Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ either, or indeed any reference to EMU, certainly not before the internal market’s complete freedom of capital movements had been achieved.

      The arguments had no empirical basis, except in current practice in running the EMS and ERM, Britain not being a member of the latter. But the eventual compromise rested on promises from France and Italy to liberalize their exchange control provisions – promises which were turned into a guarantee of abolition before the single market deadline came, at an ECOFIN meeting in June 1988, just prior to the Hannover Summit. Meanwhile, the preamble of the SEA was given three indents referring to the ‘objective of EMU’, together with a chapter stating that the member states should cooperate to ensure the convergence of economic and monetary policies.

      On this somewhat ambiguous basis, EMU was to be included in the pre-Maastricht process. The Single European Act retained majority voting for all EMS decisions, so that Britain could still exercise a veto, even though it was not in the ERM. Nevertheless, two years later at Hannover, the UK government did concede that the Central Bank Governors Committee, chaired by Delors, might examine ways of setting up the future European central bank, and the ‘concrete steps’ towards EMU long sought by France.

      An increase in structural funds (coherence policy) to appease Ireland’s and Greece’s fears about the impact on their economies, eased the Act’s passage, up to its ratification by nine governments in February 1986, and by Ireland more than a year later. Some member states seem not to have realized how large these sums would be, when measured afterwards in relation to Iberian needs. It also brought a trade-off between the German federal government and the Länder (led by the Bavarian and North Rhine Westphalia prime ministers, Franz-Josef Strauss and Johannes Rau, which gave the Länder increased rights of participation in decision-making in Bonn). These were to be a foretaste of the regional compromises made at Maastricht in 1991. Success in the IGC negotiations, reform of the CAP, and extension of QMV to financial services’ liberalization, satisfied British ambitions. The Italians got their extra powers for the Parliament,⁵¹ the Netherlands and Belgium achieved an extension of political cooperation, Germany a clearer definition of regional policy, and France its hopes of EMU. From all this stemmed the mood of euphoria leading on to Maastricht.

      But that was only the legal framework: much space remained for Commission interpretation. Officials’ creativity during the next six years improved on what had actually been agreed, while members transposed what eventually became the 285 legislative enactments, in order to meet Cockfield’s deadline of 1st January 1993. Among the twelve governments, opinions inevitably varied. (Margaret Thatcher particularly resented the way the Commission used Articles 100 and 235 to obtain ECJ confirmation of its interpretation.⁵²) It was not clear until the Hannover Summit in June 1988 that all the heads of government had ‘irreversibly accepted’ the SEA: indeed the Act deliberately had not made the 1 January 1993 deadline a legal obligation, so that the internal market would not be final until all its provisions had been transposed and implemented. Whereas transposition had nearly been completed by the 1st January 1993, implementation still fell far short.

      At the time of Hannover, 194 out of 285 legislative items remained to be completed. But the breakthrough on exchange control abolition had come. The legislative programme no longer depended on each six months’ Presidency (which was as well, since the Greek government attempted to turn the proceedings after Hannover in the direction of social policy, training and worker consultation, which would inevitably have aroused industrialists to make a renewed ‘Vredeling offensive’.⁵³) Member states’ mid–term failures to transpose legislation were already being remedied by an informal system of mediation, réunions paquets (see below, p. 628). Great as the delays were to be, even beyond 1992, the main technical problem after Hannover lay not with visible barriers but the implicit ones, created out of ‘exceptions’ through which member states continued to defend their chasses gardées long after they had conceded the former. Although Hannover represented a political landmark, ‘beneath its calm surface, the battle between liberals and interventionists for control of the 1992 project was at last launched.’⁵⁴

      In the two and a half years after the IGC, the game between states, Commission and industrial players continued,⁵⁵ complicated by the entry of new players from Spain (which played a part in the second Banking Directive). Most of the advantage, however, accrued to the Commission, which did not seek to hide its wider design but only to nuance it for different audiences as the next stage – harmonization of VAT, excise and corporation tax – approached.⁵⁶ The Commission concentrated, for example, on reducing national restraints on air transport and the carriage of goods, and on the agreement over car imports with Japan. Officials accepted that some implementations would be delayed beyond 1 January 1993, particularly by Mediterranean countries (especially those concerning Spain’s financial services and Italy’s state industries), but relied on the states’ commitments, sealed at Hannover, to limit delays to an acceptable level.

      Having been very largely excluded during the bargaining process from Milan to Luxembourg, the Parliament also increased its part during later stages of the single market negotiations, as Cockfield steered his enactments through. Some 260 legislative items remained after the Act’s second reading, together with a host of amendments, and in the process MEPs acquired a power through practice which they were later to consolidate at Maastricht. This extended informally to areas where MEPs had no direct competence at all.⁵⁷

      The financial sector also emerged as a player, now that EMU’s shadow lay over the internal market. Banks and insurance companies, at least in the northern states, joined the various action groups and some even took part in public campaigns for 1992 through their domestic press and television. Huge financial gains were being made in these sectors by 1988, much greater than Cecchini had forecast; more in France and Germany than in Britain, but most of all in Italy and Spain, where the least open markets operated.⁵⁸ Harmonization affected all securities markets and stock exchanges, and Spain went through its own ‘big bang’ in 1989–90, as London had done eight years earlier. Nothing was invulnerable to foreign access, not even long-closed insurance and mortgage finance sectors.

      Previously, these had been heavily protected areas: in Germany, insurance protection law meant that all policies were similar, with strict tariffs, so that innovation was impossible. This was in complete contrast to the competitive market in Britain, which regulated intermediaries, not policies. In France it remained a criminal offence for non-French companies to sell any sort of insurance. Some liberalizing had been achieved by the EC on life and non-life policies, but full market freedom was not actually achieved until 1990, after nearly twenty separate Commission drafts. Until then, the governments of Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Denmark and Luxembourg resisted any change, to the unconcealed fury of German companies and all multinationals. It was no wonder that Cockfield avoided legislating for this sector, relying, as 1992 approached, on the single market’s momentum to do the job.⁵⁹

      Talk about ‘Europe à la carte’ and ‘variable geometry’ during the Presidencies of the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium and Denmark in the years 1986–8 revealed how fortunate the EC had been in the previous year under Italy and Luxembourg. Britain was evidently keen to prevent the emergence of a contingent social policy dimension. As the Thatcher decade neared its end, and as she herself attempted to limit any broadening of the single market concept, Britain seemed once more to be at loggerheads with the rest. Among member states, it seemed as if the impetus had been lost.

      The breakthrough under Germany’s Presidency at Hannover can be explained partly because of France’s occlusion, during the tense period of ‘cohabitation’ between Mitterrand (who during a long duel between Elysée and Matignon managed to retain power over foreign and EC affairs) and Jacques Chirac’s RPR government, and partly by a convergence of opinion between Bonn and German industry on the substantial opportunities for Germany offered by the internal market. The Hannover Summit also indicated that West Germany had committed itself to political, if not yet monetary, union.

      Even then, СКАЧАТЬ