Keith Middlemas - Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

III. Political Union

The second IGC’s origins derived from two sources: member states’ long concerns with foreign policy from which, unlike EMU or the Social Chapter, Britain could not and did not wish to dissociate itself; and from the threats to their national security represented by cross-border crime, drug smuggling, terrorism and illegal immigration. Consciousness about the latter grew as the internal market and abolition of economic frontiers approached, and on the former with every stage in eastern Europe’s metamorphosis. Although the IGC had not been envisaged initially as having a defence element, events in 1989–91, including the incipient break-up of Yugoslavia, led that way, as did economic aspects of both the Community’s foreign and security policy (CFSP) and the internal market, via defence procurement, state aids to industry, and mergers such as the Siemens/GEC takeover of Plessey. 31Meanwhile, thirty-five years after the French Assembly had killed off the EDC, the French government wished to come back into the centre of European defence, even if that meant it had to reconsider aspects of NATO, so long as it did not have to rejoin NATO’s Military Committee. But defence as a separate theme could not be brought within the Treaties since it had been specifically excluded in 1957.

Mitterrand therefore sought an enlarged status for Western European Union (WEU) as the main plank of France’s CFSP proposals. 32But since the dilution of NATO was a highly sensitive subject, his proposals remained vague – as did their embodiment in the Treaty (see p). Not only did they have a direct impact on other member states in NATO, they invited an unpredictable Russian response. France’s defence industry, long the most successful of any EC exporters, also stood to gain substantially, to the dismay of British and German competitors and those parts of the Commission concerned with the single market and competition policy. If defence was to be touched on during the IGC, not only Britain’s fears about NATO but Germany’s concerns with its own new status and the problems of eastern Europe and Yugoslavia had to be addressed.

Interior Ministry issues were also brought into sharp focus by events in eastern Europe, above all the profound uncertainty about what would emerge from the former Soviet system after the onset of civil war in Yugoslavia. For the first time since 1961, the possibility of a flood of refugees and asylum seekers confused the patterns in which legal and illegal immigration had largely been contained. Unlike 1961, heavy structural unemployment in western Europe was beginning to change the outlook of governments which had previously been willing to accommodate large numbers of refugees. For the first time since the 1960s, the prospect of economic migrants, rather than refugees, from eastern Europe reappeared. In mid–1991, while the IGC was in progress, the International Labour Organization estimated that roughly eight million legitimate immigrants were living within the EC’s borders; on top of that had to be added the illegal ones, and asylum seekers whose numbers had risen from a mere 70,000 in 1983 to 350,000 in 1989 and nearly half a million by 1991 – even before the Yugoslav conflicts.

Refugees and asylum seekers were one thing, illegal migrants another. But the conditions of the time fostered confusion, so that the two easily became conflated, in certain political movements, and by the popular press. Nations’ rights to defend themselves against crime or drugs, recognized in Article 36 of the Rome Treaty, had been reaffirmed in the Single European Act. But the Schengen Agreement, made between France, West Germany and the three Benelux states in 1985, prefigured a Europe of open borders, where the southern and eastern members – Greece, Italy and Spain – would stand in effect as frontier guarantors for the rest against most sources of illegal immigration.

The political IGC therefore had to encompass a vast area, with no clear long-term aims, where member states argued not only over the practicalities of ID cards, data protection, and the so-called ‘right of hot pursuit’, but their likely impact on national public opinions. This was especially so in Britain and France, but became more so in parts of Germany and Spain; Italy felt the force of it once refugees began to pour in from Yugoslavia and Albania. Even among the Schengen countries, discords developed, for example over Dutch permissive policies on soft drugs, which French interior ministers referred to in outspokenly critical terms. Sentiments which had rarely been voiced in public now became commonplace, throwing doubt on the competence of other member states to keep out, variously, Moroccans and Algerians, Albanians, Yugoslavs or Somalis, and economic refugees from behind the fallen Iron Curtain.

Three main influences shaped this IGC: the efforts of the Parliament (by far the weakest); the Commission’s attempts to set the agenda, which dated back to 1986, if not 1985; and the aims and ambitions of member states. The well-attested tendency for EC states to grow more to resemble each other might have led the Maastricht negotiators to expect the same sort of consensus levels that had been obtained in 1985. Earlier frictions between Commission, Council and Parliament had indeed lessened during the late 1980s. But north-south differentiation seemed to have increased, as Spain’s successfully aggressive tone during the bargaining indicated, and the distinction between countries with sound fiscal regimes and others who were lax demonstrated. The ancient gulf between Britain and the majority, with all its philosophical undertones, remained, albeit softened by Major’s ‘Britain at the heart of Europe’ pretensions. Even subsidiarity, which for most states already meant devolution not to national but to regional capitals or even municipalities, meant something different to British Conservatives – though not to many Scots and Welsh.

How divergent the larger member states’ aims were can be gauged from the table of their desiderata compiled by the Economist in December. 33But whereas smaller and Mediterranean states had more cause than they had had over the Single European Act to defend particular national interests, the activities of Germany, France and Britain were complicated by their adjustments to changing perceptions of the outside world.

As in the past, the German government supported a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) having, at that stage, no conceivable alternative. French foreign minister Dumas and his German colleague Genscher explained in their October 1990 proposals for a CFSP that they were prepared to include majority voting in the Council. In December 1990, they widened their approach to include a common European defence, building on what had been done in Western European Union (WEU) since 1984. The German-French paper of February 1991 spelled out the WEU’s function as a bridge between the European Union and NATO. For both Bonn and London it was also important to guarantee that any European defence pillar in the framework of the WEU would not undermine NATO. However, the Germans had the additional aim of tempting France back into full membership of NATO.

Conduct of this part of the negotiations, though in the hands of foreign ministers at their monthly meetings, and deputies or permanent representatives on more frequent special occasions, reverted in the last six weeks to heads of government level. In Paris, it was the responsibility of Dumas and Guigou, but never far from Mitterrand himself: in Bonn, rather less harmoniously, it lay between Kohl and Genscher.

For the French government, it was vital to reinforce the EC in French colours rather than allow the Dutch Presidency, aided by Belgium and Italy, to make EC transactions more accountable to the Parliament and more detrimental to national sovereignty. The French were playing for very high stakes: not only for EMU but for a French rather than a NATO-based version of CFSP – at variance, for example, with what the Netherlands required. If defence were also to be included, an alternative had to be found to the organic image of a tree from whose trunk all the branches would spring.