Who says nothing happens in Brussels? Only the other day, your correspondent was lying in bed at 8.30am, eagerly anticipating that morning's press conference on new commission regulations on car dealerships, when an earthquake struck. Not a metaphorical earthquake either-a real one. The house shook and an ornament or two fell off the bookshelves. My wife, lying next to me, confirmed that the earth had moved. The corny symbolism of this event is too good to overlook. The hitherto geologically stable capital of the EU has been hit by an earth tremor which came close to a four on the Richter scale. And-get this-the earthquake started in Germany. Its epicentre was in the Ruhr valley, the very place where the original coal and steel community got going. Makes you think...
Fischler in the frying pan
I hope Franz Fischler, the EU commissioner for agriculture, has enjoyed his holidays because he is likely to have a trying four months on his return. In the weeks before the summer break, he proposed ambitious and much needed reforms for both agriculture and fisheries. They have won him golden opinions from environmentalists, economists and those countries that happen to be net payers into the EU budget and who are fed up seeing their money poured into wasteful and destructive subsidies. But inevitably Fischler has also gravely antagonised the other countries that rather like receiving all that CAP money-and this despite the fact that he's not even proposing an overall cut in the size of the budget. Rather unpromisingly, when the council of ministers first met to discuss the Fischler agriculture package, ten out of 15 countries were opposed. Fischler will soldier on, hoping to pick off his opponents sector by sector. He will be helped by the fact that he is almost universally respected for his knowledge of the subject matter. He hung onto his portfolio after Romano Prodi came in to replace Jacques Santer as head of the commission, and so has had many years to build up his command of the brief. But Fischler's reputation for expertise is also built on the fact that he looks the part. A big beard, an even bigger stomach-cartoonists can rarely resist portraying him in muddy boots, or clutching a pitchfork. It is widely believed in Brussels that he used to be a farmer. Not quite. Despite his yeoman image, the commissioner actually has a doctorate in agricultural economics-the only time he has worked on a farm was as an intern during his doctoral programme. Still, he has long been able to claim expertise over farming. Not so the other bit of his portfolio-fishing. Much Spanish bitching about Fischler's "savage" (for which read, entirely justified) attack on fishing subsidies draws on the fact that he hails from land-locked Austria. It is true that when he arrived in Brussels, Fischler was conscious of his lack of knowledge of our fishy friends. He and his Austrian colleagues are said to have resorted to testing each other with flash cards of fish. Now Fischler can pick out a hake at ten paces. Curiously, this has done nothing to reconcile the Spanish to his proposed reforms.
Madness in the regions
It is not only fisheries reform that has got Spain on edge. The Aznar government is also worried that the EU's constitutional convention may give a fillip to those revolting regionalists in places like Catalonia and the Basque country. The convention secretariat has set up six working groups to examine worthy topics like the legal personality of the Union, foreign policy and so on. Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing, the convention chairman, favoured setting up an seventh-on the European regions. But when he proposed this to the ten-person presidium guiding the convention's work, Ana de Palacio, the Spanish member of the group-who has just become Spain's new foreign minister-made such a fuss that Giscard backed down. The regionalists are hoping that they may get their working group later in the year. But what do they want? At a minimum, they would like to incorporate the role of European regions into any definition of who does what in Europe-the so-called "charter of competences." The German states, for example, have long complained that deals struck in Brussels have eroded their cherished powers. Although the competence charter now appears to be rapidly disappearing off the convention agenda-along with the regions themselves-it was the complaints of the German states which helped persuade the Schr?der government to push for a constitutional convention in the first place. The most ambitious regionalists, however, want to go well beyond the protections of their traditional powers. They argue that the regions should be directly involved in EU negotiations when their interests are at stake-over regional aid, or transport policy, or even tax. The Spanish government, however, fears that giving Catalonia a direct voice in Brussels will make the Catalans even more uppity, and may be part of a process that leads to the break-up of the country. They also have a practical argument. As one Spanish minister put it to a seminar attended by your correspondent-"It is already almost impossible to achieve agreement among the 15 member states of the EU. Soon there will be 25 countries around the table. If we also introduced 50 sub-national regions we would all go mad."
