Keith Middlemas - Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

Two assumptions can be made about formal mechanisms: firstly, that they rely on their operators’ continual good behaviour; secondly that, without informal processes, they become more rigid or unworkable the more pressures build up in the societies which originated them. No mechanism is so perfect that it cannot be disturbed by dissidents or outsiders. None can be designed to alter itself over time to meet the challenges of which the originators can have had no conception, unless it has latitude built in. Combinations of the two have a better chance of preventing systemic failure than tight legal prescription does on its own.

But what is it? Almost any habitual, voluntary practice could be described as informal. It is not restricted to individuals who know each other – though nationality or language affinity, cultural rapport and shared professional ethos are important. Whatever it is must constitute the basis for continuous relations between the players, whether governments, officials or commercial organizations. It must include everything which does not appear in legal texts, all rules and conventions which may be policed but are not justiciable.

Informal politics are defined not so much by players’ status – any who wish and can establish credentials to the satisfaction of others can enter – as by the mode chosen to establish relationships. All players can choose between formal and informal modes and the shades of grey between them. There is no dividing line – only a spectrum. Rules and conventions are policed on both sides, with many nuanced penalties for infringement.

Inclusion depends on a player’s willingness to accept the rules and conventions of its own club or association. To a minimum extent, all players, like member states themselves, must demonstrate an element of altruism (European-mindedness) as well as basic self-interest, not only to be proper members of higher sectoral and European-wide groupings, but to make themselves acceptable to EU institutions and officials.

Informal politics exist wherever there are ‘grey areas’. As these are filled in and categorized over time, the informal may mutate, becoming, like the European Council, quasi-formal or ultimately fully formalized. But periodically new grey areas will open up as contexts or procedures change. Where interpretation is open to dispute, where there are margins of manoeuvre, where boundaries are imprecisely defined, where authorities have to exercise discretion, the informal will always flourish.

It exists most in conditions of plural bargaining where interdependence requires players to consort together to make agreements or risk losing the consensual base on which their status and the possibility of future agreements rests. It increases with the number of players, because none wishes to be isolated in the political marketplace; and it operates more easily and frequently in the Community than in nation states – whose modem forms of trilateral brokerage developed earlier in the twentieth century and have since grown older and more rigid; whose governments are also less open or willing to admit that it exists.

Its appearance is infinitely variable, but each aspect has certain common characteristics: impermanence, flexibility, subtlety. Inside groups and institutions it is disseminated as individuals are inducted, socialized and promoted, taking root most readily where there is professional training or practical experience. Political constructions damage it, for it is ultimately consensual, unlike the politics of politicians which tends to divide.

It evolves mechanisms for revision more easily than the formal system, and is closely compatible with the long Community tradition of setting markers in legal texts, to be implemented in riper circumstances at a later date. In that sense, it assumes both good faith and the continuity of ethos and convention among players, though not of course always in the same forms.

In what follows, I argue that this constitutes a distinct field with systemic characteristics, not merely a shadow or extension of the formal. But it is not a Manichean distinction: only at the ends of the spectrum are matters black and white. Unless the whole range is taken into account, analysis remains imperfect, since for want of it the strong probability is that the formal system will be less acceptable, flexible or efficient.

The formal and informal sides’ interactions are present in any known political system, since the only difference between them in a tyranny and a democracy is one of proportion: they exist in both. But in open systems the informal is far more pervasive, legitimate and well-grounded, even at the point of policy initiative. Looked at in this way, not only governments but the components of the modem state – ministries, civil servants, central banks, and the state as a whole – are players. Power is exercised through shifting alliances, depending on what is at stake in the polygonal activities which surround economic activity and the social life of individuals.

But its Community aspect is not the same as that in nation states, being more open, welcome, and effective to the point at which the formal might well silt up without informal mechanisms. As one very senior Brussels official put it, ‘if you were to stick to the formal procedures, it would take ten years every time … the more there is disagreement, the more the informal is necessary.’ 4This argues that the EU’s slowly evolving statehood – which is a subtext throughout this book – will continue to differ in kind from the statehood of its members. Each player operates in a multinational range. Each of them has its own distinct global interests, its own concept of what is good for it within the European framework. It is this which it wants inserted, like a pacemaker, in the heart of Europe. No nation state has to contend with such a game, none is so much an artefact of the game.

What the EU will become is not something this book attempts to guess. Given the model of perpetual flux which the formula competitive symposium implies, that would depend on answering an impossible set of questions about the future of the nation state, which is at present still the EU’s main determinant. Yet that outcome will be affected by all the players, not just member states and Community institutions, in the double game in Brussels and national territories. How power is exercised in the Community is inseparable from the sum of all their transactions, a state of affairs which national governments would not permit at home but are powerless, because of their diversity, to prevent here.

By participating, players affect each other’s perceptions of one another and what each is doing. As a result, the European Union may be becoming more like a global market in political and economic terms, but not necessarily so in social or cultural respects since there is a wider assimilation at work, beyond the one that makes their behaviour patterns similar. As their perceptions change – faster with the onset of an internal market – so may their interests. Imperceptibly, the economic players may become European, whatever nation states do, whether or not a European public comes into existence to fulfil what, in national terms, remain ‘unnatural communities’. Yet the Community cannot be confined to the economic sphere because there are not even Chinese walls to separate economics from the political economy. If that makes the Community into a state, albeit of a different order from nation states, then the members of it must accept the outcome of what they have helped to create.

Sources

A book like this can only be written on the basis of elite oral history. Only one major archive, that of the Confederation of British Industry, was made available to us, from 1973 more or less to the present day. In amassing our own archive of over four hundred and forty interviews, we were able to hear the views of as complete a range of practitioners as seemed possible: Commission officials, Commissioners, member state administrators, politicians and Permanent Representatives, MEPs, judges and Advocates General, regional notables, representatives of peak institutions in the industrial, financial and labour sectors, and a considerable variety of firms’ and financial institutions’ executives.