Ironies of EU history
Hegel once wrote that "the owl of Minerva spread its wings only with the falling of dusk." Personally, I was never too sure what he meant by that, but I think it had something to do with history's habit of playing nasty little tricks on the unsuspecting. In Brussels, few are better placed to reflect on this than Klaus Regling, Hegel's fellow countryman and the top civil servant in the economic and financial affairs department of the commission. In a previous incarnation, Regling was the chief adviser to Theo Waigel, Germany's finance minister, at a time when Germany was insisting that all potential members of a European currency union should sign up to the Stability and Growth pact-which famously threatens to impose fines worth billions of euros on any euro-area country that runs a budget deficit of over 3 per cent of GDP. Regling, it is thought, wrote much of the pact himself-to ensure that Germany's tradition of monetary stability would not be threatened by currency union with the likes of Italy and Greece.
How ironic then, that in his new job at the European Commission overseeing the pact that he once designed, Regling found himself having to recommend that the commission issue its first censure to his native Germany-for coming dangerously near to the 3 per cent tripwire. A furious reaction by the Schr?der government (backed by Gordon Brown, who has his own tiff with Brussels about public spending) ensured that the warning was not formally endorsed by EU finance ministers. The Schr?der crowd complained that the effort to censure Germany was "political." In Brussels this is read as meaning that it was all a plot by Regling-who worked for a CDU-CSU government-to undermine the SPD in an election year. Most unfair. The Schr?derites are conveniently forgetting, however, that it was they who levered Regling into the job anyway, precisely so that he could provide a bit of Germanic rigour to the enforcement of the stability pact.
Reshuffling the nationalities
When Regling was first shoehorned into his job, there was much muttering about German pressure and a disgruntled French candidate was heard to remark, "it seems I am the wrong nationality." But the saga of the German reprimand underlines the fact that when the commission is working properly its senior civil servants carry no brief for their own countries. That, however, has not prevented much excitement about the repercussions for various nationalities of a reshuffle of the top jobs currently underway at the commission. Reforms being pushed through by Romano Prodi and Neil Kinnock are meant to ensure that no one person can stay as the director-general of the same department for more than seven years; the prime example of this was Emile Noel, who managed to hold down the job of secretary-general of the commission (the top job) from 1958 until 1987.
The Kinnock-Prodi reforms are also intended to crack the system of informal national monopolies on certain jobs, which has ensured, for example, that the agriculture directorate was always run by a Frenchman and that the top man at competition was always German. The impending reshuffle-and the threat that a number of top jobs may go to British and Irish candidates-has had the French and German press all of a twitter. The Frankfurter Allgemeine noted the "ever growing influence of the British" and bemoaned a relative loss of German influence, which it put down to the doziness of the Schr?der government. According to the FAZ, "the British are slicker and more self-confident than Germans in using the EU bureaucracy. And they also have a linguistic advantage. English is well on the way to becoming the dominant community language." Over in Paris, Lib?ration, always quick to spot a British plot, headlined its article "Brussels, French influence in decline." It pointed out that "by pure chance" four of the seven directors-general that will be forced to move on in the coming months are French, and grumbled that Ireland would now have four director-generals, the same number as Germany.
Giscard and Sir John Kerr
This picture of Britain's masterly manipulation of the Brussels machinery is-however-a little spoiled by an examination of the constitutional convention on the future of Europe, which gets underway at the end of the month. First, the Brits tried to stop there being a convention at all. Then, they tried to ensure that the convention would have a limited agenda. Then they tried to make sure that it would at least be chaired by someone they trusted. They failed at every turn. The convention is indeed taking place; it will discuss a very broad agenda; it will be chaired by that slippery old eel, Valery Giscard d'Estaing; and it looks as if it may be rather important (see Thomas Klau, "What does France want?" p36). The Brits are now either pretending that the whole exercise is "boring" (as one top Foreign Office man put it) or are placing a lot of weight on the fact that Sir John Kerr, a former head of the Foreign Office, has been appointed to head Giscard's secretariat. "Giscard can come out with all the federalist rhetoric, and Sir John can ensure that British pragmatism prevails," says one Blair adviser. But being chief secretary to an autocratic former president of France may not turn out to be quite so simple. ("Take a letter, Sir John.")
