Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ by the Spanish Presidency early in 1989 over trade with Japan. That the Commission did retract, as it had done often in the past, on some of its more contentious positions in order to take a more emollient line, was less often remarked.

      For example, concessions made by Delors and Christiane Scrivener, the Commissioner responsible for taxation, on VAT harmonization, which the British in particular had resisted, appeared in any case to accrue to the member state holding the Presidency, or to the European Parliament. In strategic terms, a grand design clearly did exist by 1989, on which the Hannover Summit’s accord allowed the Commission two priceless years to expand. But this might have happened in any case, without the Commission’s driving force, since preoccupation with Euro-sclerosis did not automatically vanish in 1988. It was certainly accelerated by the entry of financial institutions as significant players, and employers’ determination Europe-wide to use the internal market’s four freedoms firmly to re-establish managerial rights and enforce further deregulation of wages, security of employment and conditions of work, to the inevitable detriment and dismay of trades unions.

      The Commission, led very strongly by Delors during the period 1988–91, provided a focus for what might otherwise have been diverse activities. Delors’s speeches and the agenda he outlined each January to the Parliament increasingly embodied a particular view of the inexorable unity of economic and social spheres; put simply, that EMU and the Social Charter should run in tandem. The argument that the EC needed a new deal (with undertones of Roosevelt’s New Deal) to safeguard concertation (as long as that had genuine economic content) and to give some hope of a return to full employment, required the Community to examine training and education, technology and structural cohesion, together with redress for unemployment and support for the areas of late 1980s industrial devastation.⁵

      The embryo of an EC-wide supply side policy contained a built-in presumption that, while post-War neo-Keynesianism may have been misguided, the answers that Keynes had provided were not.⁶ Whether interpreted as a compromise between the requirements of financial and industrial capital or as an innovative response to the EC’s uncompetitiveness, the Commission set out a strategy in which industry, trade and social policies complemented each other in the search for adjustment in a guided, not a wholly open, market. Some of its manifestations are discussed later: industrial policy and trade, competition, and state aids, monetary union (which depended on member states reforming their public finances according to selected convergence criteria) and the Social Chapter.

      The existence of such a massive agenda, unprecedented in the EC’s history, represented a drawing together of many disparate strands of policy-making within different Commission Directorates, by an unusually powerful and comprehensive direction. Given a second term of office as President, for the first time since Hallstein, Delors made clear what he intended in his speech in January 1989 to the European Parliament: ‘History’, he declared, was ‘knocking at the door … it will not be enough to create a large frontier-free market nor … a vast economic area. It is for us, in advance of 1993, to put some flesh on the Community’s bones and to give it a little more soul.’

      Naturally enough, each Directorate strove for a greater role in this grand design,⁷ which in turn contributed to demands for greater competence by the Commission, and also by the Parliament. The appearance, as much as the reality, affected member states’ perceptions, so that ‘Delors II’ became for some a synonym for aggrandizement.

      Answers to the question whether Delors did in reality overstate the grand design in the second Presidency, depend on when the estimate is made. At the time of Hannover, the build-up was incomplete. But in 1990–91, the run-up to Maastricht paralleled the final run-in of the single market programme, together with the waves of legislation from the Single Act itself, then going through every member state’s parliament. The popular press and public opinion in member states only woke up to this concatenation in 1991–2, and there was a very widespread reaction which fed through during the process of ratifying Maastricht and EMU (which was itself a follow-up to the SEA).

      But for the political elites in each member state, and the Brussels milieu, the Delors peak came a year earlier; the factor which merited blame was that the IGC was ill-conceived, badly prepared and badly conducted, not on EMU, but on the political side. There was, for example, no central EU body like the Spaak Committee and no think-tank to prepare what actually went on at Maastricht; ministers went into the negotiating chambers often without full texts, in a changing set of circumstances. But the fault lay not only with the Commission’s excess of zeal to get everything included: ministers were equally over-ambitious, for instance in their desire to merge CFSP and defence.

      Spain’s entry in 1986 also introduced a novel element, for Spain rapidly became not only a major beneficiary but an increasingly adept player. The Gonzalez government focused on a narrow set of aims, clearly intending to take its place alongside the existing big four⁸ – an outcome which seemed to have taken place after Spain joined the ERM in 1989, but above all in the triumphal year 1992 of Expo-Seville, Madrid’s tenure as Europe’s cultural capital, and the Barcelona Olympic Games.

      The Spanish phenomenon also highlighted what was initially a less obvious part of the grand design: the extension of regional funding from a policy of subsidizing poor areas, such as Italy’s Mezzogiorno and most of Greece (often without tangible returns), to one by DG16 intended to raise the standards of infrastructure, production, investment and commerce to those of the rich core. This gave the well-organized, politically articulate regional governments in Catalonia and northern Italy their cue to ask for political as well as financial recognition when the IGCs began work.

      Member states’ consent for the agenda and the Delors II agenda budget which was to pay for it depended on resolving a string of apparently unrelated issues in the two years before Maastricht. This was the harder to deliver since the Twelve no longer grouped in broad agreement, as they had on the Single Act, but divided into aggregations, northern or Mediterranean, large and small, rich and poor, those with great bargaining skills and those with less. Generally in this period it suited the ‘northern’ members to appease Mediterranean demands – in short for Germany to pay. Delors’s appointment of three liberal-minded Commissioners to the principal jobs in January 1989 (Leon Brittan to DG4, Martin Bangemann to DG3, Frans Andriessen to DG1, while keeping the protectionists Manuel Marin (Spain) at Fisheries, and Vasso Papandreou (Greece) at Social Affairs) may have encouraged them to do so.

      The two principal issues need to be treated separately: monetary union first, then ‘political cooperation’ (foreign policy and defence), together with the whole area of the ‘interior ministry matters’ – policing of borders, cooperation on crime, terrorism, drugs and illegal immigration – which came together as a result of much wider developments in Europe and ‘near-Europe’. All were, of course, contingent on achievement of the single market. But the Commission could integrate the agenda and take a leading role only on the first of these; the other two touched on member states’ sovereignty far more directly and had to be argued out by ministers and heads of government in the context of a Europe that was changing, after the collapse of Soviet power, more rapidly than at any time since establishment of the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’ had cut old Europe in two in the late 1940s. Even France and Germany could not agree on the details of so wide a range.

      On both aspects, the Commission lacked the force to recreate the coherent agenda that had been given it earlier by industrial and financial organizations in Brussels and member state’s capitals during the single market negotiations. These players did not lack interest, but they tended to dispute the agenda among themselves, with those expecting advantages in the internal market facing up to the still-protected national champions, secure for the present in their state aids and government procurement contracts. On the question of Japanese car imports for example, the old peak organization actually broke up, to reform itself under a new title and without one of France’s leading producers (see chapter 10). Apart from these relatively novel rivalries, firms and financial institutions were СКАЧАТЬ