First Confession

by Chris Patten

  Institutionally, the European Commission reflected the French influence from the early years before Britain’s membership. I was supported by what was called a ‘cabinet’, in practice a large private office, staffed by men and women from several countries whom I picked myself. They helped me to run a directorate-general led by an official who was doing the same sort of job as a British Permanent Secretary. The main difference from running a British government department was that there was much more jockeying for position and for promotion in Brussels, a fight to put flags on jobs, encouraged by some of the member states, Spain and Italy to the fore. There was also a much more explicit obligation to build consensus across the Commission and with member states. The officials I worked with in Brussels were excellent and the process of accountability was in some respects tougher and more transparent than back home. You had to manage your relationships with colleagues in the Commission, the ministers and ambassadors of member states, and the European Parliament. This is an institution about which it is easy to sneer, particularly if you are a well-paid, expenses-consuming Eurosceptic member of that body, choosing to spend your life in an organization that you are intent on destroying. The Parliament works in every EU language, which makes its interpreted proceedings pretty clunky. It travels from Brussels to Strasbourg at great expense to satisfy French amour-propre, which is of course administratively crazy. The Parliament’s role and members are too little known in most member states. It tends to be fired up by extremes of integrationist sentiment. But the Parliament and particularly its committees do much good work, largely unnoticed, and it is home to many genuinely expert parliamentarians. I found my British parliamentary experience a useful asset in dealing with it. As with Westminster, it wanted to spend a lot of its time debating issues over which it had little or no control. Since my brief was External Affairs, this affected me considerably.

  When I arrived in Brussels there were two commissioners for each of the larger member states – France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK – and ten for the remaining smaller member states. (In the summer of 2004, ten new commissioners were appointed from the countries such as Poland and Hungary in Central and Eastern Europe which had joined the Union. The new Commission formed later that year had one commissioner for each country.) The twenty-member Commission from 1999 to 2004 contained some real heavyweights, as good as any Cabinet ministers with whom I had worked in London. Mario Monti, who dealt with Competition, was a distinguished Italian economist, with impeccable manners and a strong commitment to socially responsible market economics. Frits Bolkestein was a crusty, clever, old-fashioned European Liberal who would have graced any Conservative Cabinet in London. Pascal Lamy, who covered Trade, was an outstanding product of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA); he had been the head of the private office of the previous Commission President, Jacques Delors. He was steeped in European politics and just about as clever as it is possible to be, but dwelt well beyond the vulgarities of politics. He went on to be the secretary-general of the WTO. Pedro Solbes, who returned to Spain to become finance minister in the socialist government in 2004, ran Economic and Monetary Affairs. The Portuguese Commissioner, António Vitorino, was intellectually first rate and adroitly gave the member states the impression that they were driving the Justice and Home Affairs agenda, whereas in fact he was himself doing all the heavy lifting. I mention them, not because some of the others were not equally good, but primarily because they were the ones with whom I mostly dealt. It should be added that they all spoke perfect English, and in some cases other languages too. Virtually every Commissioner had good English and French. Northern European commissioners tended to speak German as well.

  The President, Romano Prodi, was a genial Italian economist who had previously been Prime Minister of his country. He did not have a very high profile, which was partly a result of his disinclination to interfere in the departments of his colleagues. It was to his credit that he captained a pretty contented crew. Romano had an early, bruising experience of British politics and tabloid journalism. Shortly after I got to Brussels, Neil Kinnock, my fellow British Commissioner, telephoned me to suggest that I should join him in discouraging Romano Prodi from an initiative he was determined to take. He intended to go to London to see the editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, to tell him what he wanted his Commission to do over the next five years. He thought he could persuade Dacre to give the Commission and its policies fairer coverage. I agreed with Neil that this was a terrible idea, born of Romano’s perhaps other-worldly view of the quality of British tabloid journalism and its interest in the truth. We both failed to dissuade him, even though we argued that the word ‘fairness’ became oxymoronic when used in the same sentence as Dacre’s name. He duly went to London, Dacre received him courteously but told him succinctly that his position on the EU was very clear. His newspaper, he said, had two ‘stringers’ in Brussels. They were there to ferret out every bad story they could find about Brussels and the EU. That is what his paper would publish. He was not interested in anything else. Romano returned, chastened, to Brussels, his belief in the British commitment to responsible free speech and liberal values considerably dented. I mentioned to him a line of Tom Stoppard’s: ‘I am passionately committed to free speech, it’s just some newspapers I don’t like.’

  Nothing in my new life in Brussels put any great strain on my sense of identity; indeed in many respects I felt able to assert strongly felt aspects of my Britishness. I paid a lot of attention to the Parliament, flattering its own idea (not always vain or wrong) of its own importance. I stood up for promotion on merit. I resisted pressures to parachute particular national choices into jobs for which the candidates were not especially suitable. I tried (as did members of my cabinet) to argue my corner in forceful, clear English, not Brussels bureaucratese. This occasionally gave us the reputation of being blunt, not just unambiguous. Moreover, what I was trying to do plainly mattered to Britain as well as to its EU partners. We were developing and implementing policies of international co-operation from the Balkans to China, from Colombia to Palestine, as efficiently as possible. The surrender of any of my national affiliation didn’t come into this, unless of course you take the view that organized co-operation with other European, or indeed any other countries, is by its very nature a quasi-treacherous activity.

  I am a Conservative who has never believed that everything my party does or stands for is right. I am a Catholic who has occasional doubts and disagreements which have not persuaded me of the merits of agnosticism or atheism. In a similar if not quite so important a spirit, I have always been in favour of Britain’s membership of the EU without thinking everything about it is hunky-dory. Working in the Commission made me more aware of some of the inadequacies of the EU, as well as some of the myths, exaggerations and lies that we allowed in Britain to erode trust in the whole institution: ‘allowed’ because we usually tried to avoid confronting these for fear of standing up to the tabloid press or, in the Conservative Party, taking on the right wing. I will try to avoid what follows turning to a lengthy Lenten meditation, and divide my criticism into two parts – the way the European Union works and what it seeks to do.

  A fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching is the notion of subsidiarity, which has become attached, not by accident, to the philosophy of European activity as well. The idea is that decisions should be taken and policies implemented at the lowest manageable level. This is obviously a sensible guide to action in a collection of nation states used to running most of their own affairs. What it means in practice is that many – arguably most – of the non-economic functions of government are left to the member states to run. It would have been foolish for Europe to try to run welfare, health or education policies, though from time to time an initiative that the European Union wants to take collectively may have an impact on an area of policy reserved to national governments. For instance, a public health issue which is not contained within national frontiers may affect national health pol
icies. But overall the principle is clear and sensible. There are times, including recently, when subsidiarity has been pursued with a modicum of enthusiasm. There has inevitably, however, been a tendency (as in most bureaucracies) to develop the equivalent of imperial over-reach. When I was a Commissioner, I used to think this was given a curious sort of moral impulse by the feeling in the very bowels of the institution that everything would be done better if it was done on the European level. This was a sentiment that could easily be given a push by the fact that so many things done at national level as a part of European initiatives were done so badly. Most of the auditors’ queries about Europe’s accounts concerned mistakes made by national governments, not by Brussels institutions.

  So the rule on subsidiarity was more likely to be honoured in the breach than in the observance. The case for forgetting about it was invariably contained within the notion that this or that area of activity cried out for ‘more Europe’ not ‘less’. Sometimes this was true; one could see the case for it in relation to many aspects of energy policy for instance. Yet while the single market, to take the most important example, needed to be completed, with ‘more Europe’ in areas like e-commerce and services, pushing back the frontiers of commerce did not necessitate drawing in as much as the Commission could acquire of the social policies of member states. The Commission took on too many tasks that it should not have been doing and could not do well. More functions meant more meetings, with more staff and more interpreters. Inevitably, as ever, Hendrickson’s Law began to apply: ‘If you have enough meetings over a long enough period of time, the meetings become more important than the problems they were intended to solve.’ It was at such a meeting, the subject of which has long since escaped me (though there is probably a directive on it), that I tried to work out what proportion of the rest of my life was being consumed by it. I mentioned this fairly straightforward arithmetical problem at a private dinner for Conservative Members of the European Parliament that evening. Fool! Inevitably it got on to the front page of the Telegraph the following day as an example of how bored I had become in Brussels. It was true of that meeting, but overall I found being a Commissioner rather more interesting than being, say, Secretary of State for the Environment, with endless meetings about the mostly incomprehensible arcana of local government finance.

  So the Commission suffered from a form of mission creep that was part of its DNA. There would always be someone in a meeting or hovering just outside who wished to make the case for ‘more Europe’; ‘more’ answerable to whom? To the Council of Ministers, and through that body to national parliaments, and to the European Parliament. But these forms of accountability were pretty opaque, though probably not much more so than the parliamentary process in Britain. We tend to assume not only that our island home is governed by a flawless parliamentary democracy but that its mechanisms are widely understood. As I write this sentence, the House of Lords, of which I am a member, is poised somewhere between the Second and Third Reading of a bill on universities and research which will have a profound impact on both. I doubt whether this legislation is being followed with close attention on our buses or even in the common rooms of English universities. We have always been happier to criticize the imperfections of the ‘demos’ – even the lack of it – in Europe, while rather romanticizing its role in our own country.

  In political as in other areas Inverness probably has more in common with Plymouth than Seville has with Reykjavik, and probably always will. So Europe tries routinely to do too much and, as a result, exacerbates the problem of clarifying accountability. This becomes much clearer when the great purposes of the EU are considered. Europe’s history determined what the organization set as its main priorities. It wanted to anchor the reconciled France and Germany at the heart of a co-operative, rules-based venture that would secure the development of welfare democracy among the ruins of post-war Western Europe. Britain’s greatest contributions to this were to pioneer the establishment of the single market so as to maximize European trade, and to lead the campaign to enlarge the borders of the EU so that we could accept as members the not-long liberated countries of the old Soviet Empire. There was a good deal of politics in both these ventures. Enlarging the single market – one of Margaret Thatcher’s great achievements, driven through in the mid-1980s by the British European Commissioner, Arthur Cockfield – involved political rows in Britain over the necessary extension of majority decision making in Brussels, and arguments in other European countries which saw market competitiveness as a threat to national commercial interests. Germany and France, for example, both threw up roadblocks against the opening of service and retail sectors to greater European trade. Professional services were always protected by national governments. In these fights for a more liberal, market-oriented approach to Europe’s economic challenges, Britain regularly argued for ‘more Europe’ not ‘less’. London was probably too reticent, fearful perhaps of provoking domestic opposition, in pointing out to European colleagues how much leadership we were trying to give in an integrationist way on this issue, which, if we had been successful, would have raised Europe’s growth rates and productivity levels.

  Inevitably there was a lot of politics about the enlargement process, which was in many respects a triumph for Brussels management. The politics lay principally in securing the democratic stability of countries which had only recently been under the thumb of Moscow’s communist empire. Helping these countries to be free and democratic naturally took them out of any Russian sphere of interest. They were independent and able to chart their own course. Where the politics went too far was in rushing the process for some countries, out of a desire to get as many countries as possible into the Brussels lifeboat as quickly as we could manage. Sometimes Brussels was plainly inclined to pretend that the would-be member states were conducting reforms or had already done so when in practice this was far from the case. (The same happened, as we shall see in a moment, over membership of the eurozone.) Had Romania and Bulgaria really complied with Europe’s demands over the rule of law and the suppression of organized crime, for instance? We knew the answer but pretended to believe their assurances. We were even prepared to allow Cyprus into the EU with the promise that if we did so its Greek leaders would work with Turkey and the Turkish community on the island to end its by then three-decade-old division. It would have been perfectly possible to condition Cypriot accession on an agreement, rather than allow (as happened) duplicity to trump diplomacy in order to inflate the EU accession numbers. A divided Cyprus became and remained an EU member with its Greek leaders initially actually campaigning against a UN-brokered agreement, despite all their former promises. A besetting sin in the EU (and in most diplomacy, it has to be said) is to duck hard questions in order to secure soft answers.

  The most damaging example of politics triumphing over other considerations was the introduction of the euro. The case for economic and monetary union and the introduction of a single currency was essentially political. The economic case was that the euro’s arrival would boost inter-EU trade (which it did to some extent, alongside the reduction of barriers in the single market) and prevent competitive devaluations which would damage the integrity of the market. The results have been economically and politically terrible for most members of the eurozone, particularly the weaker ones, and it is at least worth considering how much stronger and much more competitive Europe’s economy would be today if as much political effort and energy had gone into completing the single market as has gone into keeping the euro afloat.

  Initially, I supported the case for Britain joining the euro, although mindful that it was primarily a political project driven by France in particular. For Paris, German abandonment of its own currency, the Deutschmark, in favour of a new European currency was the price demanded by President Mitterrand for supporting reunification of Germany in 1990. Germany at the time must have been a little unnerved by the fact that both France and Britain were opposed to reunification. In Margaret Thatcher�
�s purported recollection of a remark by the French novelist François Mauriac, ‘We like Germany so much that we want two of them.’ Thatcher had explicitly told President Gorbachev in 1989 that Britain did not want a united Germany. The hostility of both France and Britain to reunification must have been a powerful point of pressure on Chancellor Kohl to persuade his government and party to surrender their own beloved currency, the hardest of the hard, for a sickly infant. No wonder some German politicians still argue that this grand bargain did not occur, despite the evidence published by the news periodical Der Spiegel and the corroboration of French officials like the former Mitterrand adviser and foreign minister Hubert Védrine. The way the euro has developed must make French officials these days wonder whether an initiative which made Germany even more central to the running of the European economy was such a bright idea.

  It was not too long before my views on the euro came into line with those of John Major. From the start, he had argued that there was a strong case for a common, not a single, currency running alongside national ones. In time the strong would drive out the weak. But the launch of the euro, a single currency, was fundamentally flawed. First, it treated all the members of the zone as though they were at similar levels of competitiveness and needed a single interest rate to deal with similar levels of cost push inflation. This could not have been much further from the truth, particularly since Germany under Chancellor Schroeder had just driven through painful reforms to lower costs. In the early years, there was a flood of money from northern banks into southern economies in pursuit of wholly implausible returns which mostly depended on unlikely levels of competitiveness. For a number of years, flying into Madrid or driving out of Dublin, the amount of construction activity made you think for a moment that you must be in an emerging Asian economy. What made the situation even more damaging was that some members of the eurozone – Greece was the prime example – were only there because of politics; in Greece’s case indeed it only qualified as a euro member because it fabricated, with the help of a well-known global bank, the figures necessary for membership. Presented with the evidence that Greece did not really qualify to become a member of the eurozone, President Chirac famously observed, ‘But how could we exclude the country that gave Europe Plato?’ Very easily, actually, if the eurozone was to be taken as a serious economic policy rather than a genuflection to the roots of Western culture. This was level one economics, not the beginning of a philosophy course.