Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

Even before the IGCs began, change and reform of institutions touched other spheres, such as the European Court of Justice.

Any extension of QMV proposed at Maastricht would also greatly complicate member states’ tactics, obliging them to calculate more carefully than they already had to, under the Single European Act, when constructing alliances or trading advantages if they wished to mobilize a blocking minority. But some power also adhered to the Parliament, as its President, Enrique Baron Crespo, with Kohl’s support, demanded that the political IGC should confer on it the right to initiate legislation, and amend more of, or reject, what was put before it. Italian, Dutch, and Luxembourg ministers, as well as those from Germany, supported this challenge to the prerogatives of the Commission and the Council.

The Parliament had already conducted its own attempt to set the IGC’s agenda, when its first ‘assizes’, held in Rome in November 1989, debated the proposals which Baron Crespo was later to advance in his semi-official meetings with ministers before and during Maastricht. These included not only greater rights to initiate, amend or reject legislation, but definitions of citizenship – basic rights on which might eventually be constructed the idea of a European public. In addition, it asked for enlarged competence for the Commission in social and environmental cases, and that European political cooperation (EPC) should be brought within the Treaties.

III. Political Union

The second IGC’s origins derived from two sources: member states’ long concerns with foreign policy from which, unlike EMU or the Social Chapter, Britain could not and did not wish to dissociate itself; and from the threats to their national security represented by cross-border crime, drug smuggling, terrorism and illegal immigration. Consciousness about the latter grew as the internal market and abolition of economic frontiers approached, and on the former with every stage in eastern Europe’s metamorphosis. Although the IGC had not been envisaged initially as having a defence element, events in 1989–91, including the incipient break-up of Yugoslavia, led that way, as did economic aspects of both the Community’s foreign and security policy (CFSP) and the internal market, via defence procurement, state aids to industry, and mergers such as the Siemens/GEC takeover of Plessey.

Meanwhile, thirty-five years after the French Assembly had killed off the EDC, the French government wished to come back into the centre of European defence, even if that meant it had to reconsider aspects of NATO, so long as it did not have to rejoin NATO’s Military Committee. But defence as a separate theme could not be brought within the Treaties since it had been specifically excluded in 1957.

Mitterrand therefore sought an enlarged status for Western European Union (WEU) as the main plank of France’s CFSP proposals.

But since the dilution of NATO was a highly sensitive subject, his proposals remained vague – as did their embodiment in the Treaty (see p (#litres_trial_promo)). Not only did they have a direct impact on other member states in NATO, they invited an unpredictable Russian response. France’s defence industry, long the most successful of any EC exporters, also stood to gain substantially, to the dismay of British and German competitors and those parts of the Commission concerned with the single market and competition policy. If defence was to be touched on during the IGC, not only Britain’s fears about NATO but Germany’s concerns with its own new status and the problems of eastern Europe and Yugoslavia had to be addressed.

Interior Ministry issues were also brought into sharp focus by events in eastern Europe, above all the profound uncertainty about what would emerge from the former Soviet system after the onset of civil war in Yugoslavia. For the first time since 1961, the possibility of a flood of refugees and asylum seekers confused the patterns in which legal and illegal immigration had largely been contained. Unlike 1961, heavy structural unemployment in western Europe was beginning to change the outlook of governments which had previously been willing to accommodate large numbers of refugees. For the first time since the 1960s, the prospect of economic migrants, rather than refugees, from eastern Europe reappeared. In mid–1991, while the IGC was in progress, the International Labour Organization estimated that roughly eight million legitimate immigrants were living within the EC’s borders; on top of that had to be added the illegal ones, and asylum seekers whose numbers had risen from a mere 70,000 in 1983 to 350,000 in 1989 and nearly half a million by 1991 – even before the Yugoslav conflicts.

Refugees and asylum seekers were one thing, illegal migrants another. But the conditions of the time fostered confusion, so that the two easily became conflated, in certain political movements, and by the popular press. Nations’ rights to defend themselves against crime or drugs, recognized in Article 36 of the Rome Treaty, had been reaffirmed in the Single European Act. But the Schengen Agreement, made between France, West Germany and the three Benelux states in 1985, prefigured a Europe of open borders, where the southern and eastern members – Greece, Italy and Spain – would stand in effect as frontier guarantors for the rest against most sources of illegal immigration.

The political IGC therefore had to encompass a vast area, with no clear long-term aims, where member states argued not only over the practicalities of ID cards, data protection, and the so-called ‘right of hot pursuit’, but their likely impact on national public opinions. This was especially so in Britain and France, but became more so in parts of Germany and Spain; Italy felt the force of it once refugees began to pour in from Yugoslavia and Albania. Even among the Schengen countries, discords developed, for example over Dutch permissive policies on soft drugs, which French interior ministers referred to in outspokenly critical terms. Sentiments which had rarely been voiced in public now became commonplace, throwing doubt on the competence of other member states to keep out, variously, Moroccans and Algerians, Albanians, Yugoslavs or Somalis, and economic refugees from behind the fallen Iron Curtain.

Three main influences shaped this IGC: the efforts of the Parliament (by far the weakest); the Commission’s attempts to set the agenda, which dated back to 1986, if not 1985; and the aims and ambitions of member states. The well-attested tendency for EC states to grow more to resemble each other might have led the Maastricht negotiators to expect the same sort of consensus levels that had been obtained in 1985. Earlier frictions between Commission, Council and Parliament had indeed lessened during the late 1980s. But north-south differentiation seemed to have increased, as Spain’s successfully aggressive tone during the bargaining indicated, and the distinction between countries with sound fiscal regimes and others who were lax demonstrated. The ancient gulf between Britain and the majority, with all its philosophical undertones, remained, albeit softened by Major’s ‘Britain at the heart of Europe’ pretensions. Even subsidiarity, which for most states already meant devolution not to national but to regional capitals or even municipalities, meant something different to British Conservatives – though not to many Scots and Welsh.

How divergent the larger member states’ aims were can be gauged from the table of their desiderata compiled by the Economist in December.

But whereas smaller and Mediterranean states had more cause than they had had over the Single European Act to defend particular national interests, the activities of Germany, France and Britain were complicated by their adjustments to changing perceptions of the outside world.

As in the past, the German government supported a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) having, at that stage, no conceivable alternative. French foreign minister Dumas and his German colleague Genscher explained in their October 1990 proposals for a CFSP that they were prepared to include majority voting in the Council. In December 1990, they widened their approach to include a common European defence, building on what had been done in Western European Union (WEU) since 1984. The German-French paper of February 1991 spelled out the WEU’s function as a bridge between the European Union and NATO. For both Bonn and London it was also important to guarantee that any European defence pillar in the framework of the WEU would not undermine NATO. However, the Germans had the additional aim of tempting France back into full membership of NATO.

Conduct of this part of the negotiations, though in the hands of foreign ministers at their monthly meetings, and deputies or permanent representatives on more frequent special occasions, reverted in the last six weeks to heads of government level. In Paris, it was the responsibility of Dumas and Guigou, but never far from Mitterrand himself: in Bonn, rather less harmoniously, it lay between Kohl and Genscher.

For the French government, it was vital to reinforce the EC in French colours rather than allow the Dutch Presidency, aided by Belgium and Italy, to make EC transactions more accountable to the Parliament and more detrimental to national sovereignty. The French were playing for very high stakes: not only for EMU but for a French rather than a NATO-based version of CFSP – at variance, for example, with what the Netherlands required. If defence were also to be included, an alternative had to be found to the organic image of a tree from whose trunk all the branches would spring.

One of the French negotiators, Pierre de Boissieu, brought forward the idea of a temple, whose pediment would rest on three distinct pillars: EMU (which mattered above all other elements to France), foreign policy, and home and justice or Interior Ministry matters. This had the inestimable advantage that neither of the latter need add to Commission competences – negotiations between governments would suffice. Even so, it would need advance concertation with Germany if a move in foreign and defence policy apparently so at variance with France’s twenty-five year stance were to be accepted by French public opinion.

Germany’s representatives regarded strengthening Community institutions and a stronger position for the European Parliament as so important that they were prepared to link them to their consent to economic and monetary union. They were also well aware that EMU was subject to growing criticism inside Germany, and that public support for bringing new fields into the Treaties, such as asylum policy for refugees, combating terrorism and international crime, derived from Länder administrations, not Bonn. Länder governments, of course, sought a significantly stronger role for themselves, and the principle of subsidiarity. Remembering how their views had been ignored when the Single European Act was ratified five years earlier, and relying in part on the example of what Belgium’s ethnic regions had already achieved in the EU context, these sought confidently to replicate in the Community the division of powers between ‘Bund’ and ‘Land’ in the federal system itself.

Less obviously, fear motivated German leaders that if the new treaties were not signed quickly, conditions in the mid–1990s would deteriorate and encourage the rise of instability, fierce nationalism, and ethnic discord in central and eastern Europe. To avoid that, and the repercussions on those of German origin living in the former Soviet Union (and therefore entitled to citizenship of the reunited Germany), Kohl would be prepared to make substantial concessions.

It was not however clear that the British would even sign. One vital preliminary had been the ousting of Margaret Thatcher, for, in spite of an initially obdurate stance, John Major and Douglas Hurd skilfully let it be seen in private among the foreign ministers that they were not opposed à l’outrance to political union, but rather that they were men of goodwill as well as firm principles, shackled by the Thatcherite faction in their Conservative party. Such hints were reinforced at the personal level by links with the CDU between Chris Patten and Volker Rühe

and informally by Whitehall officials. By November, confronted with preparations by the other eleven governments for an ‘opt-in’ strategy on EMU, British ministers allowed it to be thought that they were prepared for concessions so long as they were permitted to opt out when stage three finally arrived. There was also some common ground with Germany, given British resistance to the Delors II budget package and demands for greater parliamentary audit over spending, as well as for the ECJ actually to be able to fine member states who ignored single market judgments.

In the end, Major was able to extract large, even remarkable concessions, partly because he was not Margaret Thatcher but more because it suited the other large state governments – principally Germany’s – to make deals which safeguarded essential interests before too much time elapsed. But this was done at what seemed a high price to the southern states then facing up not only to completing the single market but to the Community’s next extension in favour of EFTA countries which were already completing their political and economic reorientation.

Brokerage between governments conscious of the need to safeguard their national interests, rather than Commission control of the agenda, characterized the second IGC, together with a determination to get everything into texts, agreed and signed, before it was too late.

As the IGC ground remorselessly on, under enormous pressures from world events and domestic public reactions, a series of interlocking, contrapuntal elite bargains were made, by men and women who were often by now over-tired, working late at night in cabals and closets using an arcane jargon, assisted by increasingly exhausted officials. Although within each government’s apparatus, the issues appeared clear (and some of those engaged now admit that there was insufficient discussion by some national EC affairs coordination systems, leading to a lack of direction on essential questions),

their outcomes proved simply too complicated or obscure to explain in public language.

Yet since the web of alliances seemed to preclude national vetoes, while most participants believed the Luxembourg Compromise dead, national publics – or perhaps better, national media – came to feel that ‘their’ governments could do little to reverse the momentum. A pervasive sort of disillusionment spread, most strongly in Denmark, which may have been the first genuine expression of European-wide public opinion. It ramified in Britain and France, to say nothing of Italy, where the failure to educate or explain led (with good reason) to deep fears about higher taxes, sacrifices and assaults on work-place security as a result of fiscal reform.

Shifts of perception occurred, the results of a changing external environment, among the main players during the IGC. German diplomacy now had to operate in an entirely different way, given its borders with eastern and central Europe, a factor which explains President Bush’s transfer of interest as early as 1990 (and which disturbed Mrs Thatcher on her last visit to see Bush at Camp David). Her fall removed the principal – indeed the only – exponent of a bilateral diplomacy involving Britain and France, intended to contain a newly united Germany, but it did not alter Britain’s reliance on NATO and the CFSP framework; nor the fact that on matters such as Community support for Slovenes and Croats against Serbian claims to a greater Serbia, or EC extension to eastern Europe as well as EFTA, Germany would now insist on being heard.

The orientation of France towards the Community also changed, signified in 1991 when the Quai d’Orsay abandoned its line on ‘variable geometry’, even if the phenomenon was interpreted in a variety of ways by French analysts at the time. Under Mitterrand and Edith Cresson, France committed itself firmly to the internal market, not in the form of Anglo-Saxon liberalization – which Cresson, as a member of a Socialist government, frequently lampooned – but as a defence against Japanese competition and a means to adjust (an echo perhaps of how de Gaulle had assessed the EEC’s mid–60s harmonization policy). An element of protectionism grew, while unemployment rose in 1991–2. Yet as its one method of containing Germany, France set itself to become less particularist and more truly European, a step well beyond the already-significant turning point of 1983–4.

Documents flooded into the IGC, starting with the Commission’s agenda and member states’ own proposals. Others, with less formal status, included the Martin Reports and recommendations from the Parliamentary Assizes. Having been hyperactive in the preparatory period, the Commission appeared to miss several chances of imprinting its own agenda, possibly because Delors and the college were preoccupied with the many separate issues ranging from the early trade negotiations in eastern Europe to disputes over the budget. Whatever the reasons for the loss of focus, the proliferation of member states’ general plans, which varied from relatively ‘soft’ Spanish proposals to the more forthright German draft Treaty of March 1991, caused serious problems for the Luxembourg Presidency.

To contain the flood, and induce greater precision, the Presidency wrote what it styled a ‘non-paper’ in April, summarizing the state of play as if it had actually encompassed majority opinion. Later, on 20 June, in time for the Council Meeting, this was rendered into the negotiating text for a draft Treaty. As was normal in these circumstances, Council did little more than endorse what was going on, because actual progress was held up by three points of principle.