Coulisses de Bruxelles

Jean Quatremer's blog, Coulisses de Bruxelles is not award-winning for nothing. It's by far the highest-quality French-language EU blog that I am aware of, with insightful postings by the author and a lively, courteous, and serious debate by commentators.

M. Quatremer's recent postings have focused primarily on the new EU treaty and on the growing political and constitutional crisis in Belgium. Belgian politics is a something of a black art, and has the ability to flummox even veteran Brussels expats.

Quatermer's latest theory is that Belgium may be heading for dissolution because the Walloons and Flemings are incapable of agreeing the terms of a new coalition government. The king recently suspended negotiations for the many players to cool off and come back to the table after the Summer with a renewed commitment to power sharing. As I understand it, the key issue is how much de-centralising constitutional reform the Flemings can extract from the Walloons. Massively oversimplified, this is about the Flemish parties pushing for more independence within Belgium, at the inevitable economic expense of their poorer French-speaking countrymen.

Last year, a Belgian state-funded French-language television channel ran a spoof news item that pretended that Flanders had seceded. Quite apart from the political furore that followed, the episode was interesting because of the scenario chosen by the broadcasters - a vote by the Flemish parliament. What we are seeing today is quite a different scenario - the simple absence of a democratically mandated federal government. I have not got the faintest idea how this will all end; for all I know, it could end up strengthening the Belgian federal state. But at the moment it looks like Belgium is slowly but surely tearing itself apart.

French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgians have separate print and broadcast media that focus on regional and not national perspectives. They have separate political parties (the Walloon Christian Democrats are at odds with the winner of the elections, their sister party in Flanders, over constitutional reform). They have a high degree of legislative independence from each other, including on such policy areas as environment. Their education systems are different and separate - it is rare to find a native French-speaker teaching French in a Flemish school, or a native Dutch-speaker teaching Dutch in a Walloon school. And national politics have become a sort of zero-sum game between Walloons and Flemings over money - for every subsidy granted to one region, the other insists on a matching subsidy for itself.

What are the implications and lessons for the EU? Should we be concluding that dissolution à la Belge is inevitable without greater centralisation of power in Brussels? Or should we conclude, on the contrary, that the EU is the ideal home for smaller "national" communities that prefer broader associations than the ones that have bound them to non-nation-states such as the UK, Belgium, or Spain? I tend towards the latter view, but we have not yet seen the practical effects of the dissolution of an EU Member States. The closest we have come is the velvet divorce of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but this happened some years before EU membership.

How would such a split work? Would new accession treaties be required for both Wallonia and Flanders, or Scotland and a rump England-Wales-Northern Ireland, or Catalonia and the rest of Spain? Would new calculations have to be made for votes in the Council and European Parliament seats? New allocations of Structural and other funds? How would the timing work? Would new official languages result? Would there be legal challenges to any of this? Which courts would have jurisdiction?

I'm not sure whether this post is really a review of the Coulisses de Bruxelles, or perhaps more of a collection of random thoughts about Belgian politics. At any rate, if you read French and you want to read only a half-dozen EU blogs every week, Jean Quatremer's should be one of them. Merci, Jean!

Commissioner Wallström's Blog

Communications Commissioner Margot Wallström is one of 3 (or is it now 4?) European Commissioners who publish a blog. It's by far the best of these, with the most regular postings and the best opportunity to send in comments. In fact, it gets a lot of comments. Unfortunately, they are dominated by a coterie of less than 10 annoyingly regular posters, who probably put enough other people off with their bickering to make a big difference to the numbers.



The Commissioner publishes some interesting posts on important topics, but the debate on the comments pages seems to be fated to descend into sterile discussions on the legitimacy of the EU and these days, a peculiarly British discussion on the Constitutional/Reform Treaty. I'm all in favour of freedom of speech, but I think some clever moderation could allow commentators to post say, up to once a day, leaving the field free for people who would otherwise not care enough to read through the back-and-forth of the more "enthusiastic" readers.



A big issue with the blog also seems to be the fact that it is published primarily in English. This is a cause for concern from many non-English speakers, including a dedicated band of esperantists who translate all the Commissioner's words into Esperanto and a series of European languages. I have expressed some of my thoughts on language in another post, but there is more to be said here. I think that on balance, the Commissioner could publish a higher proportion of her posts in other EU languages, but the reality is that she is a Swede who is most comfortable with English when not speaking her native tongue. If the next Communications Commissioner is Austrian, I would expect a good number of posts to be in German.



The Commissioner's most recent post attempts to bring up the subject of climate change (before being drowned out in a cacophony of "the EU is inherently evil" - "no it isn't, it's the best thing ever" comments). She tries to make a link between this Summer's extreme weather in Europe and Asia and man-made climate change. Now, between you and me, I think there may well be a link. But I think it is scientifically impossible to ascribe individual events like this to the man-made climate change phenomenon. At any rate, the scientific consensus that the trend exists is the most overwhelming there has been on any environmental issue I have ever heard of.



Which makes climate change, with its cross-border weather angle, the perfect candidate for EU-level action from the Commission's point of view. After all, here's an issue that resonates with the public in all of Europe. Following the embarrassing false start of the Kyoto targets that we aren't going to meet despite self-righteously criticising the Americans for non-participation, there seems to be a genuine desire for fresh and radical ideas in the Berlaymont. The challenge will be for the Commission to push an ambitious environmental, carbon-emission-cutting agenda without badly alienating industry. A particularly interesting challenge, given that this is the most pro-business Commission ever. The current debate on the proposals for very strict car emissions will create a hugely important precedent. Watch this space.

A good blog, Commissioner. With a few tweaks, it could be great.

Certain Ideas of Europe

The Economist is one of those publications that people either love or hate; very few who have read it are indifferent. I feel somewhat lonely as a regular reader who enjoys it but well understands the irritation and frustration of others with it.

It does at least have the virtue of providing a great deal of informed analysis on a great may issues. And its coverage of EU business, although it suffers from being too high-level and afraid to get down in the weeds, is very solid.

For those who like to look at EU affairs through the Good/Bad prism, who see any debate about the EU as being necessarily about praising it to the heavens or calling for its demise, the Economist is of little comfort. It takes a fairly middle-of-the-road stance, endorsing the idea of the EU but being critical of its workings. The Economist's excellent blog, Certain Ideas of Europe, is a good example.

I always dread the prospect of entering into a debate on the Constitutional Treaty, or the Reform Treaty, depending on the name you prefer, because it is so painfully sensitive that use of terminology has to be very precise to avoid accusations of favouring one side or the other. What the Economist does do skilfully is to expose some of the less "serious" criticisms of the Reform Treaty in one of its recent postings. I think the publication might have taken a more critical look at the treaty. But I also think that "unserious" journalism like that of British EU-sceptic Christopher Booker does nothing to aid his cause, since it is easily dismissed as ill-informed, misleading, or inaccurate.

A Quiet Revolution

Back to one of my favourite topics: the Services Directive. This isn't an excuse for me to publish that picture of the Polish plumber again, although I suppose I might secretly be hoping that readers think he's me...!

No, I really want to share my views and hopefully stimulate some discussion on the effects of the Directive. My line of argument is essentially that the Directive's main benefits will come in areas completely unrelated to the subjects of heated political debate. I remember distinctly the times when PES (Socialist) and EPP-ED (Christian Democratic) groups stopped talking to each other in the European Parliament's internal market committee. I remember the tortuous negotiations that addressed the precise wording of the Country of Origin Principle (now renamed the Freedom to Provide Services Principle). I remember the painfully detailed discussions on precisely what administrative requirements for establishment of new businesses should be banned or reviewed or allowed. I remember the farcical horse-trading that went on over the scope: health services, public services, education, gambling, temporary work...in or out?

There was also a surreal moment when I saw a news item on Belgian television about the anti-Services Directive demonstrations in Brussels organised by the trades union movement. The journalist interviewed a Polish union member holding a placard written in French, who said that he was against the Directive because he, as a Polish worker, wanted to be able to work in Germany for German wages and not Polish wages. It was surreal because he clearly had been bussed to Brussels on the basis of a plain lie about the contents of the Commission proposal - the proposal specifically said that workers posted in other Member States would work under local labour conditions, specifically including wages. He was actually fighting against the cause he claimed to be fighting for. But the irony didn't stop there. It was of course even more surreal because it was widely believed (and in fact explicitly claimed by the trades unions movement) that Polish workers overwhelmingly wanted to come to the West to work for lower wages than locals.

Joking apart, it was a significant moment in my life, when my view of politics changed abruptly, and I saw much more clearly than ever before how cynical people could be when seeking to achieve a political goal. hroughout he debate on the Services Directive, it mattered little to the unions or their opponents what logic they used, as long as they could make a big media impact. It was media coverage the politicians were counting on to win their battles on the Services Directive, and not the strength or consistency of their arguments.

All this is really to set the scene for my main point. Which is that while these battles were being fought, the parts of the Directive that I think will have the biggest long-term impact on the single market were being quietly nodded through. I suspect this was partly because the articles concerned were quite boring and therefore less likely to make good press. I am, of course, referring to the articles on administrative simplification and administrative co-operation.

The Directive's high profile provisions on freedom of establishment, freedom to provide services, and the restrictions on administrative requirements, were essentially re-statements by the Commission of its interpretation of the Treaty and ECJ case law. None of this, despite the claims of the more passionate advocates and opponents of the proposal, was really innovative. It was simply an attempt by the Commission to force the pace of opening of the internal market for services by directly attacking common practices by protectionist Member State administrations through legislation. Had these proposals not been made, the ECJ and the Commission would have done the job eventually through case law and infringement proceedings.

The parts of the proposal that were new and innovative were those that addressed the most fundamental workings of national administrations. These will entail nothing short of a revolution in the way public administrations work in the EU. The Directive contains no less than 13 articles (well over a third of the content of the Directive) that touch on the way national administrations must change to serve the market and the citizen. I won't bore readers with a detailed list, so here are some headlines:

• simplification of procedures;
• points of single contact for businesses;
• rights to information for economic actors;
• procedures by electronic means;
• detailed obligations on mutual assistance for Member State administrations;
• rules on which Member State is responsible for supervision of various aspects of cross-border service provision;
• alert mechanisms when fraud is suspected.

The Commission is given some pretty impressive powers to harmonise implementation through comitology, particularly as regards the IT systems that will have to be set up to make all this work. The whole philosophy that drives these provisions is one that will strike those of you who are familiar with European public administrations as quite alien. National administrations will be obliged by the Directive to modernise and become more efficient, and to communicate systematically with counterparts in other Member States. The primary driver of all of this is the idea that the administration should facilitate, rather than control, economic activity. That philosophy is going to be a shock to most of the national administrations I have come across. Expect strikes and demonstrations as the Commission and Member States push modernisation through. ..