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.

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