Refugees and asylum seekers were one thing, illegal migrants another. But the conditions of the time fostered confusion, so that the two easily became conflated, in certain political movements, and by the popular press. Nations’ rights to defend themselves against crime or drugs, recognized in Article 36 of the Rome Treaty, had been reaffirmed in the Single European Act. But the Schengen Agreement, made between France, West Germany and the three Benelux states in 1985, prefigured a Europe of open borders, where the southern and eastern members – Greece, Italy and Spain – would stand in effect as frontier guarantors for the rest against most sources of illegal immigration.
The political IGC therefore had to encompass a vast area, with no clear long-term aims, where member states argued not only over the practicalities of ID cards, data protection, and the so-called ‘right of hot pursuit’, but their likely impact on national public opinions. This was especially so in Britain and France, but became more so in parts of Germany and Spain; Italy felt the force of it once refugees began to pour in from Yugoslavia and Albania. Even among the Schengen countries, discords developed, for example over Dutch permissive policies on soft drugs, which French interior ministers referred to in outspokenly critical terms. Sentiments which had rarely been voiced in public now became commonplace, throwing doubt on the competence of other member states to keep out, variously, Moroccans and Algerians, Albanians, Yugoslavs or Somalis, and economic refugees from behind the fallen Iron Curtain.
Three main influences shaped this IGC: the efforts of the Parliament (by far the weakest); the Commission’s attempts to set the agenda, which dated back to 1986, if not 1985; and the aims and ambitions of member states. The well-attested tendency for EC states to grow more to resemble each other might have led the Maastricht negotiators to expect the same sort of consensus levels that had been obtained in 1985. Earlier frictions between Commission, Council and Parliament had indeed lessened during the late 1980s. But north-south differentiation seemed to have increased, as Spain’s successfully aggressive tone during the bargaining indicated, and the distinction between countries with sound fiscal regimes and others who were lax demonstrated. The ancient gulf between Britain and the majority, with all its philosophical undertones, remained, albeit softened by Major’s ‘Britain at the heart of Europe’ pretensions. Even subsidiarity, which for most states already meant devolution not to national but to regional capitals or even municipalities, meant something different to British Conservatives – though not to many Scots and Welsh.
How divergent the larger member states’ aims were can be gauged from the table of their desiderata compiled by the Economist in December.33 But whereas smaller and Mediterranean states had more cause than they had had over the Single European Act to defend particular national interests, the activities of Germany, France and Britain were complicated by their adjustments to changing perceptions of the outside world.
As in the past, the German government supported a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) having, at that stage, no conceivable alternative. French foreign minister Dumas and his German colleague Genscher explained in their October 1990 proposals for a CFSP that they were prepared to include majority voting in the Council. In December 1990, they widened their approach to include a common European defence, building on what had been done in Western European Union (WEU) since 1984. The German-French paper of February 1991 spelled out the WEU’s function as a bridge between the European Union and NATO. For both Bonn and London it was also important to guarantee that any European defence pillar in the framework of the WEU would not undermine NATO. However, the Germans had the additional aim of tempting France back into full membership of NATO.
Conduct of this part of the negotiations, though in the hands of foreign ministers at their monthly meetings, and deputies or permanent representatives on more frequent special occasions, reverted in the last six weeks to heads of government level. In Paris, it was the responsibility of Dumas and Guigou, but never far from Mitterrand himself: in Bonn, rather less harmoniously, it lay between Kohl and Genscher.
For the French government, it was vital to reinforce the EC in French colours rather than allow the Dutch Presidency, aided by Belgium and Italy, to make EC transactions more accountable to the Parliament and more detrimental to national sovereignty. The French were playing for very high stakes: not only for EMU but for a French rather than a NATO-based version of CFSP – at variance, for example, with what the Netherlands required. If defence were also to be included, an alternative had to be found to the organic image of a tree from whose trunk all the branches would spring.
One of the French negotiators, Pierre de Boissieu, brought forward the idea of a temple, whose pediment would rest on three distinct pillars: EMU (which mattered above all other elements to France), foreign policy, and home and justice or Interior Ministry matters. This had the inestimable advantage that neither of the latter need add to Commission competences – negotiations between governments would suffice. Even so, it would need advance concertation with Germany if a move in foreign and defence policy apparently so at variance with France’s twenty-five year stance were to be accepted by French public opinion.
Germany’s representatives regarded strengthening Community institutions and a stronger position for the European Parliament as so important that they were prepared to link them to their consent to economic and monetary union. They were also well aware that EMU was subject to growing criticism inside Germany, and that public support for bringing new fields into the Treaties, such as asylum policy for refugees, combating terrorism and international crime, derived from Länder administrations, not Bonn. Länder governments, of course, sought a significantly stronger role for themselves, and the principle of subsidiarity. Remembering how their views had been ignored when the Single European Act was ratified five years earlier, and relying in part on the example of what Belgium’s ethnic regions had already achieved in the EU context, these sought confidently to replicate in the Community the division of powers between ‘Bund’ and ‘Land’ in the federal system itself.
Less obviously, fear motivated German leaders that if the new treaties were not signed quickly, conditions in the mid–1990s would deteriorate and encourage the rise of instability, fierce nationalism, and ethnic discord in central and eastern Europe. To avoid that, and the repercussions on those of German origin living in the former Soviet Union (and therefore entitled to citizenship of the reunited Germany), Kohl would be prepared to make substantial concessions.
It was not however clear that the British would even sign. One vital preliminary had been the ousting of Margaret Thatcher, for, in spite of an initially obdurate stance, John Major and Douglas Hurd skilfully let it be seen in private among the foreign ministers that they were not opposed à l’outrance to political union, but rather that they were men of goodwill as well as firm principles, shackled by the Thatcherite faction in their Conservative party. Such hints were reinforced at the personal level by links with the CDU between Chris Patten and Volker Rühe34 and informally by Whitehall officials. By November, confronted with preparations by the other eleven governments for an ‘opt-in’ strategy on EMU, British ministers allowed it to be thought that they were prepared for concessions so long as they were permitted to opt out when stage three finally arrived. There was also some common ground with Germany, given British resistance to the Delors II budget package and demands for greater parliamentary audit over spending, as well as for the ECJ actually to be able to fine member states who ignored single market judgments.
In the end, Major was able to extract large, even remarkable concessions, partly because he was not Margaret Thatcher but more because it suited the other large state governments – principally Germany’s – to make deals which safeguarded essential interests before too much time elapsed. But this was done at what seemed a high price to the southern states then facing up not only to completing the single market but to the Community’s next extension in favour of EFTA countries which were already completing their political and economic reorientation.35 Brokerage between governments conscious of the need to safeguard their national