Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ the total membership of some key Strasbourg committees), to leverage via its own member state government’s European Affairs Coordinating committees, or with its Permanent Representation in Brussels. The sheer volume of new entrants, the number of corporate offices set up in Brussels in the late 1980s, the numbers of lobbyists who, like Renaissance mercenaries, did well at Strasbourg out of the legislative boom, have done more than clutter the EU’s political marketplace. They have changed it, probably irreversibly, because all the serious players (which does not include those who work sporadically or primarily through lobbyists) have engaged themselves permanently, on a large scale and with substantial resources, to the evolution of means of influence at every level. A firm cannot ignore any of these approaches, not because all means are equal, or have a commercial or even viable return, but because competitors might gain advantage there.

      It is sometimes argued that players are more concerned with relative than collective advantage. My impression is that, in the more coherent industrial sectors like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, this is not so and may not even be true for the less coherent such as motorcars and consumer electronics, firstly because it is almost impossible for a large firm not to play in the EU market, secondly because the extensive range of modes available ensures that relative advantage can be defended on other levels – for example by utilizing group pressures on those perceived as playing only for their own interests, or deprecating what they do to Commission officials in order to ensure their partial exclusion or downgrading.

      Given such a plethora of activities, there are substantial problems not only in deciding who influences whom but in discriminating between significant and unimportant activity. It is not much use measuring the numbers of lobbyists employed, the size of federation memberships, or the numbers of MEPs’ signatures on proposed amendments; it would be better to ask what is their quality, how coherent is their representation, on which committees do they sit? Few players, from member states to SMEs, focus all their existence in the Community context; we need to know if they have changed emphasis in the spectrum running from national capitals through Europe to global markets; whether the man in Brussels reports direct to the managing director, whether players with widely different interests are adopting similar tactics.³

      Formality and informality are not part of a syllogism, thesis and antithesis because, like ying and yang, they complement each other. All social scientists understand what informal politics is, but find its essence hard to define formally. But if they too often reduce it to formal abstractions, historians tend to avoid it altogether for lack of proper documentation. Logically, it does not constitute a system, because that would mark its clear separation from the formal: it can only be part of a system.

      Two assumptions can be made about formal mechanisms: firstly, that they rely on their operators’ continual good behaviour; secondly that, without informal processes, they become more rigid or unworkable the more pressures build up in the societies which originated them. No mechanism is so perfect that it cannot be disturbed by dissidents or outsiders. None can be designed to alter itself over time to meet the challenges of which the originators can have had no conception, unless it has latitude built in. Combinations of the two have a better chance of preventing systemic failure than tight legal prescription does on its own.

      But what is it? Almost any habitual, voluntary practice could be described as informal. It is not restricted to individuals who know each other – though nationality or language affinity, cultural rapport and shared professional ethos are important. Whatever it is must constitute the basis for continuous relations between the players, whether governments, officials or commercial organizations. It must include everything which does not appear in legal texts, all rules and conventions which may be policed but are not justiciable.

      Informal politics are defined not so much by players’ status – any who wish and can establish credentials to the satisfaction of others can enter – as by the mode chosen to establish relationships. All players can choose between formal and informal modes and the shades of grey between them. There is no dividing line – only a spectrum. Rules and conventions are policed on both sides, with many nuanced penalties for infringement.

      Inclusion depends on a player’s willingness to accept the rules and conventions of its own club or association. To a minimum extent, all players, like member states themselves, must demonstrate an element of altruism (European-mindedness) as well as basic self-interest, not only to be proper members of higher sectoral and European-wide groupings, but to make themselves acceptable to EU institutions and officials.

      Informal politics exist wherever there are ‘grey areas’. As these are filled in and categorized over time, the informal may mutate, becoming, like the European Council, quasi-formal or ultimately fully formalized. But periodically new grey areas will open up as contexts or procedures change. Where interpretation is open to dispute, where there are margins of manoeuvre, where boundaries are imprecisely defined, where authorities have to exercise discretion, the informal will always flourish.

      It exists most in conditions of plural bargaining where interdependence requires players to consort together to make agreements or risk losing the consensual base on which their status and the possibility of future agreements rests. It increases with the number of players, because none wishes to be isolated in the political marketplace; and it operates more easily and frequently in the Community than in nation states – whose modem forms of trilateral brokerage developed earlier in the twentieth century and have since grown older and more rigid; whose governments are also less open or willing to admit that it exists.

      Its appearance is infinitely variable, but each aspect has certain common characteristics: impermanence, flexibility, subtlety. Inside groups and institutions it is disseminated as individuals are inducted, socialized and promoted, taking root most readily where there is professional training or practical experience. Political constructions damage it, for it is ultimately consensual, unlike the politics of politicians which tends to divide.

      It evolves mechanisms for revision more easily than the formal system, and is closely compatible with the long Community tradition of setting markers in legal texts, to be implemented in riper circumstances at a later date. In that sense, it assumes both good faith and the continuity of ethos and convention among players, though not of course always in the same forms.

      In what follows, I argue that this constitutes a distinct field with systemic characteristics, not merely a shadow or extension of the formal. But it is not a Manichean distinction: only at the ends of the spectrum are matters black and white. Unless the whole range is taken into account, analysis remains imperfect, since for want of it the strong probability is that the formal system will be less acceptable, flexible or efficient.

      The formal and informal sides’ interactions are present in any known political system, since the only difference between them in a tyranny and a democracy is one of proportion: they exist in both. But in open systems the informal is far more pervasive, legitimate and well-grounded, even at the point of policy initiative. Looked at in this way, not only governments but the components of the modem state – ministries, civil servants, central banks, and the state as a whole – are players. Power is exercised through shifting alliances, depending on what is at stake in the polygonal activities which surround economic activity and the social life of individuals.

      But its Community aspect is not the same as that in nation states, being more open, welcome, and effective to the point at which the formal might well silt up without informal mechanisms. As one very senior Brussels official put it, ‘if you were to stick to the formal procedures, it would take ten years every time … the more there is disagreement, the more the informal is necessary.’⁴ This argues that the EU’s slowly evolving statehood – which is a subtext throughout this book – will continue to differ in kind from the statehood of its members. Each player operates in a multinational range. Each of them has its own distinct global interests, its own concept of what is good for it within the European framework. It is this which it wants inserted, like a pacemaker, in the heart of Europe. No nation state has to contend with СКАЧАТЬ