European Diary, 1977-1981 (4 page)

 

The first month or so of 1977 was taken up with initial dispositions—first of Commission portfolios and then of Directors-General, the rough equivalent of Whitehall permanent secretaries—and with the semi-formal establishment of relations with the other Community institutions: the Court of Justice, the Parliament (then nominated from the Parliaments of the member states and not directly elected), the Council of Ministers and its Brussels-resident shadow, the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER).

The allocation of Commission portfolios was much the most difficult of these tasks. Despite the efforts at Ditchley before Christmas there was substantial work on the fitting of pegs into holes still to be done when I arrived in Brussels on 4 January. It was made more difficult by the fact that the rules (two Commissioners for a big country, one for a small one) created more Commissioners than there were proper jobs for them to do. And it had to be completed, unless the new Commission was to start very much on the wrong foot, by the night of 6/7 January.

This led to the first days in Brussels being dominated by bilateral negotiations with individual Commissioners. The story has a certain retrospective interest, but not I think sufficiently so for the reader to be thrown into a long account of these proceedings. I have therefore abstracted it and put it in an appendix which appears at the end of the book. This abstraction may have the effect of making the first days seem undercharged, rather than overcharged as in reality they were.

In mid-February I began a customary round of inaugural visits to the governments of the member states. Such visits typically lasted a day and a half, and I did them over five months in the not entirely haphazard order of Italy, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg,
Germany, Ireland, Denmark and Britain. The Belgian Government received a non-travelling visit in September.

On the second of these visits—the Paris one—a tiresome and in some ways ludicrous issue of form and prestige which was to dominate much of that spring (and to continue with diminishing reverberations throughout the rest of my presidency) erupted to the surface. In November 1975 President Giscard had inaugurated a series of ‘intimate' meetings between the leaders of the Western world. He had brought together at Rambouillet the heads of government of the United States, Germany, Britain and Japan, with Italy somewhat reluctantly added almost at the last moment. In June 1976 President Ford had responded almost too quickly by organizing a meeting at Puerto Rico. On this occasion Canada had been added at the request of the Americans. There had also been some movement away from the genuine informality of a country house gathering at Rambouillet towards the international circus trappings of more recent Western Economic Summits.

There was considerable feeling amongst the Little Five of the European Community that Ortoli, my predecessor as President, ought to have been present at Puerto Rico. The gatherings were specifically ‘economic' and not political or military in their intent. The countries of Western Europe had charged the Community with a significant part of the responsibility for conducting and coordinating their economic policies, particularly but not only in the field of trade relations. In these circumstances it appeared both perverse and divisive for four of them to go off and try to settle matters with the Americans and the Japanese, leaving the coordinating body in the dark and five of the member states of the Community unrepresented.

There had been some suggestion that Ortoli ought simply to have packed his bags and arrived forcefully even if uninvited at the Summit. However no invitation was forthcoming and Ortoli, wisely I think, did not attempt to gate-crash. This issue was left unresolved but with a settled determination on the part of the Little Five, supported with enthusiasm by Italy and with moderate enthusiasm by Germany, that there should be no repetition of the crime.

A repetition of the Summit itself was however by then inevitable, and by the time that I took office one had been firmly arranged for
London in May 1977. The only question at issue was therefore whether or not I would be present. Ortoli's absence had unfairly been seen as a blow to his prestige and to that of the Commission. Part of the role I was expected to perform was to restore this prestige. My credibility as an effective new President was therefore somewhat at stake.

But there was more to it than the questions of pride or position. The Little Five regarded my own determination to get there as an essential test of whether I was to be a true spokesman of the Community as a whole or a lackey of the big countries, from one of which I came and by another of which my appointment had been initiated. Almost independently of my own views, I therefore had no choice but to fight for a place at the London meeting. And when Giscard at the conclusion of our Elysée discussion on 28 February announced with silken politeness that he was equally resolved the other way, a battle between us became unavoidable. While it was being fought it was, like most battles, disagreeable. The outcome however was reasonably satisfactory, particularly as the ground gained was never subsequently lost. But the price paid was a long-term deterioration in the relationship between Giscard and me (interrupted only by a brief and cautious second honeymoon in the summer of 1978), which probably mattered more to me than it did to him.

At the time I could see no merit in his position. At best it could be explained, but not excused, by political difficulties with the Gaullist wing of his coalition. In retrospect however I can see a little more in his case. He had successfully initiated a new forum for Western leaders to talk to each other in semi-spontaneous intimacy. It was a formula which he and his friend Schmidt particularly liked, because they were the best at it. Already he had been forced to admit first Italy and then Canada. Now there was me. Furthermore the Americans, with their need for back-up, were already making the meetings more bureaucratic, and the Commission was famous for bureaucracy. Where was it going to stop? The Australians were already knocking at the door; and was the Prime Minister of one of the Little Five, when his country held the presidency of the European Council, also to be admitted?

However Giscard's status-conscious and schematic mind did not see things in these quantitative and practical terms, which might
have appealed to Schmidt. Instead he raised theoretical issues in a
de haut en bas
way. In his long letter to me of 22 March (see page 74
infra)
he based his attitude on the syllogism that the Summit was a meeting of sovereign governments, and that as the Commission was not a sovereign government it manifestly could not participate. This had the advantage of appealing to the British, who react to the word ‘sovereignty' with all the predictability of one of Pavlov's dogs, but the disadvantage (from his point of view) of repelling the others, including the Germans, because it struck at the heart of Community doctrine.

Despite my partial Summit victory (but with the circumstances of the Downing Street meetings on 6–8 May hardly enabling me to feel that I was taking part in a triumphal parade), the summer of 1977 was for me a period of low morale. Apart from anything else the Belgian weather that year did not lift the spirits. One of the advantages of my large room at the top of the Berlaymont was that a great deal of sky was visible from its windows. One of the disadvantages of that Brussels summer was that the sky was hardly ever even partially blue. There were seventeen consecutive days in June during which the sun never appeared.

At a more serious level I did not feel that I had so far found a theme around which I could hope to move Europe forward. My first European Council in Rome in March had been dominated by the peripheral issue of representation at the Summit. My second European Council in London in late June was perhaps the most negative of the twelve that I attended. Schmidt and Giscard were firmly in control of Europe, but for the moment had no direction in which they wished to take it. They were rather hostile to Callaghan, whom they saw as semi-detached towards Europe, too attached to the unesteemed President Carter, and running an ineffective economy to boot. Towards Italy and the Little Five they were in a rather sullen phase. The Franco-German axis was working internally well, but, temporarily, it was doing no good for Europe.

In these circumstances, which were also unfavourable to Commission initiatives, I cast around for ideas and pondered the advice which Jean Monnet had given, both publicly and privately. On at least two occasions his ideas had been spectacularly successful in gaining the initiative, and on the second occasion he had done it by rebounding from setback and switching from one blocked avenue
to another which was more open. The successful inauguration of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951 had been followed by the juddering halt to the plan for a European Defence Community in 1954. By the following year the Messina Conference was meeting to plan the Economic Community and by 1957 the Treaty of Rome was signed. The lesson he taught me was always to advance along the line of least resistance provided that it led in approximately the right direction.

It was against this background that, during July, I came firmly to the view that the best axis of advance for the Community in the circumstances of 1977 lay in re-proclaiming the goal of monetary union. This was a bold but not an original step. At least since the Werner Report of 1971 (named after the Prime Minister of Luxembourg) ‘economic and monetary union' had been a proclaimed early objective of the Community. But no obvious progress towards it had been made, and in a curious way the Janus-like title had the effect of making rapid advance seem less likely. If economic convergence and monetary integration were never to move more than a short step ahead of each other, there was no place for three-league boots.

I decided that there was a better chance of advance by qualitative leap than by cautious shuffle. And such a leap was desirable both to get the blood of the Community coursing again after the relative stagnation of the mid-1970s and on its own merits—because it could move Europe to a more favourable bank of the stream. The era of violent currency fluctuations, which had set in with the effective end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, had coincided with the worsening of Europe's relative economic performance. In the 1960s, with fixed rates, the Europe of the Six had performed excellently, at least as well as America or Japan. In the mid-1970s, with oscillating exchange rates, it had performed dismally. Nor was this surprising. For the other two main economies the fluctuations had been external, affecting only trading relationships across oceans. For the Community they had been viscerally internal, with the French franc and the D-mark diverging from each other at least as much as either had done from the dollar or the yen.

The key dates for the promulgation of the ideas were: 2 August, when I discussed them at a day-long meeting of my
cabinet,
held at my house at East Hendred; 17–18 September, when I discussed
them at a Commission strategy weekend held at an hotel in the Ardennes; 8–9 October, when I presented them to the regular six-monthly meeting of Foreign Ministers, at another hotel in the Belgian countryside; 27 October, when I launched them on the public in a Monnet Memorial Lecture to the European University Institute in Florence; 5–6 December, when I expounded them to the heads of government at a European Council in Brussels; and 8 December, when I chose Bonn as the most appropriate capital in which to try to refute such sceptical comment as had been forthcoming.

I did not end the year with any lively expectation that early 1978 was going to see the governments launching themselves on the qualitative leap. But the sustained advocacy of it had given my presidency a theme and a focus which had been lacking before the summer holidays.

There was one other feature of that autumn which is perhaps worth recalling by way of background. From early September to mid-November the German Government was thrown into a state of total disarray and semi-paralysis by terrorist attacks within the country.