Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)
Originally published in 1995 and now available as an ebook.This edition does not include illustrations.European Union is the grand political enigma of the late twentieth century. Its very essence resists definition, and why and how it works defy agreed explanation. For politicians, it is endlessly controversial, even occasionally fatal, but for businessmen and bankers it is a source of opportunity, and for students the gateway to broader horizons. From above, where Council ministers haggle, it seems to offer a welcome hybrid of all member-states’ systems; but from below, at best it represents the legal, political and economic context in which every player is bound to operate, while at worst it is perceived as a miasma or a haven for unproductive bureaucrats.But a clear view is nonetheless possible. In examining the informal machinery of European power, Keith Middlemas opens up an unfamiliar and expansive alternative prospect, illuminating not what is 'said' to happen, but what actually does. In the gap between the official and the real, member-states, regions, companies, financial institutions all complete, seeking to create durable networks of influence to gain advantage in a never-ending game, a game fundamental to the EU’s nature. A complex web of rivalries is spun. Drawing on over four hundred interviews by a gifted team of European researchers with participants at all levels, Middlemas turns his unblinking eye on those who inhabit that web to disentangle its disputes, its rules, its flaws, its successes. He shows us a Europe spinning itself into existence, and a Union much different from that envisaged by its founders.
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Copyright © Keith Middlemas, 1995
Keith Middlemas has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780002556781
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008240660
Version: 2017-01-06
To my grandchildren:Hugo, Georgia, Fabian, Isabella
It is the duty of the patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive interest and glory of his native country: but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views and to consider Europe as one great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation. The balance of power will continue to fluctuate, and the prosperity of our own, or the neighbouring kingdoms, may be alternately exalted or depressed; but these partial events cannot essentially injure our general state of happiness, the system of arts, and laws, and manners, which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans …
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol VI, chapter XXXVIII, p. 402 (1818 edition)
CONTENTS
Presidencies and principal Commissioners, relevant to the main themes, since 1981
Presidencies of the Council of Ministers and Meetings of the European Council
The European Integration Experience
3. The Stagnant Decade, 1973–83
4. Making the Market: The Single European Act, 1980–88
5. Maastricht and After, 1988–93
8. Institutions: The Parliament and the Court of Justice
12. Policy-Making: Industry and Trade
Part IV: State without a Country
The late 1980s brought a sense of quickening tempo to the European Community after a decade of stagnation. Two landmark Treaties, the Single European Act of 1986 and the Treaty of Union at Maastricht stood out in that optimistic period. Now that the wave of euphoria has broken, and the tide receded – though not nearly to its pre-1985 level – it is worth asking what were the permanent achievements and the quality of change that each brought about. As EEC, EC or EU, the European Community has habitually moved through troughs and hollows, punctuated by much shorter bursts of energy: neither can be explained without asking what all the relevant forces – governments, Community institutions and the array of interested outside players – were doing at each point in the cycle.
How member state governments and EU bodies relate is similar enough to what goes on in national political systems to be comprehensible, and open enough to be readily accessible. Community institutions are in most cases much the less secretive of the two. But the task of weaving the influence of non-governmental players (industrial firms, financial institutions, trades unions, regions and distinct state organs such as central banks) into the recent history of a subject extending over twelve or more nation states requires a different format, almost an alternative kind of history. Robert Brenner did this for seventeenth-century England in Merchants and Revolution,>1 with the benefit of access to all surviving archives. But the EU, like its member governments, restricts access at every point after 1965.
Yet without a complete picture of how influence is exercised and who moves whom, we have only half the story. Present day comment lacks essential connections to the recent past, to the trends which may not be obvious today but remain latent, like nationalism in eastern Europe before 1989. Without contemporary history, studies of the contemporary world – by political scientists, lawyers, economists, or specialists in international relations – rest on a dangerously relative foundation, and students are faced with a blind spot for the ‘years not taught’.
The contemporary historian (like any other), ought to contribute a distinct sort of understanding of three connected phenomena: processes as they change over time; the continuous interchange of many players; and the mutation of institutions, and the beliefs and behaviour patterns of those who work in them. These were my own concerns in a series of studies of British government during the twentieth century which developed the concept of a long and continuous game between an increasing number of players of different power, status and interests, a game in which all of them used the needs that the modem state had for their participation to draw it and its component parts into an informal framework, from which there could subsequently be no retreat to a pristine minimal state.
