Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ the momentum among governments from mid–1984 onwards, ERT’s later contributions have to be seen as supererogatory, part of the heightened climate of awareness about venture capital, completion of ‘missing links’ in the infrastructure (such as the Channel Tunnel or the EC-Scandinavian road/rail bridge) and the individual projects such as the European Technology Institute, for high-grade postgraduate training.³⁵

      As for the firms themselves, who in a mere three or four years were to flood into Brussels to establish influence in what now appeared to be the epicentre of commercial advantage, it is impossible to isolate their individual weighting.³⁶ Most had a vested interest in the process, as they demonstrated in the wave of mergers, joint ventures and takeovers – in consumer durables, office equipment, metals, agribusiness, airlines (though these mergers all failed), press and television and venture and finance capital – which occurred even in advance of the Single Act, 1985–6, usually with Commission support.³⁷ Firms in the lead here included Thomson, Zanussi, Olivetti, Pechiney, Ferruzzi, Cerus (Olivetti), and entrepreneurs such as de Benedetti, Maxwell, Berlusconi (several of which, as a result, became grievously overstretched by the early 1990s).

      American firms, feeling themselves losing market share worldwide to the Japanese, especially in semi-conductors, banking and financial services, were meanwhile extracting special concessions in the United States and many varieties of protection from the compliant Republican administrations of Reagan and Bush. As a result, there emerged a barely veiled policy of trade through bilateral agreements which seemed to have become, by 1985–6, as great an impediment to the current GATT round as anything emerging from France or the EC. The situation generally worsened with the US Trade Bill of 1987. In the critical areas of cars, semi-conductors, telecoms, and consumer electronics, the EC reacted less stringently (since American companies, organized in AmCham’s European Committee, had long since operated within its borders)³⁸ than it did against Japan. Nevertheless, the Commission disliked the mid–8os regimes of VERs, quotas and tariffs, imposed by member governments acting together in Council, which officials believed only emphasized the bankruptcy of inter-governmentalism and the virtues of the Commission-led internal market process.

      The Commission had developed its own scheme in 1983 in the limited field of mutual recognition and standards introduction: ‘limited’ (in DG3’s view) meaning the most that member states would permit. Thereafter, it seemed as if Stuttgart had produced only rhetoric, of little value in daily transactions. Narjes’s long summary of uncompleted items emphasized the backlog, without shaming the Council into advancing the project. Fontainebleau gave no particular encouragement to the internal market. As late as November 1984, when Delors put his four questions to the member governments, he himself was inclined towards institutional reform: it was the negative responses to that which convinced him that only the internal market could proceed.³⁹ His first speech to the Parliament, on 14 January 1985, with its call for ‘completion of a fully unified internal market by 1992 (with) a realistic timetable’ may have represented a Commission-led breakthrough.

      But that ignores the fact that the 1983 efforts by officials had only been postponed. One close participant points to ‘the Commission’s internal dynamic which… used the multinationals; and also the pressures coming from the Parliament to get away from “non Europe”’, which pre-dated Delors’ activity. Allowance should also be made for the ECJ’s influence: what had begun with the Continental Can case 1972 (see above, p. 96) was renewed in the Philip Morris case of 1981, when the ECJ used Article 85 rather than 86 to lay down the considerations pertaining to cases of mergers and concentrations. The issues of merger regulation and limiting state aids did not disappear from the Commission’s agenda with the Council’s rejection of the Draft Merger Regulation; that this area of the internal market required the work of two far-sighted Commissioners, Peter Sutherland and Leon Brittan in 1986–92, may in fact be a tribute to the delaying capacity of certain governments and industries. Then, as later, the many-faceted interaction of President, college of Commissioners and Director-Generals, has to be seen as itself a competitive symposium operating on a much longer time cycle than those of national governments or firms.

      Delors’ questions offered the twelve governments four choices of how to recapture the EC’s momentum: monetary union, foreign policy and defence cooperation, institutional reform, and the internal market. Apart from France, no member government chose anything but the latter; yet few supporters felt strongly about it. On the evidence of his own writings, Delors reckoned that it would take two full four-year terms of office: the first up to 1988 to get the Single European Act, the second to 1992 to complete it;⁴⁰ so his rélance to the European Parliament was to be read both as a proposal for a Europe without internal borders, and a long, politically radical project for what that Europe was to become.

      The concept of a single market had by then been agreed between Delors and the key Commissioner, Arthur Cockfield, who had been appointed by Margaret Thatcher to succeed Christopher Tugend-hat who was now out of favour. That combination, and the greatly enlarged competence which Cockfield requested at DG3 (financial institutions, company law, VAT and indirect taxation) set him in a position of greater directive power than Davignon had ever possessed. Cockfield could therefore provide sole authorship as well as conceptual force for DG3’s work in preparing the White Paper, and a unique preponderance in the Commission college. Davignon’s pragmatism and Narjes’s preparatory work infused what was done, but the logic and intricate cooperation between Directorates owed most to their successor.

      Thatcher had given Cockfield a brief ‘to make the internal market work’. His early investigations led him to agree with Delors that any target date before 1992 would be unrealistic. He had no illusions about the lukewarm involvement of most governments, even though the Luxembourg Council (following the Dooge Committee Report) endorsed the target. Consequently the White Paper had to contain a precise schedule of all the components, amounting to nearly 300 items for legislation, a deadline (1 January 1993), fully elaborated concepts of mutual recognition harking back to Cassis de Dijon, tax harmonization (a favourite of Cockfield’s) and some measure of supervision to keep member states in line during the process of implementation. The programme had to be coherent, interlocking, yet distinguished from the social, environmental, competition, investment and monetary issues which were contingent on it, but which, for political reasons to do with member states, could only be incorporated later.

      Member state governments may have been unanimous in their welcome for some sort of internal market; but how much they foresaw of the White Paper’s actual details or its contingent elements is unclear. Cockfield took his tutorial mandate to the limit, composed the document as if the political will already existed (as the founding fathers had done in 1957) and wisely circulated it only ten days in advance, giving time for governments, civil servants and permanent representatives to evaluate it but not to draw up counter-proposals. He prefaced it by citing every endorsement that ministers had given, from Copenhagen and Stuttgart onwards: they had willed the ends, here were the means. Despite this care, and despite the low-key, almost bureaucratic tone, objections were at once raised, from other Directorates and from some of the industrialists, who sensed how far it reached beyond the Dekker Report. But Cockfield refused to tone it down. Indeed, being well aware of its impact on financial services, he used other industrialists and City of London figures to propagate what he claimed was the only way to end ‘this prolonged period of uncertainty’. He was rewarded when, at the Milan Summit, the Council instructed the Commission to prepare a plan of action, within the timescale which Cockfield had envisaged from the beginning in his critical path analysis. From this point on, ministers began also to come to terms with QMV, which had been evaded at Dublin the year before and which Cockfield and Delors knew would be essential.

      During the French Presidency in 1984, President Mitterrand had also made a tour of European capitals with a ‘relaunch of the EC’ in mind. From this came two significant understandings, the first between Germany and France on institutional reform, (even though France still hesitated at the further powers for the European Parliament apparently required by both Germany and Italy), and secondly between Germany and Italy on market liberalization.⁴¹ The СКАЧАТЬ