The UK Presidency: A View From Brussels

Journal of Common Market Studies Volume 3 1, No. 2 June 1993

The UK Presidency: A View From Brussels

PETER LUDLOW* Director, Centre for Economic Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels

Evaluating an EC presidency is no easy task, whatever country is involved. The difficulties are numerous. I will mention only three.

Firstly, the period of office is extremely short. Much of the business with which a presidency is confronted is passed to it by its predecessors. A great deal that it does in turn will have to be finished by others. It is therefore by definition difficult to decide which, if any, presidency should get the principal blame or credit when things go wrong or right. There is also a large element of luck. Some presidencies have looked good because they happen to occur during a period in European or global affairs in which the current was running very strongly in favour of the EC. Others have been less lucky but not necessarily any less competent.

Secondly, the Community’s political process is so complex and multi- layered that general judgements must always be tempered by the admission that there are exceptions, both good and bad, to the overall impression given by this or that presidency. The Council normally meets in formal session approximate- ly one hundred times a year. Add in a fairly significant number of informal meetings, some of which can be very important, weekly or still more frequent meetings of the Committee of Permanent Representatives and innumerable other meetings of officials, and one is faced by an awful lot of people and events that ought to be considered before judgement is delivered. It would, to say the

* Speech delivered at the Annual Conference of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES), January 1993. 0 Basil Blackwell Ltd 1993, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge MA 02 142, USA

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least, be a very odd human phenomenon if a presidency involving so many people and so many occasions was either uniformly good or uniformly bad.

Thirdly, the increasingly important role of the European Council at the end of each presidential period and the strong tendency of all presidencies, as a result, to stake their reputation on what happens at that meeting, complicates the evaluation process still further. On the one hand, the Council meeting is the single most important event in the six-month period. On the other hand, it is not the presidency. A presidency’s ability to push things through at the last moment may mitigate some of the harsher criticisms made of it during the first five months: it may also, however, seriously distort a balanced judgement on the period as a whole.

All three observations are relevant to an assessment of the UK presidency in the second half of 1992. As the country in charge during the final six months before 1 January 1993, it was predestined to complete - or almost complete - the Single Market programme. To that extent, therefore, the UK was lucky. In other respects, however, it was singularly unlucky. When the presidency was planned, it was assumed, reasonably enough, that the Maastricht ratification process would, by the middle of 1992, be proceeding smoothly throughout the Community and that, as a result, the principal Maastricht-related business would be concerned with implementation of the Treaty from 1 January 1993 onwards. The Danish referendum of 2 June, followed a few days later by the French President’s decision to call a referendum in France, blew these calcula- tions sky high. One may criticize the way in which the UK government responded to the unexpected crisis: one cannot avoid some sympathy with it for the predicament in which it found itself. At another level, the worsening economic situation in Europe as a whole, which by the end of the six-month period could justly be described as a recession, can hardly be blamed on the government. Finally, by way of example, even the gloomiest presidential scriptwriter could not have been expected to anticipate the horrors of Bosnia. Luck, it might be said, was in many ways not on the UK government’s side.

The need to avoid sweeping judgements on such acomplex process as the EC presidency is also highly relevant in the UK case in terms of both personalities and policies. To take personalities first: there were many individuals, particularly at official level, who emerged with honour. Sir John Kerr and the key officials around him in Brussels are an obvious case in point. Whatever reservations one may have about the organization of the UK presidency, they do not concern UKREP so much as London. Even in London, there are officials who shone in one way or another, particularly in the Foreign Office where Michael Jay and Martin Eaton were highly praised for their part in the resolution of the Danish problem both before and at the Edinburgh Council. At ministerial level, stars are relatively harder to find, but Richard Needham, who presided

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over the Internal Market Council and was therefore responsible for pushing through much of the Single Market business, was very well regarded. The Foreign Secretary, too, succeeded in avoiding most of the harshest criticisms directed against UK ministers. He still seemed to insiders to be ill at ease in an EC setting, but at least nobody doubted his professionalism or his determination to make a success of the presidency. As to John Major, we shall have more to say later, but nobody can deny that he played the role assigned to him at Edinburgh with skill and charm.

In terms of policies too, a great deal was achieved. When Douglas Hurd spoke to the European Parliament at the beginning of July about the priorities of the British presidency, he listed seven issues which he believed would be particularly important during the following six months: the resolution of the problems concerned with the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, and in particular the legacy of the Danish ‘No’ vote of 2 June; completion of the Single Market programme; a successful conclusion of the GATT Uruguay Round; the resolution of the dispute over the Delors I1 financial package; a decision concerning the opening of the first round of enlargement negotiations; EC policy towards central and eastern Europe including the former Soviet Union and, inevitably, Yugoslavia.

The balance sheet on most if not all these points at the end of the six-month period was by no means negative. A formula was found to cope with the Danish problem over Maastricht. The Single Market programme was almost completed. The way was paved for a successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round, as a result of the EC-US deal on agriculture. The European Council at Edinburgh settled the Delors I1 problem. It also, somewhat surprisingly, decreed that a first round of enlargement negotiations could begin immediately in the New Year. Less noticed, but in some respects no less important, it took a positive position on a Commission paper regarding relations with central and eastern Europe, if not the CIS, which went a good deal further in terms of precise commitments regarding membership than the Community had been ready to contemplate when the so-called Europe Agreements were negotiated with the countries concerned. The record regarding Yugoslavia was less impressive, but the presidency alone can hardly be blamed. Against this background, i t would clearly be absurd to maintain that the UK presidency was entirely unsuccessful or undistinguished.

Some of those principally involved would of course go further and denounce the harsh comments made on the presidency by a large number of senior political figures as premature and unfair: yet another example of EC rhetoric masking EC reality. This would, however, be to go not merely one step but rather a lot of steps too far. When every allowance is made for the UK’s relative bad luck and its specific successes in terms of both personalities and policies, this must, one

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fears, be assessed as a presidency which singularly failed to provide the EC with the leadership that it needed in a period of considerable difficulty, which exposed the Community to quite unnecessary and unacceptable strains and which, as a result, left the EC weaker and the UK more vulnerable and isolated than either had been when the six-month period began. Fortunately for the EC, the Community’s institutions are a good deal more robust than that weird coalition of Anglo-Saxon Eurosceptics and continental enthusiasts pretend - needless to say for quite different reasons. The Community’s momentum will be regained. The real question left by the presidency indeed does not concern the European Community as such so much as the UK’s place in it.

This negative assessment of the presidency is probably best considered under three headings:

misconceptions concerning the role of an EC presidency; organizational shortcomings; a lack of political and economic credibility.

Misconceptions Concerning the Role of an EC Presidency

The presidency is acommunity office. It is in other words a supranational rather than a national role which the government concerned performs on behalf of the EC as a whole. The physical arrangements at normal Council meetings are intended to highlight this fact. All 12 Member States sit as usual, including the government currently holding the presidency. The presidency and the Commis- sion make up the number: the latter in effect as a 13th member with a very special role, and the former as chairman and spokesman.

The presidency can undoubtedly exercise a major influence on the conduct of Community business. There are, however, any number of constraints that it must or at least should acknowledge. In fixing the agency, for example, the presidency has to operate for the most part within a framework in which the Commission has exclusive right of initiative and, as we have already noted, where a great deal of business is of an ongoing character. A less obvious, but nevertheless real constraint is the overwhelming bias of the EC system towards compromise and consensus, even when in principle ministers can resort to majority voting. A presidency is, or ought to be, an honest broker, a cobbler of agreement and an architect of coalition. This discipline in the system can be particularly irksome if the government holding the presidency has itself a clear- cut, but not necessarily universally held position on a particular point. As the EC’s representative and spokesman to the outside world - including of course the European Parliament - the obligations of office are in some respects even more demanding, including as they must in certain circumstances, the need to


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explain or defend positions with which, as a Member State government, the presidency itself may feel little sympathy.

So much for the ideal. All presidencies, with the possible exception of Luxembourg, are in the habit of issuing declarations at the beginning of their six- month period of office which reflect to a greater or a lesser degree domestic preferences. Both the Spanish and Portuguese governments, for example, announced and to a certain extent actually realized their ambition to give relations with Latin America a higher profile during their six-month presidencies. Every presidency hopes and indeed expects to acquire political kudos at home. Community successes therefore become presidency successes. Nobody minds. Indeed nobody would expect it otherwise. There is, however, a balance to be struck between the obligations imposed by the supranational character of the office and the desire to play to the gallery back home. A good presidency can push and cajole: it cannot impose its will and it certainly should not use the advantages of its office to defend a national position or advance a particular view of the Community which may go down well at home but which is quite clearly at odds with the wishes of most of its partners. Minor infractions of this rule may be overlooked. If however the presidency pushes too hard and too far on an important question, nemesis can be rapid and sharp, as the Dutch found on 30 September 199 1 when they were obliged in the most humiliating manner to withdraw their draft treaty on Political Union in the run-up to Maastricht.

The UK already had a reputation before July 1992 of being more inclined than most Member States to view their presidential term from a predominantly national perspective. There were early signs that this would be so once again. At a preliminary meeting of ministers to discuss the presidency in mid- 1992, for example, most of them obviously relished the opportunity which, in their view, they would have in the six months ahead to put the Community to rights on questions where the British had strong alternative notions. Sir John Kerr and others did their best to remind the ministers concerned of the constraints and limitations of their office, but not, it would seem from what happened subsequently, with total or even much success.

By the autumn, the litany of complaints that the UK presidency was systematically exploiting its office for national advantage was becoming dauntingly long. It is therefore somewhat arbitrary to pick and choose examples. Two examples must suffice as illustrations of what was perceived by many to be characteristic of the presidency as a whole.

We might as well begin with the worst case, arguably indeed the lowest point in the whole UK presidency from a management, if not from a more general political point of view, namely the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s conduct of the informal meeting of ECOFIN at Bath in September. It was by general consent a shocking occasion: shocking to those who were there for the first time but


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shocking too to veterans who had never seen anything like it. The Chancellor chose to turn what should have been an informal opportunity to think long and think big into an exercise in bear baiting in which he himself assumed the role of the principal baiter of the bear, urging others to join in. The Bath meeting focused on the problems of high interest rates within the EC, with the British government lobbying the Bundesbank (without success) for a significant reduction in the key Lombard rate. He then compounded the disastrous impact of the partisan use of his office by encouraging the British press to represent the whole grizzly occasion as an outstanding victory for British diplomacy. From then on he was widely regarded as unfit to exercise the presidency. In a period of extreme disquiet, not to say danger, on the foreign exchange, the Community was therefore obliged to operate with a president of ECOFIN whom nobody inside and, as a result, nobody outside could take seriously.

A second illustration from the final days of the presidency is important not so much because of its intrinsic merit as because it occurred after the Edinburgh Summit when, allegedly, the atmosphere of recrimination between the UK and its partners had been dispersed. During the final week of business before Christmas, ministers and officials attending the Agricultural Council received a sharp reminder that this was not the case. The British President, John Gummer, presented the conclusions of a discussion on the compatibility of the recent EC- US accord with the EC’s CAP reform in a manner which, even those colleagues who agreed with him on substance, recognized as misrepresenting the balance of forces within the Council. He compounded his error by distributing the text to the press as a statement which had been approved by all the delegationsexcept one, namely the French, whereas in reality the Belgians, the Italians and the Irish shared many of France’s reservations, and the Danes and the Dutch were also less than happy with the presidency’s position.

These are, it should be stressed, no more than episodes in a much larger series in which, in the eyes of even anglophile ministers and permanent representatives, the presidency seemed far too ready to identify its own government’s position as that of the Community and to misrepresent sometimes for mischie- vous purposes the actual course of discussion. As a result, suspicion, recrimination and bad blood vitiated the functioning of several of the more important Councils. One permanent representative noted, as early as October, that he was having to sell those proposals advocated by the presidency which he personally thought worthwhile as ideas that had emerged in spite of presidency advocacy, and not because of it.

Most of the blame for these breakdowns in communication must be linked with the political debate in the UK, to which we shall return later, and the personal priorities of ministers determined to score bully points at home rather than conduct business seriously in Brussels. The distance between London and


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Brussels and London and the other partners was compounded, however, by the second set of weaknesses already referred to - organizational shortcomings.

Organizational Shortcomings

The British civil service has always enjoyed a rather high reputation in EC circles. No less an authority than Emile Noel described it as late as 1987 as the best - to the considerable annoyance of some of his fellow countrymen in Paris. Both ministers and senior officials from other Member States testify spontane- ously to the quality of the preparatory work which British officials do to ensure that their ministers are properly briefed and ready to meet virtually any contingency in Council meetings.

During the presidency, however, this admiration was more often than not overshadowed by irritation, as a system which works very well indeed when the main aim is to prepare a minister to defend or advance a UK position was mobilized to run the b siness of the Community as a whole. The self-sufficien- cy, not to say the self-confidence of the UK’s civil service, assumed negative proportions once the latter had to play above and beyond its normal sphere of operations. Every presidency, of course, needs good national civil servants. These the British had in abundance. No presidency can function efficiently, however, unless it uses the Brussels machinery as a complement to its own resources. This the British presidency either did not do or did not do enough.

Once again, it is a big subject which would require documentation more detailed that can possibly be provided here. A brief review of the presidency’s relations first with the Commission and then with the Council secretariat, is, however, essential if the point is to be understood.

As far as the Commission is concerned, an objective assessment of which party was primarily responsible for the strained relations is particularly difficult because of the division and demoralization that was visible at the highest levels of the Commission throughout 1992. For a variety of reasons including the history of the Intergovernmental Conference in 1991, the presidential regime had lost a great deal of its authority and coherence by the beginning of the year. The Danish referendum result exacerbated the situation and put the Commission still further on the defensive. The UK presidency, however, made a bad situation worse. Again and again we were reminded that we were dealing with Mrs Thatcher’s children, The problem went far beyond the Delors bogeyman syndrome, though that was as marked as ever. More important, arguably, was a tendency to try, as the former British Prime Minister had done, to treat the Commission as a civil service and not as a political actor in its own right. As a result everybody, including the presidency itself, lost out since the Community

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system can work effectively only if relations between the Commission and the Council, and more particularly between the Commission and the presidency, are not merely co-operative but civil.

A striking exception to the general norm in the six-month UK presidency proves the rule, namely the breakthrough in the EC-US agricultural negotiations. This was first and foremost a Commission success which redounded to the credit of the UK presidency, as, under the general rule already quoted, successes always do. Despite some useful background work by the British Prime Minister, it was due above all to the fact that the Commission got on with its job. Even in this case, however, the negotiations were nearly derailed by an unscripted intervention by the British Minister of Agriculture, who ‘happened’ to be in Chicago on church-related business, but who turned up at the bilateral talks, only to give the US administration the impression that the EC would be ready to negotiate on a volume limitations approach to the oilseeds problem, an approach which Commission insiders regarded as utterly hopeless. Fortunately for the outcome of the negotiations, the US Agriculture Secretary, Madigan, subsequently made what Commission officials gratefully described as a nego- tiating error of his own in Washington when he allowed Commissioner McShar- ry to switch from the volume limitations approach to a percentage area solution. Once this slip had been made, the Commission negotiators pressed home their advantage and a deal was on, though even then it needed President Bush to overrule his agriculture secretary.

The presidency’s under-utilization of the Council secretariat was also significant. The role of the secretariat in the EC political process, particularly in the General Affairs Council and the European Council itself, is often misunderstood and underrated. No presidency can, however, function efficiently if it does not work hand-in-glove with the secretariat, and more particularly with the key officials, the Secretary General Niels Ersboll himself, his chef de cabinet Paul Christoffersen, the head of the legal services Jean-Claude Piris, and a few others. They are the memory of the presidency, the surest source of impartial political advice if, as ought to be the case, the presidency’s principal interest is in pushing Community business through to the point of decision, and an indispensable assistance in drafting proposals or compromises which are not only politically acceptable but legally watertight. The closest parallel in national terms is probably the Cabinet secretariat in London.

Several other presidencies have ignored or under-used the secretariat in the first few months of their six-month period of office. The Dutch case in the second half of 1991 was a conspicuous example. The UK presidency was nevertheless notably negligent by any standards. A self-sufficient bureaucracy prepared their ministers as meticulously as ever in an entirely British environ- ment, and on the basis of exclusively British advice about what would or would

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not work. As a result, the tendency to parochialism and inflexibility to which many ministers were already too prone was actually exacerbated by the efficiency of the British civil service. As one well-placed player put it in October, we all sing out of tune from time to time. The trouble with the British is that when they sing out of tune, they do so with such conviction and authority that the dissonance reverberates around the Community.

Once again, an exception proves the rule. On Friday 20 November, con- scious, it would seem, that they were making little or no progress on the Danish problem, which until then they had insisted on handling through London rather than Brussels, the British invited Ersbqill and Piris to London. Piris already had the basic elements of the solution worked out in a paper which he had drafted and discussed with the Secretary General weeks earlier. His opinion had not, however, been sought. Once it was sought, the UK presidency was in a position, at a technical level, to point a way through this seemingly intractable set of issues. Senior British civil servants played an important role in subsequent weeks in hammering out the details, but there is no doubt that it was the secretariat that was basically responsible for the breakthrough. The presidency itself, it should be said, acknowledged this fact at the Edinburgh Council meeting by asking Jean-Claude Piris, quite exceptionally, to speak directly to the heads of government and state about the draft declaration.

An explanation of why the UK presidency used the Brussels institutions so inadequately is difficult to find. Sir John Kerr in particular had been a strong supporter of the enhanced role of the Council secretariat which is such a striking feature of the Maastricht Treaty. It cannot therefore have been due to either ignorance or prejudice on the part of UKREP. The most plausible hypothesis is that it is yet another reflection of the primacy of domestic political considerations, compounded by the breakdown from September onwards of prime ministerial authority inside the government back home. This was very much a Foreign Office presidency, but precisely for that reason (the FCO not being able to crack the whip inside Whitehall) co-ordination was weaker than it has been when central authority in the British government machine has been clearer and more effective. The divided counsels back at home seemed to some of his colleagues to overshadow Sir John Kerr’s life as British Permanent Represent- ative in a way that they had not, for example, during the intergovernmental conferences of 1991 when he was able to operate with considerable effective- ness because he knew he was fully backed by a Prime Minister who was indisputably in charge of his government. In the second half of 1992 this was not the case, and as a result he had to pay more attention to sorting out problems in London than he ought to have done if he was to have been fully effective in the Community framework. This interpretation is, it need hardly be said, entirely

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consistent with the third and most important reservation on the UK presidency to which we now turn.

The U K ’ s Lack of Political and Economic Credibility

This point is fundamental to any interpretation of the UK presidency in terms of both its failures and, paradoxically enough, its apparent successes.

The story is in many ways a rather sad one. When the original script for the UK presidency was drafted, this was to have been the six months that welded the British into the heart of Europe. A re-elected Prime Minister, convinced intellectually and even emotionally, through his relationship with Chancellor Kohl, that Britain’s future lay in a leading role in an increasingly powerful and expanding European Community, had an opportunity to demonstrate through a competent and imaginative presidency that Britain felt at ease in the Community and could bring singular gifts to it. Sir John Kerr himself caught the mood well in a speech that he made at CEPS at the beginning of the presidency. This would be, he claimed, the first British presidency ever to take place at a time when there was no major power base in the UK which questioned the fact that Britain should belong to the Community. The extensive press coverage given to the debate between Eurosceptics and enthusiasts sometimes masked this reality. But for the first time the three main political parties, the CBI, and perhaps most revealingly the TUC, were all in favour of British membership. Even the Eurosceptics questioned only the way that the Community was developing rather than doubted the fact that Britain should be in the EC. This meant that in many ways, he concluded, Britain was already at the heart of Europe.

These remarks already seemed rather wistful in July. As the summer progressed, they became less and less apposite. In a series of disasters, both economic and political, the British government lost virtually all its credibility. Black Wednesday was, it need hardly be said, an important moment in this rake’s progress. In terms of political credibility, however the biggest disaster was still to come. The fact that Britain was not exactly the strongest member of the economic club was not after all a revelation. Nor was there anything particularly new about British reservations on the EMS nor, indeed, about the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s evident unhappiness with the European dimen- sion of his role. A senior Member State official who watched Mr Lamont at the final ECOFIN discussion before Maastricht in December 1991 commented that he had never seen a British Chancellor so ill at ease in an international or European gathering as he was on that occasion. The Prime Minister, by contrast, seemed to be altogether more constructive and indeed effective. Cynics might suggest that his predecessor had been so universally disliked that almost anybody would have seemed preferable. The regard for John Major was,


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however, more deeply based than that. Here at last, it seemed, was a British Prime Minister who took Europe seriously, and who could be expected over his four- or five-year term to integrate the UK politically with the Community in a way that none of his predecessors had done or, with the exception of Edward Heath, had even wanted to do.

The hopes that were placed in him made the fall still more dramatic and damaging. There were already signs aplenty of his difficulties from June onwards as the result of the Danish referendum made its impact on British domestic politics. Some of those who took part in a special meeting of the Christian Democrat family in London early in September noted with some surprise the striking contrast between the private, pro-European discourse which they heard from the Prime Minister on that occasion and the more Eurosceptical tones that he was already striking in public. The Conservative Party conference speech shortly afterwards gave an even more colourful illustration of a political leader attempting to keep his troops’ attention focused on the Union Jack. At the same time he and his government prepared to push the ratification of a treaty which was contrary in letter and in spirit to everything that those he had tried so hard at the conference to appease, regarded as essential. He was still, however, given the benefit of the doubt, at least at the highest levels, where the difficulties involved in managing Maastricht ratification were more keenly appreciated after the French referendum than they had perhaps been before the latter process began. This suspension of judgement persisted until as late as the afternoon of 5 November, when Chancellor Kohl assured a private CDU meeting in Bonn that, convoluted though the motion had been, the UK government’s majority in the House of Commons the night before meant that there was now a good chance that the Maastricht ratification process could be completed before the end of the year or at the very latest by the early part of 1993.

The revelation, an hour or two later, that the majority of three had been bought at the cost of a deal with anti-Maastricht elements in the Conservative Party which involved postponing a final UK ratification until after a second Danish referendum, was quite simply incredible. It ran counter to everything that the British government machine had been saying to its partners, it ran counter to what the Brussels-based part of the British government machine still believed to be the position on 5 November itself and, finally and most damagingly of all, it revealed a government which was so little in control at home that it was ready to concede the right to decide on the single most important element in British foreign policy, namely its relationship with the European Community, to a small, volatile Danish electorate whose views its own leaders had singularly failed to predict, let alone determine. As an Englishman who has lived in Brussels for 12 years, I have seen the UK’s stock



fall on several occasions. I cannot, however, recall a moment as dismal as 5 November 1992. To suspicion and recrimination was now added derision.

How then, it might be said, do we explain the success of the European Council? Did not John Major after all bounce back and surprise us all? The answer alas is that, although in the actual Council setting, Mr Major did all that was expected of him and was rightly praised, the most important explanations of the success of the Edinburgh Council are to be found not in the skills and resourcefulness of the UK Prime Minister or his government machine, but in their weakness and vulnerability. The UK government’s disastrous loss of credibility in September, October and early November was, paradoxically, the secret of its success at Edinburgh. This point is worth exploring more deeply.

The key, as so often, lay in Bonn. As already indicated, Chancellor Kohl had initially been as surprised and dismayed by the British Prime Minister’s late night deal as anybody else. Unlike President Mitterrand, however, he did not indulge in immediate public criticism. On the contrary, he used the opportunity provided by his visit to the UK a week later to express his understanding of the UK Prime Minister’s position and his personal readiness to go along with the new timetable. The German Chancellor’s declaration of confidence in John Major surprised a lot of people, in the UK as well as on the continent. His reasoning, which he subsequently outlined to at least one visitor to Bonn in the following days, was, however, straightforward enough:

John Major was the only British Prime Minister with whom the EC could realistically expect to deal for some time to come and, in the light of what to Kohl seemed to be the still more reprehensive behav- iour of John Smith, the best as well.

The UK’s failure to ratify Maastricht could, unlike Denmark’s, spell the end of the Treaty.

The Danish problem should therefore be regarded as a secondary one which had to be cleaned up as elegantly, but also as quickly, as possible.

The UK Prime Minister should be given all the help possible to carry through the ratification process in the hope, firstly, that he would indeed pull it off, and secondly that if he did not, the rest of the EC would be morally and politically in a position to press on without the UK, and/or Denmark.

This last point is of fundamental significance. The German Chancellor’s gesture to the British Prime Minister was not a sentimental act. It was on the


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contrary calculated. The British Prime Minister must be helped so that, if he fails, he is clearly in the wrong and EC-10 are equally clearly in the right.

Two further considerations also played a role. The first concerned France, the second the EC’s general interest. As far as France was concerned, the German Chancellor like everybody else was aware that, despite the referendum victory, the French President was moving into an electoral period in which any major European initiative was on hold. A further delay of the kind that the British Prime Minister said he needed was, therefore, less likely to prevent real progress than might otherwise have seemed the case, particularly if - the second consideration - a concession to Major on this point could pave the way for success at the Edinburgh Council which would do something at least to restore the general morale of the Community.

Crucial though the German Chancellor’s position is at any European Coun- cil, various other elements had to fall into place in the following week or two before success at Edinburgh was assured. Firstly, as we have seen, the legal services had to provide a form of words that would overcome the legal obstacles to a deal with the Danes. Secondly, the Danes had to make it clear-as Ellemann- Jensen did in a speech at the special meeting of foreign ministers on 27 November - that they could live with an agreement along the lines proposed by the Council secretariat and, thirdly and most important of all, Madrid and Paris had to be persuaded that compromises were worth making on both the Danish issue and the budget. The resolution of this last problem was by no means simple, but the elements of a deal which could satisfy both of them emerged in the last week of November and, as a result, it was possible to predict with reasonable confidence and in a fair amount of detail by the end of November how it would all work 0ut.l

It is in this perspective that the Edinburgh breakthrough is best evaluated. Nobody doubts that the British Prime Minister played his part well; British officials were also praised. Nor did anybody resent the plaudits that the British Prime Minister subsequently received. That, after all, was for some of his partners one of the main objects of the exercise. The event was, however, or should have been of little comfort to the British. On the contrary, there was a strong hint of menace. The Belgians and the Spaniards were the most explicit in saying that enough was enough, and that the UK had to ratify or else the others would go on. It should have been obvious, however, that this view was shared by their partners including those who really pull punches at the European Council.

’ For a fairly detailed analysis of why Edinburgh was likely to be a success, in spite of rather than because of the British presidency, see my article published in El Pais on the eve of the Council meeting, but written on 1 December.



Conclusions

To sum up: although as is normal and inevitable in any presidency, there were good things as well as bad, although the UK undoubtedly suffered from bad luck, and although, despite everything, there were significant successes in policy terms, the balance in the end was not only negative but, from a British standpoint, worryingly so. Moods pass and careful diplomacy can undoubtedly hope over the coming months and years to overcome the suspicions and soften the resentments that have been built up over the past six months. Other governments have had bad presidencies and have bounced back both within the Council and subsequently once again as holders of the presidency. I recall talking to a permanent representative in June 1983 towards the end of a German presidency. I commented that he looked harassed and dispirited, ‘Ah’, he said, ‘I am. I look back to the Danes with nostalgia and forward to the Greeks with hope.’ The next time the Germans held the presidency, in 1988, it was arguably one of the most fruitful in the history of the EC.

If the British are to make a similar comeback, however, they are going to have to address and overcome much more fundamental doubts about their commitment and credibility than the Germans raised amongst their partners in the first half of 1983. Do they really want to be party to a venture which, protest as they may, has always been about both Economic and Monetary Union and Political Union, and which by the time they next hold the presidency will, as a result of the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty and the 1996 Intergovem- mental Conference, be still more explicitly so? We are back in fact with questions that one would have hoped, 20 years after the UK’s final entry into the Community, and 30 years after Harold Macmillan’s acceptance of reality, should have been clarified or laid to rest. Where does the UK belong or see itself as belonging in the international system?

In a book written by the Frenchman Andre Siegfried entitled, in its English translation published in 193 1, England’s Crisis, the author wrote:

England has in a sense fallen between two stools, the European continent to which she does not belong, and the non-European world for which she has neither the youth nor the temperament. She is beginning to realise slowly and rather regretfully that her splendid isolation has come to an end.

For Siegfried, the answer to the question of how the British would decide, remained obscure. Indeed, he predicted that the British would not hurry in making a decision.

What is much more likely is that England will not choose at all. Faithful to its tradition and genius it will hover between the two groups, without giving itself completely either to one or to the other. A European England is a dream, and a closed empire a utopia. 0 Basil Blackwell Ltd 1993

260 PETER LUDLOW

Sixty years on the UK seems still to be hovering, not between Europe and the Empire, of course, but between the special relationship with the US and full commitment to Economic, Monetary and Political Union in Europe. Having negotiated our way into the Community from a position which all our partners perceived from the beginning to be one of weakness, we seem, incredibly enough, still to be able to believe that the world, whether it be European or non- European, waits on our decision. The truth is rather different. A special relationship with the US is not an alternative to a one hundred per cent commitment to the European Community, but at best a complement. The real choice now is between a full commitment to European Union or an increasingly dispiriting and almost certainly bitter irrelevance on the margins of Europe. The longer that we pretend otherwise and postpone a decision, furthermore, the less say we shall have when the moment of truth arrives, as it presumably will between 1996 and 1998, if not earlier. The sense that, despite 20 years of membership of the EC, the British can ‘never’ be healthy members of an Economic and Monetary Union or reliable in a Political Union is more widespread now than it was even at the end of 1990 when Mrs Thatcher gave way to the present Prime Minister. The UK presidency of the second half of 1992 is not a sufficient explanation of this phenomenon. It is, however, to say the very least an important element in any balanced judgement of how and why things have come to this pass.


The UK Presidency: A View From Brussels

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