaucrats, and the Trésor. It even involved some support for the Spinelli initiative. Yet the problem of the indivisibility of French sovereignty, which had for years made prior acceptance of EC laws problematic, may well have been obviated by Delors’s 1985 coup de génie in putting forward simultaneously the means to satisfy both economic and political projects. Political union, which was West Germany’s major ambition, would thus become a complement to economic integration⁶ – in contra-distinction to the British dislike of both.

      French defence policy provided a contingent element, since West Germany appeared willing at the same time to be associated with a revival of the 1963 Elysée Treaty and a renewed WEU. Geoffrey Howe’s alternative paper, put forward at Stresa, served as a further stimulus for launching the Franco-German proposed treaty on European Union in 1985, the fruit of what Simon Bulmer calls their ‘complex interdependence’, before the British initiative could acquire allies.⁷ Finally, having relinquished his earlier dreams of a Europe wider than the EC, Mitterrand now seemed content to see the EC as the core, to which EFTA, Mediterranean and even Comecon states could adjust. France’s role was to serve as mediator and adjudicator, a motor for scientific and technological advance, and a liberalizing influence. There was even talk of extending QMV and Commission (but not Parliamentary) competences.

      Yet Mitterrand gave no direct indication which of these four should predominate.⁸ A substantial part of the entire project design depended on how far he could recreate a centre-left governing party at home and undermine the right, utilizing the deep divisions between Giscard’s UDC and the Gaullists. Ambiguity served also to disguise the extent to which the project required West Germany and the EC itself to be shaped according to French terms.

      WEST GERMANY

      From its inception, the EC had formed an essential framework for West Germany’s process of political and economic rehabilitation, until in due course it became the precondition for whatever followed. Since Adenauer’s time, federal governments, usually in coalition, had used it as part of their increasingly elaborate balancing act between Ost- and Westpolitik, between the USA and Russia, West and East Germany and between West Germany and France. On the basis that this would prevent German isolation in the future, they had developed the EC’s most technologically resilient and efficient industrial economy. That secure basis helped determine the German vision of an ideal EC: a community to ensure peace and security in Europe, an economic entity based on free trade, and a community of values and common action (Werte-und Handlungsgemeinschaft).

      Each of these principles reinforced the more general balance of West Germany’s other external relations: whatever German unity emerged in the future was to be understood in its European dimension, not as a purely national phenomenon. Public opinion seemed benign; no anti-EC party existed, nor was there any serious questioning in public of these aims – rather, there was a consensus in West Germany that their country represented the very model of an EC state. The price, that West Germany would always be the largest contributor to EC funds, was – not always unanimously – accepted but it was extended with each new state’s accession, in 1973, 1981, and later with Spain in 1986; each time, the justification to domestic objectors being put in terms of German manufacturers’ access to these lucrative new markets.

      But the Federal Republic as a whole was not notably integrationist, and suspicions existed in Bonn, and even more in some Länder such as the CSU-dominated Bavaria, about the use that Free Democrats and their leader, Genscher, made of their long hold on the Foreign Ministry. The Christian Democratic majority of ministers in Bonn did not directly take up the Genscher-Colombo initiative (see above, p. 102), as if remembering Schmidt’s phrase (in a speech in 1977) that ‘Germany did not want to be in the front row’.⁹ German governments went only so far as this complex web of interests dictated. Indeed, the Federal administration often acted as a brake so that, following the 1970s experience, if France were to induce Germany to follow, the deals had to be made via the Chancellery.

      Germany’s tenure of the Presidency in the first half of 1983 indicated that the reactive, formal and legalistic approach to eventual European Union, based on experience of Federal government, decentralization, and citizenship rights, would continue under Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats. No one, least of all the Bundesbank, had forgotten Germany’s ill-fated reflation initiative, taken under American pressure in 1978–9, with its inflationary consequences. Thus the West German interpretation of Stuttgart’s ‘solemn declaration’ did not represent full endorsement of what the French government currently desired.

      Any estimate of West Germany’s overall aims depends on which source is chosen: Chancellery, government, Bundesbank, Länder governments, or the conjunction of chancellor with the core of foreign, economic and agricultural ministries. As far as industrial policy was concerned, the view of the Economics Ministry (BMWi) and Bundeskartellamt (BKartA) favoured free trade, open competition, and completion of the internal market, starting preferably with deregulation in transport, energy and telecoms, in preference to a single overall initiative. Informally however, the outcome depended on an intricate process of cohabitation and bargaining between the Bonn bureaucracy, leading industrial firms, and the banking system, which was to be brokered at all levels in the Federal Republic. (So content were German companies with this system of ‘patronage government’ that few bothered to open offices in Brussels until the late 1980s.)

      The Bundesbank wished monetary policy to come within the Treaties but strongly opposed EMU (as Otmar Emminger’s letter of protest had shown in 1979) even at the level of a future Treaty preamble, it being a matter for member states to safeguard their monetary sovereignty, whilst at the same time taking account of the EC’s common interest. Issues relating to foreign policy or defence which required positive responses were treated cautiously; like Schmidt before him, Kohl showed himself willing to accept a steer, either from the European Council, or from France acting in lieu.

      The principal weakness of this complicated, decentralized policy-making was that it inhibited German initiatives and thus disguised Germany’s latent strength (which was, paradoxically, German politicians’ intention). It also put the onus informally on the Chancellor either to concert policy in advance with France, or simply to acquiesce in what French governments did (the case of Schmidt’s decisiveness over EMS is unusual). Finally, it tended to irritate British ministers, making any closer relationship with them unlikely, even if that had not already been excluded in the 1980s by personal antipathy between their two leaders.

      BRITAIN

      The case is apparently simple, especially as expounded in Margaret Thatcher’s memoir, The Downing Street Years. In fact it was ambiguous, full of nuances, and hidden passages reflected in contrasting accounts.¹⁰ In an assessment of the economic significance of membership, made in 1979, the Treasury had noted that Britain had become a European country visited by 7 million EC tourists, with 42% of its export trade СКАЧАТЬ