Lobbyists and Bureaucrats in Brussels

Capitalism�s Brokers

Sylvain Laurens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351972505
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With over 30,000 lobbyists in town, Brussels is often called the European capital of lobbying. Despite this, little is known on how this political system works in practice.

This book offers an unprecedented window into the everyday relationships between bureaucrats and interest representatives. Where the media only shows lobbyists as they meet MEPs and submit amendments, the book argues that the bulk of their work is done in close contact with EU bureaucrats – a form of 'quiet politics' developed by the business community, targeting officials with little public exposure. Based on official archives, the book first sets the historical picture for the emergence of a new layer of bureaucrats; fuelled by European and transatlantic capitalism, it altered the political façade of the business community to fulfil its need for legitimacy. Drawing from observations of internal meetings of the main lobbies operating in Brussels and interviews with lobbyists and Commission officials, the book then shows lobbyists at work.

This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of the European Union, interest groups, and more broadly to political science and sociology.

1 Entanglement

A new administration in search of economic interlocutors (1958–1980)

In looking at the EU’s history, this first chapter shows how much the rising influence of the European business associations owes to the way in which the new administration was structured and acquired authority. For the establishment of the Commission’s headquarters in Brussels marked the start of a process of bureaucratisation that, over time, encouraged the business world to organise in its turn, initially within the six founder countries and then in accordance with the enlargement process. One of the main levers in the development of business representation on a European scale is thus rather hard to describe, as it is intimately linked to the gradual establishment of an administration with supranational ambitions. This is a process of which the archives retain few traces.

The formation of a European civil service distinct from the national civil services was highly significant. It required a “process of demarcation from the countries of origin” and unleashed mechanisms by which officials appointed to the European civil service sought to legitimate their actions by extending its potential scope (Georgakakis and De Lassalle 2007: 40). In order to assert their role in relation to the national administrations, European officials gradually began to enlist representatives of business interests to help them meet their administrative requirements, such as collecting statistical data on industrial output, creating “European” nomenclatures and establishing indicators common to the market of the “Six”.

In accordance with the old adage that we hear “the tree falling but not the forest growing”, this process of establishment is often hidden by history books that reduce the construction of Europe to a saga of “founding fathers” and family rows (such as the “empty chair crisis” of 1965). Yet the business community played a key role in structuring the new administration and was often encouraged to do so by the Commission’s own officials. While some in the transatlantic business world had long supported the European project, many industrialists were losing interest and even opposed it for economic reasons, such as fear of opening up their national market to competition or a desire to maintain a special relationship with their home government. The Europeanisation of business representation at the Community level enabled officials of the European administration to generate sustained interest in what was happening in Brussels and to develop public policy that could be justified in the name of “European economic interests”. This undertaking required the organisation of sector-based, multinational business representation, which the Commission sought to bring to Brussels and indeed sometimes had to fund directly.

The primitive accumulation of bureaucratic capital

International, bi- and tri-national business associations had existed in some economic sectors long before 1957, and some coincided more or less with the perimeters of the six founder nations. But the 1960s saw the creation of “Eurogroups” that could represent business interests in a manner suited to the expectations of EEC institutions. This coincidence of business representation with the administration of the EEC was grounded in the commercial interests and positioning of a few captains of industry in Europe who, in the words of Jean Meynaud and Dusan Sidjanski (1967: 2) adjusted their strategies “to the level required by enlargement of the market” in order to deal with the potential “perimeter damage” arising out of the Treaty of Rome. Meynaud and Sidjanski also show that these adjustments were sometimes business-related (such as the creation of subsidiaries), but also sometimes included a more political dimension, involving the creation of new organisations. “The use of trade organisations as a means of access to the authorities” spread rapidly because it presented “specific advantages, notably that of giving a collective aspect to demands of an individual nature” (Meynaud and Sidjanski 1967: 147). It seems reasonable to suggest that this formula became dominant with particular ease because it also reflected the very precise administrative expectations of the Commission, which never remained neutral in this process. If, as suggested by Mazey and Richardson (1996: 422), “where associations of this type did not exist, the Commission helped to set them up and supported them”, this is undoubtedly because interest groups of this kind played a role in what we can call the primitive accumulation of bureaucratic capital within the new Commission. We shall focus on those administrative departments with the closest links to business in order to examine the detail of this process in the 1960s. These were the four directorate generals (DGs) specifically dealing with the economy (External Relations, Economic Affairs, Competition and Internal Market), plus the DG Agriculture, due to the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).¹

Figure 1.1 Internal structure of the European Commission (simplified).

The DG Internal Market and the need for business data in establishing nomenclatures

Where the DG Internal Market was concerned, relations with business representatives were forged in the early 1960s through working groups seeking to establish economic indicators as a prelude to setting up an internal market. The archives show how this was driven by a handful of EEC officials reaching out to commercial interest groups. The primary aim was to obtain statistical data that could be used to draft general directions for industrial policy. Among the internal documents we might for example consider a note written in 1961 by Jean Durieux, a Belgian civil servant who had just joined the Commission as head of the industry division (equivalent to what is now a “unit”).^2,3 He drafted a report for his superiors concerning working groups comprising officials from the DG Internal Market and the office of statistics and representatives of the business associations.⁴ The DG Internal Market sought to study each branch through contact with business representatives, in order to describe the state of the future “Common market”. The first report on these efforts, written in 1961, gives an idea of the Commission’s disappointed hopes. In relation to one member state after another, the official notes that initial contacts were “made with different professional bodies in order to improve the homogeneity of the basic documentation and to fill in gaps”. But he says that “despite the progress made, there is still a long way to go”, citing “qualitatively inadequate studies, unsatisfactory quantitative returns and the slow progress of the work”, notably due to the fact that officials were required to gather this information in addition to their usual tasks. The production of market studies encountered fundamental problems, notably “gaps in the statistics” and a lack of “harmonisation of nomenclatures”. But this overview is more than simply a list of the Commission’s weaknesses due to a lack of “experts in financial analysis, econometrics and industrial exchange tables”. Crucially it highlights the poor quality of the expertise produced by the business community and notably by the business associations.

The “economic expertise of group members differs widely” and “on average the methodology lacks rigour”. The author notes the existence of “national susceptibilities” and complains of “the relative aversion among some business associations and national administrations to providing or obtaining data that might fill fundamental gaps”. In this regard he can only advise his superiors “to proceed with caution in working with them”, but regards as the only solutions “to increase contacts with the business associations with the aim of improving the homogeneity of the available documentation and to fill in certain flagrant gaps”. To foster this close relationship, he proposes that the Commissioner “François-Xavier Ortoli and his collaborators” should make “presentations to the permanent representatives, UNICE, the European business associations and the heads of the national statistics offices”. He concludes by saying,

The terrain must be well prepared by an operation of mental conditioning seeking to demonstrate the usefulness for all of good studies in each sector and the constructive and cooperative spirit that drives the Commission in seeking to obtain a good tool for analysis and forecasting at industrial sector level.

UNICE: a basis for the construction of a European business community

As revealed by Jean Durieux’s note cited above, the officials of the new Commission began by seeking support from UNICE (the Union of Industrial and Employer Confederations). This confederation of national business associations was formed in 1952 within the framework of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Based in Paris with a branch in Luxembourg (where the ECSC headquarters were located), it provided an initial core of business representation “grouped as Six” (in the terminology of the day) to reflect the area covered by the treaty on trade in coal and steel, and thus also the Treaty of Rome (Morival 2015). Having left the ECSC for a post as economic affairs adviser at the Commission, Jean Degimbe (a Belgian civil servant, head of the ECSC President’s office and then adviser to the Commissioner for economic affairs⁵,⁶) describes the development of relations with UNICE in the context of the construction of the brand new Commission. He says that links persisted with UNICE from Luxembourg to Brussels, but the tone and nature of relations with the permanent business representatives changed:

At the ECSC, it was a tiny institution. … In Luxembourg, there were representatives from each industry. The French, whom I knew best, had their permanent representatives for iron and steel, with their own residence. We gave them a lot of information they could use – never anything secret of course. … At the ECSC it was in our interests to have support from the iron and steel industry. We were managing the market in coal and steel. The atmosphere was completely different. As for what influence they might have had on you, you know at the ECSC we ate a lot, we drank a lot, we were invited everywhere, we were used to all that. You should have seen the receptions held by some industrialists from the Ruhr. They were magnificent. … They had cellars full of wonderful Bordeaux. In the end none of that had much influence when we were looking at the dossiers. I remember we fought – and defeated – the rebuilding of the Krupp cartel. At the time we were invited everywhere. But that doesn’t influence someone who is doing his job honestly. But in Brussels, things are a bit different. It’s no longer about managing one specific market, it’s about managing several specific dossiers relating to different markets. So here I would make an important point. At the ECSC … the civil servants had formerly been civil servants for mining or iron and steel, so they really knew how the machine worked. In Brussels it’s not quite like that. I felt it when I first arrived. A lot of civil servants from the national administrations weren’t competent when it came to some of the subjects they had to deal with. So when a civil servant comes across a lobbyist who wants to help him get a dossier together, that’s not something to be ignored.⁷

Continuously funded by the European Commission, in the 1960s UNICE provided an important basis for the development of a Europeanised business discourse adjusted to the expectations of EEC officials. The work done by UNICE enabled officials to take on specialist dossiers with which they were not always very familiar.

Renamed BusinessEurope in 2007, this organisation still exists as a federation of national business associations (including MEDEF for France). It remains one of the main instruments of lobbying in Brussels, although it usually acts only in relation to directives affecting several economic sectors simultaneously.

“Mental conditioning” for cooperation with the Commission

Alongside the need for delicate diplomatic and political balancing, the establishment of the European Commission was also the start of an administrative history that encountered logistical problems of its own. How was an administrative structure seeking to bring about convergence between the economies of six countries to establish the equivalent of a national statistics office or reliable economic indicators? How could it impose this process on existing national administrations? These very concrete problems were addressed a long way from European summits at hierarchical levels seldom discussed in history books. One of the Commission’s own oral history programmes began to explore these administrative levels in the early years of the twenty-first century. Jean Durieux, interviewed in this context in 2004, gives the following description of his arrival at the Commission and his first contacts with the business community and national administrations:

What was the point of an Industry division in the early days of the European Economic Community? What would its job be? … We consulted the national administrations of the six member states. … And the answer was, “Don’t get involved in industrial policy, that’s the business of the member states.” That was the answer we got from all the governments. … Then we saw the industrialists. Their position was much more nuanced. They were starting to entertain the idea that industrial structures were not going to remain intact after the ordeal of market unification, the strengthening of competition and so on. And they didn’t rule out the idea that it might be in their interests to have a kind of fledgling industrial policy at the European level. … On one of my first jobs we conducted studies. … We gave those studies to the member states and we gave them to the industrialists. … We had more discussions with them on the basis of these studies and we identified a number of measures of concerted, coordinated industrial policy or properly European measures that could be taken, that the industrialists would regard with a favourable eye. Not much came of all that. … We discovered that many national materials were not based on the same definitions and weren’t comparable. There was an enormous job to be done. And we turned to the industrialists on several occasions to ask them to help us clarify the definitions so that we could make comparisons and see what was comparable and what wasn’t. … It’s a huge story of trial and error and successive approximations in those sectors.⁸

So, regarded as competition by the industry ministries of some member states and national offices of statistics, the DG Internal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 Entanglement: a new administration in search of economic interlocutors (1958–1980)
• 2 1970–2010: how Brussels became crucial to the private sector
• 3 Lobbying: harnessing bureaucratic resources as a weapon for business
• 4 Routine lobbying: the personal appropriation of administrative knowledge
• 5 Containing the political and depoliticisation: behind the closed doors of the administration
• 6 Serving the scientific standardisation of markets: the technical extension of commercial wars
• 7 Expertise in the service of business: lobbying and the European Chemicals Agency
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index