Rather apposite, some might say. For the occasion was a meeting in which the Commission would decide to collectively resign, the first in the EU’s history to do so. During the day, commissioners had been talking with their home governments; those who had not made up their minds to go had the decision made for them by Pauline Green, a British ex-policewoman and leader of the socialist faction in the European Parliament. Green sent Ray Collins, her political adviser, across town to deliver the word to Commission President Jacques Santer: the socialists, who had been supportive of the Commission, had seen a highly critical report by a Committee of Independent Experts, and were abandoning Santer and his team. Ritt Bjerregaard, a Danish commissioner, tried to hang tough: “I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said. Someone at the table uttered the Latin phrase “Alea iacta est.” “What Caesar said crossing the Rubicon: ‘The die is cast’,” explained Marin with a bored air. “It’s like the ‘Last Supper’,” said Mario Monti, an Italian commissioner: “Leonardo da Vinci’s.” And with that reference to the name of a much-criticized youth-training program headed by French Commissioner Edith Cresson, the game was up. “Let’s leave in silence,” said Monti. “It’s the best thing to do.”
Actually, it was the only thing the commissioners could do. Faced with a devastating report by the experts–or “wise men,” as everyone in Brussels now calls them–Santer and his team had no option but to go. The details of the report were bad enough (box), and, in the case of Cresson, who seemed to treat her job in Brussels as an opportunity to employ friends from her political power base in France, genuinely shocking. But it was the wise men’s tone in conclusion that sealed the Commission’s fate. The committee said it found “a growing reluctance among the members of the hierarchy to acknowledge their responsibility.” Left in the lurch by their erstwhile supporters in the Parliament, treated with something like open contempt by ministers in their home governments, many of the commissioners had become friendless. And with their passing, Europe started to figure out exactly how this had come to pass. Think of it: just a few short weeks after those heady days when the euro was launched as a rival to the mighty dollar, the executive of the EU was forced to slink into the night, branded as irresponsible incompetents.
Across the Continent, commentators struggled to divine what it all meant. In Le Monde, Olivier Duhamel, a member of the European Parliament and political scientist, wrote that the worst outcome would be a “Kenneth Starrisation” of European politics. Elsewhere, there was a hope that the events of last week marked a new maturity in the EU’s affairs, a sense of accountability for performance. Some rushed to find a division between “southern” and “northern” habits of administration, and detected (perhaps a bit hastily) a brisker air of efficiency and greater transparency as a consequence of the recent membership of Sweden and Finland.
The German government, preparing for an EU summit in Berlin, was particularly exercised. “It is now even more important that Europe makes clear that it can act decisively,” said German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. But the Germans openly admitted that the crisis in Brussels cannot be solved at Berlin, where the EU’s governments will work on Agenda 2000, the linked set of decisions needed to reform the Union’s creaking finances (and, not coincidentally, reduce Germany’s role as EU paymaster in chief). That implies that for a while–perhaps until a summit in Cologne in June–Santer and his team will have to stay on as the lamest of lame ducks.
Santer himself may return to Brussels, ironically as a member of the European Parliament (elections to which will be held in June), whose growing outrage in the face of Commission stonewalling sealed his fate. By the end of the week, opinion was hardening that his most likely successor as Commission president would be Romano Prodi, the former prime minister of Italy, a man just left-wing enough to be acceptable to the dominant socialists, just southern enough to be a member of the EU’s Club Med and just fiscally responsible enough to convince the steely men from the north. “Whichever road you take,” said one senior European minister, “it leads to Prodi.”
For now, though, the EU has to deal less with its future than with a horrible recent past. In the last few months Brussels has seen a series of parliamentary games, backroom deals, comic errors, reports by whistle-blowers–and, in the end, a conclusion that few anticipated. Despite growing outrage over the winter at constant discoveries of corruption and cover-ups, “everyone expected that the wise men would come up with yet another mushy report,” said one Euro-skeptic in the Parliament. The report’s five authors were for the most part insiders who had served in a variety of posts in European government institutions. Moreover, the committee had been put together as part of a deal between socialist leaders in Parliament and Santer, and its membership was vetted by the commissioners themselves.
Still, the wise men did their job. “We hardly had time to speculate what the outcome would be,” said one of them, Walter Van Gerven. “We were five strangers… We had no habits, no rules, and there was such a short time.” The committee had been promised by the Commission that it could review all relevant documents, uncensored–something the Parliament had been denied during its investigations over the winter–on six cases of alleged fraud, and several instances of alleged favoritism and nepotism. Along the way, they came across more areas that will require investigation. “It has not been possible within the time at the disposal of the committee,” says the report, “to investigate such cases.” There’s plenty of work to do; the report does not mention, for example, the fiasco surrounding the entrance exam for Commission jobs last September. The Commission invalidated the entire exam, which had been staged at 38 centers at a cost of $1.3 million after it emerged that the questions were leaked in advance to selected candidates. Newspapers reported that candidates conferred together and made calls on mobile phones to get answers.
With the shock over the report and resignations not yet abated, Europe is trying to figure out what went wrong. And the first conclusion, freely admitted by insiders, is hardly encouraging: none of this is new. Says a senior Commission official: “The terrible thing is that Santer doesn’t deserve all this. It was a lot sleazier here 15 years ago.” That’s a fair point: indeed, the Commission security service, lambasted in the report as a state within a state, got up to some of its worst excesses–like drunkenness at the Seville Expo in 1992–under the presidency of Jacques Delors, in Brussels mythology, an ascetic saint.
One longstanding problem that must now be addressed is the Commission’s habits of secrecy. In its earliest days, it was less a place for executive tasks, and more one for dealmaking between member states. That’s left its mark. “It’s a diplomatic culture,” says Jens-Peter Bonde, a Danish M.E.P. “Secrecy is very useful in diplomacy–but not in lawmaking.” And the Commission has long been dogged by the practice of making appointments to senior jobs on the basis of informal national quotas rather than merit. In Community jargon, these jobs are “flagged” for certain countries. And each country regards the size of directorates headed by its own commissioners as a source of national pride, regardless of need. The result–too much effort is tied up writing pointless reports about trivia, while really important departments are stretched to the limit.
There’s a larger point here. There are certainly faults to be found in Brussels. Says Graham Mather, a British conservative M.E.P., “If they have managed to impose a uniform culture, it’s the Belgian one. That means a readiness to accept sloppy outcomes in matters of execution and administration, and a relaxed approach to financial standards and conflicts of interest.” And the staff trade unions bear part of the blame. Efficiency-driven reforms can bring instant protest. But a large part of the fault for the miserable performance of the Commission should be placed at the door of member states. Most EU money is disbursed by national authorities; most wastage happens far from Brussels. Take the five water-treatment plants built in Italy with EU money, for instance, but left to rot, unused, because the Italian authorities never linked them to the national grid.
Moreover, national governments have consistently heaped responsibilities on the Commission without willing the resources to let it do its job effectively. Says Marcelino Oreja, who is responsible for relations with member states, “Our mistake was that we didn’t say, ‘Stop: not an inch more’.” Monti echoes the cry: “There has been a growing disproportion between the tasks assigned to the Commission and the resources.”
One response: subcontract work to private agencies. The common thread in nearly all the cases that were examined by the wise men was the degree to which the EU has outsourced and subcontracted its projects to consultants and outside firms. According to Oreja, the Commission now makes out 120,000 contracts a year to external contractors. There has been a freeze on hiring new staff since 1995, but during that time member states, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament have approved more and bigger projects, such as the humanitarian assistance program known as ECHO, criticized in the report for corruption due to outsourcing. Marin, for example, is in charge of aid to Latin America, and will shortly have to approve v250 million for the relief of victims of Hurricane Mitch. “I have five operational people only there,” says Marin, “and two here, but anyway they have to do it. We will have no choice but to use outside agents, NGOs, local governments. It’s crazy.”
Are there any grounds for optimism? Maybe. The dust-up at least shows some trace of the healthy friction you’d expect to see in any democracy. Says Monti: “Perhaps this is the first time that at an integrated European level, institutions are taking the shape that has characterized member states. That augurs well.” Up to a point: but if the salvation of the EU is supposed to lie with the European Parliament, those looking for a new mood are likely to be disappointed–the Parliament itself, with padded expenses and plenty of time-servers, is hardly a model of democratic accountability. For years M.E.P.s didn’t have to submit any receipts when claiming reimbursement for travel expenses. Invigorated by the forced resignation of the Commission, the European press, which with rare exceptions has been complicit in its failure to check abuses in the EU’s institutions, will now probably turn its spotlight on the Parliament.
More generally, this year’s crisis has exposed a gaping chasm between the EU’s economic maturity and its infantile politics. That gap needs to be closed. Says conservative M.E.P. Edward Macmillan-Scott: “Europeans look to the EU as some sort of salvation from our own history, and a salvation from their own feeble administrations. Somewhere along the line we’re all going to have to mature together. But unless this reform is taken seriously, it could be the end of the EU.” That may be melodramatic; but if the unique experiment in multinational cooperation that is the European Union is to take the place in the world to which it seems to think it is entitled, the events of 1999 need to be taken to heart. Memo to heads of government: order lots of cold suppers, and get to work.
