by Chris Patten
So a collection of countries of varying degrees of economic vitality and competitiveness was brought together in a monetary union which was, in effect, formed on the assumption that they could all accept the same disciplines as the most powerful among them like Germany and the Netherlands. But where was the evidence that you could have a single currency without a fiscal union, and was it really conceivable that member states would be happy to have other states, or some super Commissioner in Brussels, deciding their tax-and-spend policies? To take one obvious example, would one of the principal impregnators of this idea, France, be happy to have its budget set by German politicians? What level of VAT on restaurant meals in Paris does Herr Schäuble think we should pay this year? As if this was not enough, if you were to have a fiscal union or even a pale imitation of one, you would need a transfer union as well. Money would have to be sent from stronger countries to weaker ones, from Berlin to Athens for example, even as Athens or another less competitive economy was having to pay back northern banks for the money they had been lent and then lost in the days after the eurozone’s creation. In order to remain in the eurozone, southern countries in particular were obliged to make sacrifices and cuts in social programmes which produced public convulsions. At a conference in Rome in the early years of Greek blood-letting, the Greek education minister (a friend of mine) told me that she had been obliged to close 2,000 schools that week. The euro, badly conceived and badly managed, has almost torn Europe apart.
It was all very well scolding the Greeks or Italians for being too idle, too corrupt, the French for being too dependent on a bloated public sector, the Portuguese for being too far down any queue of economic comparators. That might all be true. But for sure you could not wave a wand or offer a blessing and save these sinners overnight. They each sinned in their own chosen way and however tiresome that might be, you could not make them all into Germans. If you believed in fiscal responsibility, you sympathized with German policy. But if you wanted the European project to survive without the political tumult of protests with banners showing photographs of Angela Merkel with a Hitler moustache, if you wanted a Europe which thrived partly because it took account of diversity and frailty as well as economic power, then change was essential – whether substantive or cautiously fudged. The problem was that Germany, which saw itself as the principal guardian of the European vision, and which wanted to be seen to bury any suggestion of its nationalism in that vision, had to face the dilemma that the rest of us knew that this vision was all too comfortable for German mercantilism. Because, when you did the accounts, the euro gave Germany a cut-price exchange rate for its exports, which continued to soar. I think this outcome was accidental rather than deliberately planned. It also has roots deep in Germany’s national identity. The German word for debt (Schuld) is the same as that for guilt. We could not expect Germany to abandon its fundamental beliefs; yet it might have better understood the need for more flexibility in pursuing its goal of fiscal virtue.
The adoption of the euro was agreed at the beginning of my term as a Commissioner; it was introduced – from ATM to wallet – halfway through that period in 2002. The management of the euro’s arrival on the scene was actually a success. But not all those who worked in the Commission were convinced that it would sail safely through the storms and avoid disaster. One of the real pleasures of being a Commissioner was that you were able, as I noted, to pick your own team of close advisers for your private office. I had first thought that, as captain of my team, it might send waves around the system to select a French official. But I soon discovered the difficulties of this. Two very clever fellows were proposed, each strongly opposed by part of the Paris bureaucracy. Since I could not understand the nature of the problem – why did Monsieur X annoy Monsieur Y – I decided to play safe and choose a British diplomat as my ‘Chef’. (It is said that when Roy Jenkins was President of the Commission and went for a meeting with Ronald Reagan in Washington, the latter was unable to understand why Jenkins had brought his cook along.) I had been allotted the portfolio of External Affairs and it was natural to put together a team who knew about international relations. I chose as Chef a charming diplomat – clever, well-read, funny – Antony Cary, who had sold himself to me at our interview by his articulate, forensic and unrelenting demolition of the case which I put rather vaguely for the euro. A current cliché is that good civil servants should always speak truth to power. Antony did not need to be encouraged to do this; indeed, sometimes he took a little time to recognize (given our respective positions) that my version of power might be (sometimes was) wrong, but carried more brawn than his subtler version. He was huge fun to work with, and would have gone even higher in the Foreign Office – he eventually became ambassador in Stockholm and High Commissioner in Canada – if he had been more sharp-elbowed and less determined to expose his own opinions. Together, we put together a fine team, including in time a Swedish and then a Dutch deputy, both of them safe, competent and sensible, a very clever ex-Treasury man, Patrick Child, who succeeded Antony, Edward Llewellyn (from Hong Kong) and two frighteningly smart and tough women. Miriam Gonzáles Durántez, who was Spanish, looked after Trade, Latin America and the Middle East. Provided that I did what she told me, very charmingly, to do, nothing went wrong. On one occasion, the Chef of the Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, told her that his boss wanted a meeting with me to discuss the allocation of accommodation in our building. ‘My Commissioner,’ she responded ‘was a Cabinet minister and a colonial Governor. Are you seriously suggesting that I should get him to give up an hour of his time to talk about square metres of official space?’ The scion of the ENA backed down rapidly. At the time, Miriam was in the process of marrying an up-and-coming young Liberal Democrat, but woe betide anyone who refers to her now as Mrs Nick Clegg. The other clever woman, Vicky Bowman, was a Foreign Office diplomat, a fluent Burmese speaker, who went at an absurdly young age to be Britain’s ambassador in Yangon. We would augment our intellectual firepower by adding each six months an intern from the ENA and another from the British civil service. The ENA interns were very bright, but slightly daunted by the informality of a British office and by the fact that they were expected to have a point of view, whether or not it happened to coincide with that of the British government. I encouraged them to follow Antony’s example.
My job description (as the Commissioner for External Affairs) reflected the political and intellectual muddle over who should be responsible for the EU’s foreign and security policy. Was this really a Commission task or was it a matter for the collective discussion of the member states? My own view was that it was definitely a member state function, but there was plenty that the Commission could do which though sometimes described as ‘back office’ often contained most of what Europe could deliver or wanted to deliver – bilateral trade, sanctions, development assistance, co-operation agreements, the linking together of those community competences – from energy to economic regulation, which had an external dimension. In some respects, provided the Commission with representative offices all around the world played its hand carefully, it was able to supply most of the beef in managing many external questions. So I had more than enough to do, with almost ceaseless travel. (A joke was told about me which had previously been attached to a French Commissioner. ‘What is the difference between Chris Patten and God?’ ‘God is everywhere. Patten is everywhere except Brussels.’) The Council of Ministers, anxious to raise Europe’s foreign and security profile, had just appointed their own High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, a former Spanish minister and NATO Secretary-General, Javier Solana. This two-headed approach to policy could have led to disaster. But Javier and I got on very well. He is a subtle, unthreatening, extraordinarily well-connected diplomat. I regarded him as my senior partner; he never treated me as his junior. In almost five years working together, no one ever managed to slip a cigarette paper between our views, a British Conservative and a Spanish socialist. A phrase at which I usually bridle is the de
scription of an organizational relationship as not ‘fit for purpose’. In my experience, this cliché can usually be circumvented when people find a way of working together. I probably frustrated Javier from time to time and vice-versa. I think he was keener on avoiding confrontation than I am. But we made the system work.
It is of course very difficult, when possible at all, to make foreign policy rapidly with twenty-eight countries, and the effectiveness of doing so declines the further you go from Europe’s borders and from the functions (trade, commercial regulation, for example) which member states have agreed to run in concert. To take an obvious example, Europe’s position in south-east Europe – the Balkans and Turkey – and around the Mediterranean from Morocco through to the Levant could be properly harmonized. I doubt the value of Europe trying to make a splash in say, North Korea, though I did once go there with Javier: a visit to another planet.
There were three specific issues which consumed much of our time. I moved pretty well straight from working on the brutal consequences of identity politics in Northern Ireland to spending a large part of my time in the western Balkans, accompanied on these visits first by Edward Llewellyn and later by Patrick Rock. The fighting there had bloodied and shamed Europe in the 1990s. The Kosovo War itself had ended just before I became a Commissioner in the late summer of 1999. This was a region where the crumbling empires of the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, leaving behind the residues of their cultures and religions, had triggered conflicts which encapsulated the hostility between the West and the East, between Catholic and Orthodox. The different groups were not really very different at all. Ethnically, for example, Croats were indistinguishable from the Serbs; they were from the same Slavic race, with the same language and names. It was religion which divided Catholic Croats from Orthodox Serbs, with Muslim Bosnians trapped in the middle of this mutual hatred. The Croats had behaved appallingly as a fascist puppet state during the Second World War, especially in their barbarous treatment of Serbs and Jews. They were led then by a political movement called the Ustase, whose ideology combined Nazi views on race, Croatian nationalism and Roman Catholicism. It was a deadly cocktail. The degree to which Catholic Church leaders were implicated in their terrible crimes, turning a blind eye at best or giving a not-so-mute endorsement at worst, was the subject of much controversy after the war. In general, the identification of churches with nationalism usually leads to trouble, providing justifications for behaviour that those religions on their own would surely condemn. Corners are cut; the New Testament or the Koran takes second place to some strident anthems of tribal belligerence.
In the post-war years the Balkan states were bound together in a communist authoritarian embrace by the former guerrilla leader Marshal Tito, who recommended himself to Western countries by deliberately and successfully distancing himself from Moscow and its colonial feudatories in the Warsaw Pact. Tito, himself part Croat and part Slovene, suppressed the symbols and flags of any other national identity than that of Yugoslavia. He kept the Serbs in check; they would otherwise have dominated the state. Tito’s death melted the glue that had held the country together. Though the Serbian dominance in Yugoslavia was its central problem, when that led to Croats demanding their own independence the issue immediately turned into the dominance in Croatia of Croats over Serbs.
Almost a decade of misery, horror, death and ethnic cleansing followed. Initially, Europeans could not decide whether they should try to prevent the disintegration of Yugoslavia, encourage it as peacefully as possible, or turn a blind eye until conditions had returned to those which would allow their citizens to go there on holiday. While thousands died in the fighting, in the shelling of cities like Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, in concentration camps and in besieged and pillaged towns like Srebrenica, politicians from outside faffed around ignoring three simple lessons. First, identity conflicts, like most others, require for their settlement a combination of force and politics. In Northern Ireland, there would never have been peace had not the terrorists in both communities come to understand that the British security effort was not going to run out of patience and energy. Second, in a big conflict, Europe had to work hand-in-hand with the United States. Europeans could not operate on their own. In Northern Ireland, American help – which was hard earned – had been invaluable with the Irish diaspora and moderate nationalists. Third, there had to be an offer to the warring parties of a brighter future.
I arrived in Brussels when the European Union was trying to put in place the building blocks of such a policy in the Balkans. We launched a programme which combined financial support, institution building (courts and police, for example), and much hand-holding with the offer of closer trade and economic relations with the EU. Perhaps, a long way down the road, membership of the EU would be possible for Serbia and the others, as has happened already for Croatia and Slovenia.
Javier Solana and I visited Balkan countries with wearisome frequency. I remember without much affection countless visits over the whole of our time in Brussels to Pristina, then the impoverished capital of Kosovo, a squalid colonial dependency of Serbia, only recently liberated with the end of the Kosovo War. Poor and rundown, Pristina’s formerly iconic hotel, the Grand, where we often had to stay, was fitted throughout with dirty grey carpets with cigarette burns, bedding which looked as though it should come with a health warning, only occasional hot water, urine stains all over the bathroom. It had provided sanctuary for the members of mostly Serbian communist politburos over the years. Trying to get life back to something like normal in Kosovo was heroic and expensive work. I remember in particular the struggle to get the power station operational again. It came straight from a Dickensian manual of darkest industry. Gradually the resilient Kosovars got their very poor country back on the road with lots of honest EU cash and other funds rather less honestly drawn out of various European rackets.
Javier and I went with just as great regularity during one very tense period in 2001 to Skopje, the post-earthquake capital of Macedonia, to work with George Robertson, the NATO Secretary-General. We were trying to prevent the country falling back into a full-scale war between the government and its Albanian population, which lives principally in the north-west of the country. There had been heavy fighting in the city of Tetovo in 2001, ended by an agreement which we helped the Macedonian President, Trajkovski, to broker. Trajkovski was the only Methodist I met in the Balkans and was as constructive and decent as his co-religionists had been in Northern Ireland, but we had to go back to Skopje again and again to help keep the show on the road. I recall spending one long night in the presidential palace surrounded by angry demonstrators, opposed to making any concession to the Albanians. They demonstrated their anger by firing their guns in the air, at least we hoped in the air. Life for Macedonia in international negotiations was made more difficult by its name. The Greeks refused to call it anything but the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM for short) on the grounds that Europeans since Alexander the Great knew that Macedonia was in Greece. This was all made more difficult by the Macedonians endlessly naming airports and streets after famous events in Macedonian history; they naturally gave the airport Alexander’s name: a tiresome but harmless tease. This is the kind of thing which happens when ideas of identity overwhelm practical politics. Our regular hand-holding in Macedonia helped end overt conflict and set the country on a bumpy road to greater stability. After Milosevic was ousted in 2000, Belgrade also had to be visited regularly. This was accomplished partly thanks to EU support for an underground radio station and for the provision of oil for Milosevic’s opponents. He had proved a consummate master of some of the most effective instruments of Balkan politics: lies, cheating, blackmail, corruption, violence and demagoguery which would transport his listeners back to Serbia’s fourteenth-century defeat in Kosovo by the Ottomans. The calamity of the Field of Blackbirds predated the Battle of the Boyne by a good three centuries, but it was invoked just as raucously.
The restoration of something appr
oximating to normalcy in the western Balkans has limped along for almost twenty years now. It has been a painfully slow success story for the European Union, for NATO, for the power of European chequebooks and for a succession of excellent officials who have presided over the efforts to restore order and peace. Paddy Ashdown particularly helped to do this in Bosnia with a formidable display of leadership which made me regret that Britain no longer has an empire to provide further career opportunities for him. And, of course, we worked with the Americans. On my first visit to Sarajevo, I found that the American Secretary of State, the formidable Madeleine Albright, was also in town. We agreed to see senior members of the government together to reinforce the similar messages we were both delivering. Afterwards, the French foreign ministry complained to Brussels that I had done this and taken a joint initiative with the Americans. Europeans should have acted without the Americans. This is too often a default position for the French: keep America out of Europe’s business. It is very silly, but then so too is the sight of British politicians and diplomats turning somersaults to try and get Americans to use the phrase ‘special relationship’. Can we, for example, persuade President Trump to love us to bits? Do we really want to escape the alleged EU cage to take up residence in the Trump kennel?