Keith Middlemas - Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

As the competitive symposium extends itself, a sort of interdependence becomes established. Bargaining through networks in a densely structured game reduces friction and produces results for which the formal system may be ill attuned, even on ostensibly formal matters such as easier implementation and enforcement of laws. It allows for wide, flexible participation; it reduces inconsistencies; it gives rise to conventions, rather than formal rules, which can be adapted more easily over time. But it is not protective of weaker interests and it privileges the more efficient ones.

Like the dusty engagements in a ‘soldier’s battle’ spread over a huge terrain, it is hard to see results. Even business participants are often unclear who is winning at any one time or what constitutes success. They might reflect with William Morris ‘how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat; and when it comes, it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’

Appreciating the game’s totality is vital: without it, it is impossible fully to understand EU processes and the behaviour of players or individual practitioners; the informal constitutes the ‘dark side of the moon’, without which that sphere is only a disc.

It is impossible even to think of including here more than a brief selection of the sorts of cases where informal politics proliferate. But space should be made for all the players or the sense of totality is lost. Each one, whatever its size, effectiveness, status or resources, has some influence on the outcome. Until it has proved unimportant or marginal, therefore, it should be given historical space. The Community contains large numbers of games which are distinct, as well as ‘nested boxes’, and a group powerful in one may be outplayed in another – which is not the case in the formal system between legal entities of equivalent status.

Power of this kind is also a function of how much the EU’s institutions need what players have to offer. Commission officials’ willingness to consult peak organizations from particular industries and their component firms is well known; and so is their propensity to take on experts from member states or those same firms as advisers (which is ascribed reasonably enough to shortages of staff in the Directorates and the need to take account of what exists in national or local markets). Very complex forms of diplomacy govern the subsequent transactions of information and influence.

Early in the EU’s history, individuals carried great clout, as befitted a relatively small Brussels elite. Today, the keys to sustained influence lie much less in personal linkages, more in tightly argued dossiers and presenting the most up-to-date information at the initial stages of policy evolution. The professionals have taken over, flanked by cohorts who constitute their own distinct groups: technical experts, lawyers or journalists.

But whoever acts, the questions remain the same: who manipulates? Who controls whom? What are effective transactions rather than ritual ones? The gains made by either side may not have obvious market connotations, especially once players have committed themselves to a long-term involvement: positional gains often outweigh monetary ones. In such circumstances it is hard to ascribe a balance of advantage, or to portray influence as a one-way process. Both sets of participants tend to shape each other, whether at the Commission/Council level, or at that of the firm and Directorate official.

It is clear from the interviews on which this book is based that the game begins surprisingly low down among relatively junior Commission officials; and that what matters is the cumulative weight of such bargaining (governed as it is by its own system of filters, access mechanisms, rules and conventions) by the time that decisions, whose basis rests on joint agreement, have become EU law or policy. This is no longer – if it ever was – a matter merely of lobbying, but of degree of commitment, indicated by when a player finds it expedient to set up an office in Brussels or to develop a department of EU affairs with a direct link to its main board. 2The index of commitment is to be measured in terms of resources (for example, the cost of lobbying in the European Parliament), the quality of personnel involved, and the extent to which the player develops internal mechanisms for dealing with the EU in its corporate structures.

If one selects only certain categories of players, the game’s totality is lost, not least because such studies tend to ignore the variety of modes of action open to all those players, ranging from direct pressures in Brussels or use of MEPs (a multinational corporation might have a minimum of fifty MEPs on its contact list at any one time, including the total membership of some key Strasbourg committees), to leverage via its own member state government’s European Affairs Coordinating committees, or with its Permanent Representation in Brussels. The sheer volume of new entrants, the number of corporate offices set up in Brussels in the late 1980s, the numbers of lobbyists who, like Renaissance mercenaries, did well at Strasbourg out of the legislative boom, have done more than clutter the EU’s political marketplace. They have changed it, probably irreversibly, because all the serious players (which does not include those who work sporadically or primarily through lobbyists) have engaged themselves permanently, on a large scale and with substantial resources, to the evolution of means of influence at every level. A firm cannot ignore any of these approaches, not because all means are equal, or have a commercial or even viable return, but because competitors might gain advantage there.

It is sometimes argued that players are more concerned with relative than collective advantage. My impression is that, in the more coherent industrial sectors like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, this is not so and may not even be true for the less coherent such as motorcars and consumer electronics, firstly because it is almost impossible for a large firm not to play in the EU market, secondly because the extensive range of modes available ensures that relative advantage can be defended on other levels – for example by utilizing group pressures on those perceived as playing only for their own interests, or deprecating what they do to Commission officials in order to ensure their partial exclusion or downgrading.

Given such a plethora of activities, there are substantial problems not only in deciding who influences whom but in discriminating between significant and unimportant activity. It is not much use measuring the numbers of lobbyists employed, the size of federation memberships, or the numbers of MEPs’ signatures on proposed amendments; it would be better to ask what is their quality, how coherent is their representation, on which committees do they sit? Few players, from member states to SMEs, focus all their existence in the Community context; we need to know if they have changed emphasis in the spectrum running from national capitals through Europe to global markets; whether the man in Brussels reports direct to the managing director, whether players with widely different interests are adopting similar tactics. 3

Formality and informality are not part of a syllogism, thesis and antithesis because, like ying and yang, they complement each other. All social scientists understand what informal politics is, but find its essence hard to define formally. But if they too often reduce it to formal abstractions, historians tend to avoid it altogether for lack of proper documentation. Logically, it does not constitute a system, because that would mark its clear separation from the formal: it can only be part of a system.