French Chefs
Mini Teaser: The final effacement of British national sovereignty will probably take place in December at the European Economic Community summit in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
The final effacement of British national sovereignty will probably take place in December at the European Economic Community summit in Maastricht, the Netherlands. John Major, Britain's prime minister, will remove his famous Biro from his breast pocket and initial away the birthright of his people. The traditional doctrine of national sovereignty, passionately defended by Margaret Thatcher, will be dead.
To judge by the way the intergovernmental conferences are proceeding, the twelve members of the EC will sign a treaty this year to establish a monetary bloc before the end of the decade. The British government has accepted that Britain will benefit from some saving clause enabling a "future parliament" to take the final decision on the abolition of sterling. The British government's leverage stops there. Britain cannot prevent the others in the EC from going ahead outside the Treaty of Rome, by creating a separate Treaty of Monetary Union; when the time comes, one suspects, it will be difficult to stay aloof. How has Britain been so cornered? How is it that its ministers and their mandarins seem so, well, impotent?
The European Community, alas, is still ruled by France. French control has increased, is increasing, and shows no sign of being diminished. As the pressure tightens on their monetary jugular, Britons along with others in the EC and the world should realize that a Euro-bank controlling the supply of money in Europe, were it to happen, would be just the latest, if the most decisive, triumph of the French civil servants, in particular those who went to the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), the "Enarques." To speak of conspiracy is not quite right. It is a chess-like genius for thinking ahead, and dressing up French national interest as the European dream.
The French express their aims, quite explicitly, as a race against time. From the moment the first East Germans started to arrive in their Trabants, via Hungary, in the summer of 1989, Jacques Delors, EC Commission president, announced in his nasal voice that "history is accelerating." As the incredible events of that autumn unfolded, the phrase, and its corollary, became the unsnappy slogan of a panicky French government: "Puisque l'histoire s'accelere, il faut que nous nous accelerions nous-memes" ("Since history is accelerating, we too must accelerate").
We must speed up the "building of Europe" said Delors, and the acceleration has indeed been phenomenal. Since the Common Market was founded in 1957, the Treaty of Rome has only been revised three times in favor of a European union--by the Single European Act of 1986, by creating the EC's 1992 free-trade zone, and by the 1991 twin conferences of monetary and political union--and all three amendments have been supervised by Jacques Delors. The word "superstate" has a cantish ring. But it is in reality a fair description of what is conjured up by the Luxembourg draft treaty, which is likely to be approved at Maastricht: a single monetary authority, a joint foreign policy, a powerful supranational parliament, and so forth.
German Threats: Phony and Real
What was never quite clear was why the speeding up was so urgent. Delors and his henchmen, and the French government, and indeed most other European governments, continually adumbrated a non-specific threat from a united Germany. Unless this "mini-superpower" were bound into a dense European federation, they warned, it would "roll around like a loose cannon" in central and eastern Europe. The consequences of this were not spelled out, but they were presumably atavistic and awful. (It was of course possible--as the former British trade and industry secretary, Nicholas Ridley, showed--to take a diametrically opposite view: that an intensification of European union would merely entrench German domination of the EC. But then he was sacked for saying so.)
At a meeting of the twelve EC foreign ministers in the Hague last June, the great French foreign policy nightmare appeared to be instantiated. Here was German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a man who had offered up an epochal career to the cause of a "united Germany in a united Europe" scarifying all with his suggestion that the community should accord virtually instant diplomatic recognition to Slovenia. And here was Herr Schumacher, his soft-spoken, bearded spokesman, confusing reporters with his glib references to "Laibach." How French skin crawled when it turned out that "Laibach" was the old German word for the essentially Teutonic city of Ljubljana.
Roland Dumas, French foreign minister, even went so far as to inveigh against those who attempted to revive "zones of influence" in Europe. "We have had these in the past," he said, "and it was not the happiest thing." Austria was his prime target, but, perhaps deliberately, the allusion was left vague. For France fears, or at least claims to fear, a re-coagulation of the Teutonic tribes of Middle Europe, from eastern Belgium down the paths of the old Saxon migrations to Romania and the Ukraine.
It sounds eery, put like that, and it is meant to. For the French are deliberately appealing to a kind of loose, reflexive, saloon bar thinking--or its European equivalent. It should surely go without saying that a united Germany and increased German trading relationships with Eastern Europe have nothing to do with Prussianism, militarism, or revanchism. But somehow it does not go without saying. The debate about European union is continually infected by sloppy analogies with another age. Everyone in Paris merrily equivocates on the concept of "German dominance," as if Deutschemarkpolitik were merely the continuance of war by other means.
The immediate evidence, in fact, is that the German machine is being rapidly thrown out of kilter by its new commitments: 100 billion DMs per year for the eastern l[uml]ander, 30 billion as Danegeld for Gorbachev, inflation, and the rest of it. And when and if Germany rights itself, what, precisely, is so terrifying about this behemoth? In the Gulf War it behaved like a lobotomized giant. As for Austria, its enclitic neighbor, it is so attached to neutrality that it is even prepared to risk failure in its attempt to become a member of the Community. No, French politicians use the memories of the 1930s and the 1940s as a mere turnip-ghost. Germany is a threat to France only in the sense that it may sooner or later lose patience with the French system of running the Common Market.
When the federalists speak of the need to "lock" or "bind" Germany in, what they mean is "keep Germany locked in" to a bureaucratic apparatus of their own devising. From the French point of view, there are many advantages to the EC, and even more to the EC of the near future. German money pays for French agricultural surpluses. Important industrial and economic decisions, which in a free market would be taken in Bonn or Frankfurt, are taken in Brussels. And France, through EC institutions, can gratify its need for self-assertion on the world stage, and perhaps even cock a snook at the Americans.
French Connections
To exploit all this to the fullest, of course, France must have a pretty good institutional grip on Brussels. This it has.
Far from being a committed cell of homogenized Euro-maniacs, the EC commission is deeply riven on national lines.(1) For instance, Sir Leon Brittan, the commissioner responsible in the central field of competition policy and anti-trust law, has a "cabinet," or team of six political advisers, in continuous social and professional intercourse with the twenty-five emollient characters of "UKrep," the permanent British government representatives to the EC in Brussels led by Sir John Kerr.
But take that gentlemanly little liaison, square it, cube it, and you have something approaching the swollen, throbbing umbilicus between Brussels and Paris. It was widely remarked that French Prime Minister Edith Cresson's new government contains Martine Aubry, daughter of Delors; few, however, noted that Pascal Lamy, Delors' chef de cabinet (or chief political fixer) at the EC, was asked by Cresson to perform the same service in the French government, or that an identical offer was later made to Francois Lamoureux, Delors' deputy chef de cabinet.
It is called the "Pink Tide." They are all somewhere in their early forties; they are French; many of them went to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration; they are members of the Socialist Party; they see France's destiny in self-assertion through the European community. They include the minister for European Affairs, Elizabeth Guigou with her Cannes starlet looks, and Hubert Vedrine, Mitterrand's supercilious spokesman. But the most important in Brussels is Lamy. With his virtually shaven head and parade ground manner, Lamy runs the upper echelons of the commission like a Saharan camp of the French foreign legion. "I like Pascal," says another chef de cabinet in a quavery sort of voice. "His mind works like a beautiful machine. There are so many idiots running about this place that you have to be rude sometimes."
When Delors and Lamy arrived at the commission in January 1986, it was already a profoundly French organization. It is not just that the everyday language is French: the structure, the "cabinet" system, even the budgetary procedures are French. At the daily noon briefing, when cyclostyled pap is distributed to the obedient hacks, etiquette still demands that Danish journalists use French to talk to Dutch spokesmen.
After eight years in power, Delors and Lamy now have a dense network of gauleiters at the pressure points of the commission: Legras at agriculture, Pons in the monetary division, Dewost in the legal department. But these are just the most obvious fluttering tricolors. The real pervasiveness of French influence, involving even the most junior officials reporting straight back to the Quai d'Orsay, became apparent at a party thrown by Lamy to celebrate his award of the Legion d'Honneur. "I suddenly realized how it all worked," remembers one British official. "There they all were."
This is no British counter-network. The locus classicus of British limpwristedness is a former treasury official who came to hold a position of potentially sweeping influence in the personnel department. At the farewell ceremony for another British Eurocrat, he produced a gold watch and made a farewell speech--in French. "British officials have been trained to think they should be politically impartial," says one official. With their shy grins and corrugated-soled shoes, they are no match for the intellectual brutality of Lamy and his people.
Nor do the Germans have a taste for this kind of intellectual guerrilla warfare--though the senior German staff of the commission undoubtedly are in close touch with Bonn. The understanding, almost 40 years after the war, is that it would be bad form for Germany to throw its weight around. By now it would, in any event, be difficult.
Sir Leon Brittan is reputed to be the only one who can go the distance with Delors, dialectically, when the seventeen commissioners meet on Wednesdays. But his success in curbing the nationalist, protectionist impulses of the president of the commission is modest. Sir Leon's department wanted Renault to pay back [srl]1.2 billion in illegal state subsidies to the French state. Delors demurred. Finally the commission settled on [srl]600 million, most of which the French government appeared to pump straight back in about two weeks later.
Then Sir Leon hailed a great triumph for competition in the skies as Air France, the state-owned carrier, gobbled up its only two domestic rivals, Air Inter and UTA. Sir Leon had extracted a promise from Air France that it would expose itself to competition from domestic rivals, glossing over the detail that those rivals were now nonexistent. Others thought it was difficult to see the value of a competition policy if it merely eliminated competitors.
The French see the battle for the soul of the commission as crucial. Brussels holds the key to the future of their great tottering industrial regimes--Renault, Air France, Thomson and others--which have been nationalized since the end of the last war. Edith Cresson and Jacques Delors maintain that Brussels must have an industrial strategy to fight off the Japanese. In reality, this means protecting French producers not just from non-EC competitors but from competition within Europe itself; even Sir Leon's mandate, after all, is to prevent firms from establishing a "dominant position" within the Single Market.
So it was that last May, Delors and a handful of advisers repaired to one of the most expensive restaurants in Burgundy to confer with the leaders of Thomson (France), Bull (France), Siemens (Germany), Philips (Holland) and Olivetti (Italy). The topic, it emerged afterward, was the "industrial strategy" for the electronics sector; in other words how to carve up the European market and fend off the Yellow Peril. So it is that the commission is proposing a new "European" broadcasting standard for High Definition Television, purely as a defense against the Japanese and to protect Thomson and Philips and which will set the true preferences of consumers at naught. It is a dirigiste, protectionist approach flowing directly from Monnet's original "Commissariat du Plan," which nannied French industry after the war.
Nothing can be done to the [srl]22 billion agricultural system without French approval. It may be imperilling the success of the Uruguay Round and causing major transatlantic difficulties, but the Common Agricultural Policy was part of the original Franco-German deal of the Common Market, and is therefore sacrosanct. The French run it, down to the tiniest detail. (Why should it be that even EC legislation on cider presses is based wholly on practice in Brittany, as if no cider-making took place in Devon and Somerset?)
Similarly, in the commission's overseas development division, one official freely concedes: "This department has never not been masterminded by France. My basic function is to provide outdoor relief for French African ex-colonies." What makes the British Eurocrat sometimes bitter is that he is marooned by Whitehall, his career forgotten, on the assumption that he has gone native. But his French colleagues are no loony "federasts." They are out and out nationalists.
Cherchez le franc
Now, as the endgame of the argument on monetary union nears, is it really right to see it as nothing but the logical extension of the 1992 Single Market? Would it be too cynical to look for a French plot in this too?
This, at least, is how it appears to have happened. The idea of a central Euro-bank mysteriously resurfaced, after a long spell on the shelf, in a speech in January 1988 by the Gaullist finance minister, Edouard Balladur. He had a list of grievances against the way the European Monetary System was loaded against the potentially weak, inflationary currencies, such as the franc and lira, and in favor of the strong currencies, namely the deutschemark. One of Balladur's aides says: "We thought it essential that the government should have some tools to define its own economic policy."
As the French explain it, ever since the birth of the EMS in 1979, they had been laboring under the tyranny of the Bundesbank. Whenever they wanted to go for growth, the gnomes of Frankfurt said "nein." It was bad enough to be in hock to the low-inflation, low-growth policies of that worldly, suntanned, former soccer writer, Dr. Pohl. More galling still was the importance assumed by the provincial bankers on the Bundesbank council, the maddening little Poloniuses from Hamburg, Bavaria and North-Rhine Westphalia. These men controlled German, and therefore French, interest rates.
What Balladur was proposing in the "European Central Bank" was effectively a French seat on the Bundesbank. After ten years of knuckling under, France wanted to mount a rescue operation for its monetary sovereignty. Not all Germans were delighted. But Herr Genscher was unquestionably forewarned of the Balladur speech and chimed in with a five-page memorandum of support.
Genscher has the reputation of being a "Euro-nut," determined to enmesh his country so deeply in the EC that it can never again appear adversarial toward Paris. Chancellor Kohl (whose private office includes one of Lamy's contemporaries at ENA) went along with it, almost as if out of habit. Not so the finance ministry under Gerhard Stoltenberg, which noted the suggestion, through gritted teeth, only after several weeks.
Balladur had made his move at a highly significant point: Delors had just been reconfirmed in his second four-year term as commission president. No sooner had Balladur spoken than it turned out Delors had a plan for a committee of "wise men" to examine the whole problem of a single bank and currency. Was it all a French conspiracy?
My own working hypothesis is that in January 1985 Delors had been deliberately planted in Brussels, with the acquiescence of Kohl, to avenge the humiliations of the franc. One has to remember that the finance minister at the time of the most painful franc-deutschemark realignments, in 1981, 1982 and 1983, was Jacques Delors (and his chef de cabinet, incidentally, was Pascal Lamy). Almost as soon as Delors left the French government in 1984, Mitterrand began negotiations with Kohl over placing him in the commission on the retirement of his predecessor as president, the ineffectual Luxembourger, Gaston Thorn. It is certainly plausible that even at that stage Mitterrand and Delors recognized that some form of "European union" would give them a lever over German monetary policy, and so end the economic servitude they had experienced.
From Balladur's speech onward, the plot takes on a Sophoclean inevitability. The June 1988 Hannover summit did indeed mandate the Delors committee of wise men to produce a report on moves to monetary union. It was unveiled in April 1989, adopted by all except Mrs. Thatcher at the Madrid summit in June. Mrs. Thatcher was overruled again in Strasbourg in December 1989, when the intergovernmental conference was called.
That conference is proceeding now. It seems clear that the twelve will agree to set up some kind of monetary institution, possibly leading to a single currency. The Germans, in the end, will consent. The Enarques will have triumphed. Instead of a looser, wider Europe dominated by Germany's natural economic weight, France's institutional manipulation of the EC will be prolonged, if not perpetuated. Delors will be able to campaign for the 1995 French presidential election as the man who united Europe and recovered French monetary sovereignty. And the British will have lost theirs.
Boris Johnson is the EC correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph.
1. The Commission is the EC's executive arm of civil servants, permanently based in Brussels. Jacques Delors is president of the supreme panel of seventeen commissioners (France, Germany, Britain, Italy, and Spain each have two). The commissioners have their own specific policy fields and they propose legislation at the regular meetings of the Council of Ministers, where the ministers vary according to which subject is being discussed. The European Parliament has, thus far, a mainly advisory role. Separately, each EC member maintains its own permanent team of diplomats and civil servants in Brussels to lobby the Commission and take part in detailed negotiations. Britain's is called "UKrep."
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