Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

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 Rühe34 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.35 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),36 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.

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