Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

reactions, a series of interlocking, contrapuntal elite bargains were made, by men and women who were often by now over-tired, working late at night in cabals and closets using an arcane jargon, assisted by increasingly exhausted officials. Although within each government’s apparatus, the issues appeared clear (and some of those engaged now admit that there was insufficient discussion by some national EC affairs coordination systems, leading to a lack of direction on essential questions),³⁶ their outcomes proved simply too complicated or obscure to explain in public language.

      Yet since the web of alliances seemed to preclude national vetoes, while most participants believed the Luxembourg Compromise dead, national publics – or perhaps better, national media – came to feel that ‘their’ governments could do little to reverse the momentum. A pervasive sort of disillusionment spread, most strongly in Denmark, which may have been the first genuine expression of European-wide public opinion. It ramified in Britain and France, to say nothing of Italy, where the failure to educate or explain led (with good reason) to deep fears about higher taxes, sacrifices and assaults on work-place security as a result of fiscal reform.

      Shifts of perception occurred, the results of a changing external environment, among the main players during the IGC. German diplomacy now had to operate in an entirely different way, given its borders with eastern and central Europe, a factor which explains President Bush’s transfer of interest as early as 1990 (and which disturbed Mrs Thatcher on her last visit to see Bush at Camp David). Her fall removed the principal – indeed the only – exponent of a bilateral diplomacy involving Britain and France, intended to contain a newly united Germany, but it did not alter Britain’s reliance on NATO and the CFSP framework; nor the fact that on matters such as Community support for Slovenes and Croats against Serbian claims to a greater Serbia, or EC extension to eastern Europe as well as EFTA, Germany would now insist on being heard.

      The orientation of France towards the Community also changed, signified in 1991 when the Quai d’Orsay abandoned its line on ‘variable geometry’, even if the phenomenon was interpreted in a variety of ways by French analysts at the time. Under Mitterrand and Edith Cresson, France committed itself firmly to the internal market, not in the form of Anglo-Saxon liberalization – which Cresson, as a member of a Socialist government, frequently lampooned – but as a defence against Japanese competition and a means to adjust (an echo perhaps of how de Gaulle had assessed the EEC’s mid–60s harmonization policy). An element of protectionism grew, while unemployment rose in 1991–2. Yet as its one method of containing Germany, France set itself to become less particularist and more truly European, a step well beyond the already-significant turning point of 1983–4.

      Documents flooded into the IGC, starting with the Commission’s agenda and member states’ own proposals. Others, with less formal status, included the Martin Reports and recommendations from the Parliamentary Assizes. Having been hyperactive in the preparatory period, the Commission appeared to miss several chances of imprinting its own agenda, possibly because Delors and the college were preoccupied with the many separate issues ranging from the early trade negotiations in eastern Europe to disputes over the budget. Whatever the reasons for the loss of focus, the proliferation of member states’ general plans, which varied from relatively ‘soft’ Spanish proposals to the more forthright German draft Treaty of March 1991, caused serious problems for the Luxembourg Presidency.

      To contain the flood, and induce greater precision, the Presidency wrote what it styled a ‘non-paper’ in April, summarizing the state of play as if it had actually encompassed majority opinion. Later, on 20 June, in time for the Council Meeting, this was rendered into the negotiating text for a draft Treaty. As was normal in these circumstances, Council did little more than endorse what was going on, because actual progress was held up by three points of principle.