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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Black Monday-- bright future?
By Holger EhlingBrussels, Monday, 15 March, 18.00 hrs. The president of the European Commission (EC), Jacques Santer, enters the conference room in the basement of the commission's headquarters. After greeting the journalists, he reads out eight lines from a sheet of paper, declaring the resignation of the entire commission on charges of mismanagement and corruption. Then, he gets up and leaves the room.
History can be dramatic. Parliaments all over the world are yearning for such fine hours -- those times in the history of nations when the elected representatives of the people come together across political divides and force governments to do what is deemed right. Whether the hour in which the European Parliament forced the resignation of the entire commission -- the closest united Europe gets to a government -- will be remembered as one of its finest remains to be seen.
A week after "Black Monday" in Brussels, Europe is still struggling to come to grips with the shock resignations of its 21 top officials. The allegations of mismanagement and corruption in the EC apparatus that were outlined in a 144-page report by one Swedish accountant and four judges from Spain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, were highly damaging and left the commissioners with no leeway. "It is hard to find anybody with any sense of responsibility," was the verdict. But whether the hapless EC president Jacques Santer and his colleagues really are the culprits, or merely the scapegoats of a political manoeuvre, is now a matter of heated discussion all over Europe.
If anything, the problem of the European Commission is a structural one. Most commentators agree that both the European parliament and the 15 member states are to blame for overburdening the apparatus with ever more responsibilities, while withholding funding and legislative support. The Commission, often demonised as a monster bureaucracy meddling in national affairs, has a total of 17,000 employees -- not a small outfit, but significantly smaller than the city councils of Birmingham, Marseille or Milan. The 15 EU member states all stake their claims in that administration: there are 15 directorates, so that every country can appoint at least one director. Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain can each nominate two. As every economist will tell you, this is not the ideal recipe for administrative efficiency -- especially if the appointments are not made on the grounds of professional suitability, but of political opportunism.
Two figures were especially singled out for criticism in the report: Santer himself and the commissioner for education, Edith Cresson. Both can serve as perfect examples of the root problems of the way Europe is managed. Santer, a former prime minister of Luxembourg, was a compromise candidate when he was appointed in 1995. German chancellor Helmut Kohl, along with the government of France, would have preferred Belgian premier Luc Dehaene, while Britain's John Major was adamant he wanted anybody but Dehaene. The big players were thus divided -- though they were unanimous in their ambition to install a less power-conscious politician at the helm of the EC than the outgoing president, Frenchman Jacques Delors, who had transformed the administration into a centre of political power. Santer performed as expected: a safe pair of hands in quiet times, never overshadowing the true masters of the European Union's institutions, the national prime ministers. When, on the day after the mass resignation, Santer told the press that he himself had been cleared of any wrongdoing, nobody showed any interest. Britain's prime minister Tony Blair dismissed Santer's statement as inappropriate -- thus ending any hopes the president might have had of returning to his post.
Edith Cresson, for her part, was offloaded onto the commission as a way of removing her from French politics. Her extremely brief stint as French prime minister was directly due to her abrasive style of government, which produced less efficiency than posturing. She was the only commissioner named in the report as having personally engaged in favouritism and malpractice. She had appointed her personal dentist to head a European AIDS research project, and friends of hers had been granted lavish contracts to conduct studies or implement parts of her commission's programmes. Other commissioners, such as Spain's Manuel Marin and Germany's Monika Wulf-Mathies, were found to have appointed relatives to posts in the commission without adhering to proper procedures -- although they were cleared of any malpractice by the report.
Cresson was the only commissioner to reject the findings of the report, claiming she was the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. The 19 other commissioners are reported to have reacted with disgusted silence. A week after the resignations, all the ex-commissioners are still at their posts, and will remain there until a new commission is appointed. It is certain that Santer will not be reappointed to serve the remaining two years of this commission's five-year term of office. Cresson is also a dead duck: the combative commissioner for competition, the Belgian Karel van Miert, says he is happy to continue to share the cabinet table with Cresson for the time being, if he has to -- but he wouldn't be seen dead with her at any other table.
Thus the discussion in Europe now centres on who will be selected as Santer's successor. There have been many calls for a credible pro-European figure, the most bizarre of them that of the Franco-German Green Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has called on former German chancellor Helmut Kohl to take Santer's place. Kohl declined firmly, but appeared to have been appropriately moved by the gesture. Dutch premier Wim de Kok and Italian ex-PM Romano Prodi have now emerged as the frontrunners, with the latter the clear favourite.
So, the commission will not be without a leadership. But the appointment of a few new commissioners, and the reappointment of many of the old ones, will not do much to solve the structural problems under which the institution labours.
A true reform of the European institutions would call for the establishment of democratic procedures to elect not only the parliament, but also the commission. German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has even called for a formal European constitution to be laid down. But it seems doubtful the EU member governments would be able to accept measures as radical as that. For why would the national prime ministers hand over their powers of appointment to an agency they cannot control, even if it were an independent body, such as the European Parliament?
In the end, it remains to be seen whether the powers that be perceive the current crisis as deserving a genuine solution -- or whether the weakness of the current institutions is a price they are prepared to continue paying in order to hang on to their place in the fragile status quo.
