When chris patten gave the first of this year's Reith lectures on governance, he ended it with a verse from a Chinese philosopher, Lao-tzu: "A leader is best when people barely know that he exists." On that measure, the institutions of the EU in Brussels, Patten's new home, must contain some of the finest leaders in world history. How many people can name the president of the European parliament? Or the president-in-office of the European council? Or more than five members of the 20-member European commission?
Lao-tzu's lines probably made delightful sense in 6th century BC China, but for Europe, at least, something has changed in the two and a half millennia since. Patten put his finger on the nature of that change in the discussion which followed his lecture. He remarked: "People feel their primary loyalty in a political sense to the institutions of a nation state. When that nation state hands over real authority, in order to protect its national interests, to an international organisation, the loyalties do not travel with it. People may rationally comprehend that it's in their interests that this should be done, but nobody feels a whoosh of pleasure... Nobody has yet climbed a mountain and put the EU's flag at the top."
A whoosh of pleasure for every European citizen! Now there is a manifesto pledge which would get Patten and his commission colleagues noticed. But Europeans will have to be whooshed and pleasured closer to home for many years yet. The kind of authority that European governments have handed the commission involves lines of business that the public rarely understands or cares much about.
No fame, no loyalty. Nor, now, does the commission stir up hostile passions in the way it used to. True, it still occupies a generous place in the demonology of some British eurosceptics. But viewed up close, the commission has become a bit of a mangy old beast-and all the more so since the sad beating it took last year when the previous team of commissioners, headed by Jacques Santer of Luxembourg, resigned prematurely in March, brought down by an accumulation of carelessness and petty scandal.
The new commission in which Patten serves, headed by Romano Prodi, a former prime minister of Italy, took office in September. But the damage done by the Santer era will not easily be undone. The commission has lost the moral high ground which used to be its main source of strength in tussles with national governments. It is seen to be just as venal and selfish as they are. Even good Europeans now entertain questions about it which would have been unthinkable a decade ago: whether it has much of a job to do any more, and, if so, whether it is up to doing it. The right answers to those questions are, respectively, "yes, but less of a job with each passing day," and, "yes, but only just." These are not the answers needed to secure the future of an unpopular institution. It was kind of Patten to take a job there.
The job in question, that of European commissioner for external relations, adds a further line to what was already one of the more diverse CVs in modern British politics. For most of the 1980s, Patten was a minister on the "Christian Democratic" wing of the radical Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher. As Conservative party chairman in 1992, he lost his parliamentary seat but won a general election for John Major. A thankful Major made him governor of Hong Kong. This was the last governor's job in the world worth having, with the powers of a benign dictator over a fabulous city state. It was, moreover, on offer for the last time. In 1997 Patten oversaw the withdrawal of British government from Hong Kong, a transaction to which Britain and China had bound themselves in 1984. He shed a tear, hung up his ostrich-feathered hat, and sailed home.
He went back to a house in Barnes, west London, another in France, and "a very happy time, writing a book, making one or two films, giving the odd lecture and being paid even more than Ken Livingstone." He declined the chairmanship of "a small bank." He was asked, "a lot," to put himself forward as a candidate for mayor of London. He was "not tempted, mainly for this reason: there is a danger of creating somebody who is a demandeur figurehead on whom a good deal of public expectation may ride but who cannot actually deliver much."
Instead, and when he was well into drafting a report on the policing of Northern Ireland, at the British government's invitation, Tony Blair offered him the job of European commissioner-one of two such posts in Britain's gift. There existed an unwritten rule that the commissioners' jobs were split between the ruling and opposition parties: Patten would fill the shoes vacated by Leon Brittan, another of Thatcher's ministers. But it was by no means a settled precedent, in Blair's view at any rate, that the leader of the opposition had the right of nomination. So there was some awkwardness when William Hague proposed Alastair Goodlad, a former chief whip. For a time Goodlad himself seemed to assume he had got the job. But Blair insisted on Patten, mainly because, when the Santer commission collapsed and Prodi agreed to pick up the pieces, Blair and other European leaders promised to send him a heavyweight team capable of restoring the institution's credibility. Patten was an internationally known figure, whereas Goodlad was not. According to Patten: "Alastair was a friend, is a friend, and will remain a friend. But it was a bit unsettling."
It can only have helped, too, that Patten's view of Europe scarcely differs from that of Blair: the EU is not a threat to nation states, nor a successor to them, but a vehicle enabling countries to do together whatever things they can do more efficiently in that way. That said, he is a touch more direct than Blair about the single currency. Asked whether Britain could afford to remain outside the eurozone while hoping still to play its full part within the EU, he gives this reply: "When most of the serious economic decisions are being taken by whatever structures accommodate all those in the eurozone, there is a political cost: there is the cost you find yourself paying when you are to a degree bound by decisions you have not helped shape or create. So you fetch up nearer the inside track than Norway or Switzerland but facing the same sort of consequences of your political choices."
And if Britain did stay outside for another ten or 15 years? "It is hard to imagine how, over that length of time, we could be outside the eurozone while being a profoundly influential member of the EU."
Patten also thinks that a written constitution for the EU would be a logical step. He says that he is resigned to having this view "torn out of context and used to justify the assertion that I really am a card-carrying federalist of the worst sort. But I don't see any alternative to politicians sooner rather than later sitting down and trying to work out a constitution for the EU. If we want to catalogue the competencies, if we want to define exactly what it is reasonable to do at the level sovereignty is pooled, and what should be done at other levels-in other words, if you want to tackle the central question of governance-then I don't see any other sensible way of doing it."
A "constitution for Europe" would certainly make Blair twitch-to say nothing of the much stronger reaction it would produce in many quarters of Patten's own Conservative party. Patten says that he finds Hague "courteous and charming," but that the party is in danger of making "a grave mistake." It should not "make the euro... a litmus test of whether one was a God-fearing, card-carrying Conservative. The Conservative party has been, for most of my lifetime, the more enthusiastic of the two major parties on Europe. A great political party should not confuse politics with religion... It is important for William to resist any attempt to demonise, blackball, what has for years been the Conservative mainstream."
in accepting blair's offer, Patten was agreeing to go to the commission before he knew exactly what responsibilities he would receive there. The parcelling-out of portfolios remained to be done by Prodi. Patten was allotted external relations, one of the more demanding jobs physically and intellectually. The commission runs 126 offices and countless programmes worldwide: all are in some degree Patten's responsibility. He has no "junior ministers" to whom he can delegate the speech-making and president-greeting in all these parts of the world, while he himself sits at home doing the strategic thinking. He does it all himself. "He never expected it to be quite so much work," says a commission official who sees him often. There has been a visible tightening of the Patten visage in recent months as the travelling and the tedium have taken their toll. He must have been to the Balkans more often than to Barnes over the winter. He has even been to Canada for the day.
He describes himself, modestly but accurately, as primarily a deliverer of resources-an "intelligent quartermaster," as he puts it. But he would be less than human if he did not want to be a maker, not merely an implementer, of policy. He has an agenda of foreign policy ideas which include engagement with Russia, more free trade with Africa, and a "higher profile" for relations with India. He thinks that "being quartermaster does not mean that you have to take a vow of omerta... The extent to which you are taken seriously by member states will depend on how competently you do the job they have given you to do."
Here, there is much ground to be made up. Patten supervises an aid budget worth roughly 8 billion euros a year, split about 80:20 between development and emergency aid-and a bureaucracy notorious in the past for providing money too late to be of use, or to the wrong place, or not at all. Huge amounts of spending capacity are immobilised in an overhang of projects approved but not implemented, or started but not finished. When taking office, he said to the European parliament that "there is a cynicism in talking about huge global sums to be spent in this or that part of the world when you know perfectly well that the mechanisms have not been put in place for actually spending the money sensibly. We should stop doing it... We have an overhang of 18 billion euros and 14,500 projects, almost a third of which are more than five years old and 17 per cent of which are technically dormant."
And yet he has gone on talking about spending huge global sums ever since. He has had little choice but to do so, because the commission, guided in this by Prodi, has decided that one of its main vocations for the decade ahead should be the stabilising of south-eastern Europe in the wake of the Kosovo war. The European powers were obliged to stand back and let the US do most of the fighting, with its far superior weaponry; the commission wants to show that Europe can take the lead in managing the peace.
All sorts of figures fly around for how much the EU and its constituent governments have spent and will spend in the region. The sums spent have yet to resemble the sums promised-as US officials are always pointing out. But as an indication of magnitude, Patten reckons that since 1991 the commission has spent nearly 8 billion euros on reconstruction and humanitarian assistance to the region, and that EU governments individually have spent about the same again. Looking forward, the commission wants to spend nearly 12 billion euros on the region over the next six years-again in addition to any bilateral aid from member states, and in addition to the cost of military operations. Roughly half would go towards grooming Romania and Bulgaria for EU membership some six to ten years hence; and half to Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, and even Serbia.
It follows that Patten needs to show that mechanisms for spending the money sensibly are being put in place. He has been trying to simplify the complex formal rules by which the commission decides how and on what its money can be spent. He has set Patrick Child, a member of his private office, to work on better procedures for managing and monitoring the flow of cash. But it is slow going: a first report on how to put things right failed to materialise by the intended date of the end of April. One problem is chronic under-staffing. "When I was Britain's development minister," says Patten, "I was spending half as much money as I am responsible for spending today, with about three times as many staff."
And when the aid budget is sorted out, what next? There will always be plenty to do in the Balkans; and there is talk of a review of the commission's overseas offices and what they are for. But in general, Patten's freedom of action is rather more circumscribed than his job title might suggest. He is commissioner for external relations, but he shares his building, and his policy domain, with three other co-equal commissioners. There is a commissioner for trade, Pascal Lamy; a commissioner for development, Poul Nielson; and a commissioner for enlargement of the EU, G?nter Verheugen. Prodi's first intention had been, apparently, to give the commissioner for external relations authority over this group of portfolios. But he backed away from that, because too many sensibilities, national and personal, would have been offended. Instead, Patten is invited merely to "coordinate" the work of his three equals, an awkward compromise which the interested parties have re-interpreted as a polite fiction.
There is also the little matter of Javier Solana, the former secretary-general of Nato, who took office in October as the EU's first "high representative for foreign and security policy." He is based over the road in the council of ministers, the counterbalancing body to the commission, where government ministers meet to represent their national governments: there he answers to the foreign ministers of the EU states. He is inventing or discovering the modalities of his job as he goes along, but in general terms he is a sort of national security adviser in the making, finding areas in which EU governments, by working together, can give the EU a political weight in the world more in proportion to its economic one. And, in the time since those same EU governments agreed in principle three years ago to have a "high representative" for foreign policy, the idea of common European defence capacity has also pushed its way up the EU agenda: so Solana has been made point-man for defence, too.
You could argue that the arrival of Solana has not changed the nature of Patten's job: the latter's field is the external relations of the commission, a supranational institution; not the foreign policy and still less the defence policy of EU governments. But it has changed everything. No matter how the EU evolves, the commission will never be able to claim a lead role in foreign policy, still less in defence policy, for itself.
In practical ways it has certainly helped that Patten and Solana are old friends: they first met in Spain in 1985, introduced by Tristan Garel-Jones, a British Conservative with a Spanish wife. They have allowed no outward sign of any rivalry between them. But personal chemistry is hardly the point when Solana and Patten answer, as it were, to two different paradigms of Europe: Patten to a "supranational" one, Solana to an "intergovernmental" one. Creative tension between commission and governments is a source of energy on which the EU has long drawn. But internal tension of any sort has no use in external relations (or common foreign policy, the labels are becoming fungible) which starts from the presumption that the EU can function as a single actor, with one set of values and interests to advance.
These are early days yet: Solana and his team are still, literally, unpacking their boxes and arranging their desks. But at some point, if not Solana, then his successor is going to make something of the fact that the commission sets trade policy, manages aid and relief programmes, and runs the EU's offices and missions around the world. He is going to observe that all these things are vital to foreign policy, and that he, as "high representative" for foreign policy, with the weight of governments behind him, should be their master: in logic, he should. Some harbinger of this future hierarchy has already been seen in the case of Balkans policy, where everybody agrees that the EU's mix of programmes and policies is an ill-governed mess. Solana and Patten jointly wrote a report explaining why the mess had arisen and how it should be fixed, which they sent to the EU's heads of government in March. But when the heads of government duly told the two men to sort it out, they put Solana in charge. At that point, a less seasoned politician than Patten might well have uttered a yelp of dismay. Patten, presumably, knows that a tactical defeat in politics is better left unadvertised.
I have the strong impression that Patten knows he has a weak hand, and that he is playing it well. He doubts that common foreign policy will come to very much for a very long time, so he is genuinely not all that impatient that Solana should have titular charge of it. He is scheming to cash his winners where he can: a successful reform of the aid budget will win him the sincere and lasting gratitude of 15 governments. He is avoiding public arguments of any kind, with anybody, even if that means biting his lip now and again-a wise strategy for any British commissioner. The British cannot claim founders' privileges over the European project, nor are they quite convincing when they claim faith in it even now, so they are easily unnerved or isolated. Besides, Patten has been in politics long enough to know that time alone solves many problems. He can be a model commissioner in this first term by doing his job conscientiously and not making a fuss; there is no reason why he should not expect to serve a second term; and he may well be in a much stronger position then.
Where he does have critical words, they are for the system he has encountered in Brussels, not the people. The EU institutions tend to remain opaque to outsiders. Their work is technical in form and couched in Euro-jargon. Only once you are inside do you see what actually goes on: and, to judge from Patten's first impressions, the news is half good, half bad. There are lots of clever and well-meaning people doing lots of tedious and often pointless things.
The commission consists of 20 commissioners and about 16,000 civil servants. The civil servants answer to the commissioners, the commissioners answer to nobody. They are not supposed to take any guidance from their home governments, who nominate them. They can be sacked only-and only en masse-by the European parliament. This almost happened to the Santer commission, which resigned instead.
That is the simple bit. Below the level of the commissioners themselves, visibility quickly falls away. Each commissioner surrounds himself with a private office known by the French name of cabinet. He can bring in whomever he wants, although it is considered bad form nowadays to appoint relatives. Patten's six-member cabinet is the usual mix of outsiders and commission veterans. His chef de cabinet, Anthony Cary, was previously counsellor at the British embassy in Washington. For the Balkans he has brought in Edward Llewellyn, who was his policy adviser and speechwriter in Hong Kong.
The main job of the cabinet is, or ought to be, advice and support to the commissioner. In practice, the most time-consuming job of the cabinet becomes that of dealing with other cabinets. Every commissioner wants to know about the work of his colleagues. One reason is that, as in the case of Patten and his immediate neighbours Lamy, Verheugen and Nielson, commissioners' responsibilities and interests often overlap with one another. There are too many of them for each to have an entirely distinct domain. Another reason is that the commission is supposed to function as a "college," taking its big decisions collectively. So commissioners have a legitimate interest in one another's projects even where there is no overlap of responsibility. When I first spoke to Patten in November he was finding the system explicable, but frustrating: "The notion of collegiality is not strictly appropriate given the present size of the commission. Of course you have collective responsibility for what is done. Of course you have contributions to overall judgements. But a system which encourages cabinets endlessly to nit-pick and second-judge other colleagues' decision-making does not seem to me to be appropriate to the demands on us today. It also strikes me as curious that there is no real capacity for ensuring policy consistency or coherence. This is not strictly a government, although it should try to act more like one, and in most institutions like this you have something like the Cabinet Office, some central capacity for ensuring policy consistency. Here that function is performed by endless meetings of hard-worked cabinets."
When I spoke to him again in March he was no more enthusiastic. He contrasted the work-style of Brussels with that of Hong Kong. The latter "was a model of how decisive government should work. There was an entrepreneurial culture: if you were not running between appointments you had no business being there... The notion which is part of the culture here of blocking, of inter-departmental consultations which seem designed to ensure that nothing gets done-that would have been entirely foreign in Hong Kong. I miss that decisive managerial role in an environment in which people still, in an almost Victorian sense, believe in progress."
And yet the commission, of course, is obliged ex officio to believe in progress too, albeit of a different kind. Its job is to advance European integration. It comes up with new ideas that it thinks governments can be persuaded to support-the European single market, for example. It chivvies governments which fail to honour obligations.
But it is national governments, acting collectively, which pass the laws proposed by the commission, and which write and rewrite the EU treaties. The commission has only the powers that governments have agreed to give it. Governments gave it a lot of powers in the early days when Europe was an "economic community" and enthusiasm for integration was running high. The commission gained authority over farming, trade and competition policy. But governments have been giving the commission a lot less new power in recent years, to the point at which it is becoming a "legacy" body, running-off the programmes of the past, while the new business goes elsewhere. The single currency has gone to Frankfurt, where the European Central Bank now resides as the most powerful factor in the European economy. Foreign policy and defence have gone to Solana and his committees at the council of ministers.
There are plenty of people who doubt that the EU should be getting into the nationally-sensitive fields of foreign policy and defence at all, and plenty who think that it will make a fool of itself, or tear itself apart, or worse still tear Nato apart, by upsetting the Americans in the attempt. Even if it does well, the gains will not be clear-cut for another 15 or 20 years. But if the EU does go down this road, it will become something fundamentally different from the mainly economic project that it was in what will come to be seen as its first phase of development, the phase leading up to monetary union. And it will rely mainly on a new institutional model to manage this new range of responsibilities-one which relies much less on leadership from an artificial, supranational institution, the European commission, and much more on concerted action by governments.
These and other outcomes, including the ways in which the EU will be changed by its planned enlargement into central and eastern Europe in the decade ahead, remain to be discovered, not decided. They sweep far beyond the capacity of any one person or any one government (save that perhaps of Germany) to influence them greatly. The EU, which is to say the interplay of national interests and political calculations that make it up, has become so dense and sprawling that it has taken on a life entirely of its own.
It merits more scrutiny than it usually gets-or allows. Hence the special pleasure of finding Patten on hand there, and in a central role. His job is difficult, his powers are limited, his brow is furrowed more than it used to be. But he is a likeable man, a thoughtful man and an open man. At least two of those qualities make him a rarity in the higher reaches of Brussels. With luck, his presence will make the process of watching "Europe" coming together in a new way-or failing to do so, or falling apart-a little bit easier for the rest of us to understand.
