Poor old Finland

Poor old Finland
February 20, 2002

Euro launched, not many dead

Journalists are unimaginative beasts. So it was that on E-Day, 1st January, half the Brussels press corps seemed to have the same bright idea of heading for Maastricht to see in the new currency. After all, it was the Maastricht Treaty which gave birth to the currency. Sadly, on a freezing new year's day, most normal people huddle indoors nursing their hangovers and the only thing that appeared to be open in the little Dutch town was a doughnut stall in the central square. Frost-bitten journalists huddled round, buying pastries with their new euros and interviewing each other. A respectable-looking Dutch gentleman stood nearby, surveying the scene with a quizzical look. After a few minutes the assembled hacks realised he was Wim Kok, the Dutch prime minister, and dutifully interviewed him too.

Poor old Finland

Much commentary about the recent Laeken summit has focused on Silvio Berlusconi's demand that Parma should be awarded the European Food Safety Agency, on the grounds that the Finns-the main rival candidate for the agency-could not tell a decent piece of prosciutto if it hit them between the eyes. All good knockabout stuff. But the upshot-that a decision on the siting of the European Food Agency has once again been delayed-is a testimony to the EU's scandalous treatment of the poor old Finns. The Finnish government has been doggedly pursuing the Food Safety Agency for almost two years. Its argument is hard to refute. Every other country in the EU except Sweden has been given a branch office of the EU. The traditional big two-France and Germany-have got the two most prestigious-the European Central Bank in Frankfurt and the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Holland has Europol and now Eurojust, the sinisterly-named prosecution service. Tiny Luxembourg is overflowing with EU jobs and agencies. Italy has the European Training Foundation in Turin. But nothing for the Finns. At each EU summit for the past two years, the Finns have tirelessly pressed their case-but have left empty-handed. At Gothenburg in June, it slipped off a crowded agenda. At Ghent in October they thought they had a deal-only for the Portuguese to block it at the last moment because they were angry that they had not been given a Maritime Safety Agency. At the Laeken summit the Finns sacrificed the candidacy of Marti Ahtissari, their former prime minister, who had been tipped to head Europe's constitutional convention (snapped up by Valery Giscard d'Estaing) lest it blight their candidacy for the Food Safety Agency. At last, they thought they had closed the deal. And then Berlusconi knocked the whole thing off course. The Finns-traditionally the only reliably "good Europeans" among the sceptical Scandinavians-are feeling bruised. It all goes to show, they reckon, that some EU countries are more equal than others. (First among equals are still the French. When the Belgians released a provisional list of which countries would get which agencies, no fewer than four out of 13 were destined for France.)

Franco-American love-in

Pascal Lamy, the EU's current trade representative and Robert Zoellick, his US counterpart, are famously intimate, confounding the British myth that the French and the Americans cannot get on. The two men go back a long way-to when Zoellick was handling German reunification for the first Bush administration and Lamy was Jacques Delors's chief of staff. A day-long private chat between Lamy and Zoellick at the latter's house in Washington was crucial to setting the current Doha trade round in motion. It is all such a relief, muses one American official, after having to deal with the prickly Leon Brittan, when he was the EU's trade representative. "It's never a great idea to let the other side know that you think you are much cleverer than them," says the American official of Sir Leon. "Particularly when you're not."

The myth of monetary shadowing

One of the myths of the pro-euro camp is that the monetary sovereignty of the Bank of England is an illusion because the Bank has to shadow the interest-rate decisions of the European Central Bank. Your correspondent recently heard this claim made by an eminent Briton in Brussels and bet him e5 that this wasn't true. Amazingly enough, I was right. Since the ECB came into existence, both the ECB and the Bank of England have made several dozen interest-rate decisions each. The British have altered rates 15 times; the Europeans ten times. On only one of these occasions did the Bank of England "shadow" the ECB; announcing a quarter-point raise the day after the ECB made the same announcement in February 2000. Mind you, the ECB "shadowed" the Bank of England in May 2001, announcing an interest-rate cut the day after London. The rest of the time, interest-rate policies were strikingly different. I will not "name and shame" my interlocutor but I expect e5 in the post.

Jargon watch

Perhaps it is pointless to single out any one piece of EU jargon in preference to any other. But your diarist could not help be impressed by the following sentence in a press release from the European Trade Union confederation: "ETUC, CEEP and UNICE/UEAPME believe it necessary to reaffirm the distinction between bipartite social dialogue and tripartite concertation." Well, somebody needed to make the point.