Hard to engineer a better world

Europe, I used to think, was essentially a clockwork, engineering operation where public opinion in the form of the tabloids is nothing so much as a wrecking operation. I remember when I first came to Brussels how amazed I was at the intricate structure of decision making: it was an immense flow chart diagram and everything seemed so immensely logical and rightful in its place. Commission proposed –parliament amended. With help of impact assessments; this went on to the council of minsiters, who represent the nation states after input from the committee of the regions and the European social and economic committee. The lobbyists and civil society also had their input arrows; there was Coreper, the nation states’ embassies to the EU,and the flow chart was slightly amended for second readings and what was known as conciliation, where the institutions failed to agree. It’s not that underneath this political structure there weren’t people; the people’s needs came in through impact assessments, ruled by the gods of utility. But there was no politics. It seemed a liberation. There were differences, but the system was designed to create the best of all possible worlds for homo europeanus.
And coming back to London and picking up the bleeding redtops was a shock to my Brussels-refined sensibilities: the mastheads were dipped in blood and opening the pages was like prising apart the jaws of a rottweiler. There were jokes about Europe when they bothered to write about it all, but the joke was in the vulgarians, and you do not answer a fool according to his folly.
But never mind, Europe would continue to work for them, supervise them, be an invisible guiding hand, while the masses made bad jokes, feasted on their roasts.
How does it all work? It’s the basic question. And the more I learnt about the subtlety of decision making, the way it took all sides into account, the more I got to admire the officials working bit by bit on this institution, which grew and grew better, so that decisions flowed not only more smoothly but ran Europe better. The acronyms and special jargon started to make sense, and were not there as a gratuitous obstacle to mark exclusivity –unless that rule apply to all specialist activity, including say engineering or medicine. But was necessary because of the fine honed and abstruse nature o fdecison-making.
And people said: who could say that Europe didn’t deliver: it broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulating technical innovation –legislation being the driver. Whereas nation states were caught up in their petty concerns, so that roads through border areas were of poor quality, the visionaries of DG transport funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network, the trans Europe express. It funded abridge between Sicily and the mainland, Sweden and Denmark. There were large sums of money to bring researchers and universities together so that there would be no Chinese walls, no duplication, The bane of a Europe of40 odd nation states with their narrow blinkers on. For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, cheap European flights, and no Spanish death duties as the most recalcitrant nationalists – the bloated, St Georges flag-draped ,mono lingual expaiateinthe southern Spain railing about ”Europe” were the biggest beneficiaries of reforms: better, fairer Spanish bureaucracy, free cross-border healthcare for ageing mother and cheap flights down to Malaga for the teenage grandchildren. .
When the people said ”What has Europe ever done for us”, the reply would be: “Watch the life of Brian”/
One of the pleasures of working in Brussels, in the European parliament, was watching the parade of nationalities: The name plates on the doors brought curiously to mind star trek in its heterogeneity: Vlasak and Lipietz, Jaatteemaki, Konya-Hanar: The European parliament was a demonstration of diversity, on show every night at nationality themed nightly receptions as the pop of champagne corks echoes around the parliament’s many lobbies, like gunfire on a night on the trenches many years ago. The idea it homogenising seemed ridiculous; for here the television set and the American TV series was surely the enemy.
I have friends of all nationalities, and the most difficult to make contact with –but ultimately the most rewarding, have been the French, because their perspectives are just so different, yet so compelling. Many times we discussed the British attitude to Europe, and they brought up the parallel of the national profession: the French, the fathers of Europe, are a nation of engineers. (Only the British tabloids and their benighted readers think they are a nation of cooks and lovers) The British are a nation of warriors and traders…or perhaps pirates. (often the same thing) . The French carefully design Europe like a grand projet, a TGV, an ariane espace or an Airbus 380 of political construction. The British just see gimlet eyed opportunities, and their pirate ships kept in port by the suffocating technocratic inevitability of it all. They approached the whole thing with a cynicism of experience rather than the analytical mind fired by idealism – the approach, as any scientist or engineer knows, leads to progress. My French friends note British euro-scepticism and ask: where is your space programme. And why trains crawl at snails pace once they reached the Kent side of the channel tunnel. The train metaphor is often used for European integration or more generally progress, and it is an apt one, for the French equate technology with politics. .
There have been times when I have hated the British, with their fat-rumped insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that they are right. Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, the smooth seminars that create a consensus, the different inputs from different institutions all leading inexorably to the right decision, I have come to see people –bureaucrats, individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends. Instead of a multilateral system based on different institutions, the council of ministers –national governments –reigns supreme, supported by acolytes in the national press. I have seen huge inefficiencies: the court of auditors failing to sign off the accounts for the14th year running, the voices from scientists at conferences who have told me that European science and technology spending – the biggest science budget in Europe, and its second largest item after agriculture –is all a waste of money, and they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole for all the conditions laid down by ignorant bureaucrats.
I have re-read my Hayek, about the dangers of centralisation and a command economy, and east Europeans like Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, are forever and rightly warning about the dangers of the EU turning into the EUSSR. We have been here before, they say. As the EU starts extending itz competences to culture and sports, Stalin’s chilling phrase about engineering the human soul comes to mind. Engineering might be a good thing; but social engineering ,if the 20th century is any guide, is not .And society is not a machine: it’s too complicated to try and make it one.
So my feelings about the EU are undergoing a change, and I am a lot less positive than before, and getting less do. The motto of the more intelligent Tory MEPs that ”We like Europe, but that the European Union” seems to ring ever more true.
But there are moments when I still think back to those early days five years ago: the snow is patterning your hair but it has melted as it touches the cobbles of the spire-infested grand place, giving a sheen in the gaslight. You have just emerged from a smoky estaminet with some gravelly words of Leonard Cohen ringing in your ears. Soon you will be hitting the pillows. And tomorrow you will goto the building with the gardens and the big atrium,, and along with the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together make the world a better place.