Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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СКАЧАТЬ union seemed a remote adjunct; main boards were more concerned with the wave of mergers and acquisitions which reached its apogee in 1988–90.⁹

      Organizations such as ERT and the European Committee of AmCham still argued the industrial point of view, especially on monetary union, but managements across Europe did not seek direct inputs to the IGC and appear not to have followed their course in detail. They reacted to the post-Maastricht crisis as if the world had changed little since the Single Act. The ERT, which did succeed in getting some of its ideas into the Maastricht texts, continued to publish pamphlets such as ‘Rebuilding confidence, an action plan for Europe’ (December 1992), which prescribed neo-Keynesian remedies for revival and employment, with talk of ‘concerted action’ and ‘strong leadership’ by governments in partnership with industry, as if the 1988–90 harmony between member states still existed.¹⁰

      The agenda for the IGC was very much more complex than in 1985 because of the range of issues it had to consider, and the diversity – often incompatibility – of outlooks among member state governments. Heads of government and the Commission, often as rivals, therefore developed the agenda at one remove from the corporate players (who restricted themselves to monetary union and its consequences), and at several removes from national parliaments, media and the public. As a result, the long-running process was shaped by bargains, trade-offs and concessions which were different in kind from those of the internal market IGC in 1985. This may not have been intended to be an evasion of public debate, for many of the issues genuinely appeared too complex to explain in straightforward language, or were too confidential. But what, in retrospect, seems a clear failure of all those in the negotiations to educate their publics, meant that the new treaties, launched in 1992 in very altered circumstances, would shock public opinion – notably in Denmark, France and Britain.

      There is no need to re-tell in any detail the Soviet Union’s collapse, the failure of former People’s Democracies (which began when Hungary opened its border with Austria to East Germans fleeing to the West and ended with the collapse of Communist authority in Prague and breach of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989), nor the reunification of the two Germanies. But all three events conditioned everything that happened in Europe thereafter. They affected EFTA, as Sweden and Finland reacted both to the removal of a forty-year-long threat and to the new-found independence of the Baltic States and Austria, with the return of growing normality, to what had once been Habsburg dominions. Above all they affected former West Germany and France, the EC’s central nexus, because the implications of a united Germany encompassed all the other eleven. The break-up of Yugoslavia, the collapse of Christian Democracy in Italy, and the undermining of the political right in Britain can be traced to the same origin, as can the growth of largely refugee immigration through east and south east Europe’s porous borders, with its direct consequences of racism and xenophobic nationalism.

      In the years 1989–93, many of the vestiges of post-War settlements, in welfare programmes, industrial relations and state benefits, also died. Each country described its own parabola of declension: the new – or perhaps nineteenth-century Liberal – thought, first enunciated by the new right in Britain and the United States, passed through a sort of contagion, causing questioning, then fiscal and moral panics, and finally a scaling down of promises and expectations. The true fiscal crisis of European states, heralded in academic literature in the early 1980s, burst a decade later. Coinciding with disillusion after Maastricht, it had a corrosive effect on what remained of late-1980s’ aspirations.

      Four Summit meetings stand out as markers on the road from Hannover to Maastricht. The first, in Madrid in June 1989, brought together the Delors Committee’s report on Monetary Union and the first draft of the Social Charter. The meeting was noted for Nigel Lawson’s attempt (speaking for a divided leadership) to be explicit about the terms for Britain to enter the ERM, though his government opposed both EMU at any point beyond stage I and the Social Charter. Defeated on the question of whether to have an IGC, and reduced to near-isolation by the accommodations between the Spanish Presidency, Germany and France (which had been made explicit in the Kohl-Mitterrand letter in favour of political union) Britain had to accept not only the IGC but EMU stage I in July 1990.

      At the next Summit in Strasbourg in September 1989, with overwhelming support from the Parliament and smaller states such as Belgium, the French version of monetary union was accepted, with a date for that IGC (but not for the one on political union) after the West German elections and under the Italian Presidency at the end of 1990. Mitterrand had won his second seven-year term in 1988, and although his narrow Socialist majority forced him to govern with centrist approval, he had the firm support of his finance minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, in a period of stability, growth and falling unemployment – which he used to get the European Bank for Recovery and Development (EBRD) off the ground, with his protégé Jacques Attali as head. By then, the Commissioner for Social Affairs, Vasso Papandreou, had seventeen draft directives ready on all the aspects of industrial relations and conditions of work which had been stultified since the early 1970s.

      The third meeting, in Dublin in June 1990, took place very much in the shadow of the Franco-German commitments to common foreign and security policy and to a second IGC on political union set out jointly by Kohl and Mitterand in April. The Irish prime minister Charles Haughey capitalized shrewdly on Ireland’s affinity with France, which was seeking to strengthen the European Council, extend QMV and inhibit the pretensions of the Commission and the Parliament. This also suited Helmut Kohl, whose government was prepared to pay the price so long as political union could be kept in tandem with its monetary counterpart.

      Once again, the British Cabinet hesitated on the margins, its prime minister profoundly uneasy at the implications of the Kohl-Mitterrand agreement which had been made without consultation with either NATO or their EC partners. That lack of consultation had offended other governments as well: however the weight of the Franco-German entente lay heavy on them all, and was on the basis of this declaration that EC foreign ministers prepared for Dublin and its sequel, the summit in Rome, which to a large extent set the IGC’s agendas. All Thatcher could do, given Britain’s eleven to one minority, was – sensibly enough – to veto a Franco-German proposal for a large dollar loan intended to prop up the collapsing Soviet Union.

      Italy took over the Presidency in July, before the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) meetings with the Soviet Union. Soon after, Giulio Andreotti became prime minister (Craxi having destroyed de Mita’s liberalizing government of 1989, together with the DC’s reformist programme which, in retrospect, was Christian Democracy’s last chance to save itself from shameful eclipse). Under his direction, the principle of two concurrent IGC’s for monetary and political union was established. After careful consultation with the German and French governments, Andreotti proposed a special ‘informal’ Council, to meet in Rome in October: his intention being to agree a target date for EMU stage II in 1994, with a further wide-ranging IGC the following year.

      So hot was this pace that the Italian leader’s motives need analysis. It has been argued that, with the help of his own MEPs and other Christian Democratic parties, Andreotti set a truly Florentine trap for Margaret Thatcher, while her attention was diverted by the July G7 meeting in Houston and by GATT negotiations, so that she went largely unprepared into the October special Council.¹¹ Certainly her political nemesis was welcomed widely across the EC – in what one French diplomat described as a mood of soulagement. Yet there is no evidence among member states, whose policies were much more finely balanced than their leaders’ statements usually allowed to appear, of a desire to marginalize Britain. Concessions on stage II, and even some consideration of the chancellor of the exchequer John Major’s ‘hard ecu scheme’ had not been ruled out. But the Italian coalition was committed to transferring power to the Parliament. Andreotti may also genuinely have been concerned that the agenda for December was too vast for one meeting, since he attempted to agree much of it in advance at bilateral meetings and in the encounters of Christian Democratic parties in the late autumn. The German government had agreed not to bring forward the subject of the next set of GATT negotiations, hoping thereby to avoid antagonizing France (whose СКАЧАТЬ