Transcription of the interview with Étienne Davignon (Brussels, 11 December 2007 and 14 January 2008)

Caption: Transcription of the interview with Étienne Davignon, Head of Cabinet of Belgian Foreign Ministers Paul-Henri Spaak from 1964 to 1966 and Pierre Harmel from 1966 to 1969, Director-General for Policy in the Belgian Foreign Ministry from 1969 to 1976, author of a report on the problems of political unification (the Davignon Report) in 1970, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Energy Agency from 1974 to 1977, Member of the Commission of the European Communities with special responsibility for the Internal Market and Industrial Affairs, the Customs Union, the Information Market and Innovation, Energy, the Euratom Supply Agency and International Nuclear Relations from 1977 to 1981, and Vice-President of the Commission of the European Communities with special responsibility for Industrial Affairs, Energy, the Euratom Supply Agency, Research and Science and the Joint Research Centre from 1981 to 1985, carried out by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE) on 11 December 2007 and 14 January 2008 in the studios of the Council of the European Union in Brussels. The interview was conducted by Étienne Deschamps, a Researcher at the CVCE, and particularly focuses on the following subjects: the empty chair crisis, Paul-Henri Spaak’s European commitment, the question of British accession to the European Communities and the ‘Harmel Report’, the Hague Summit in 1969, Pierre Werner and the Werner Report, the ‘Davignon Report’, the European Communities and the 1973 oil crisis, the ‘Davignon Plan’, the establishment of an industrial policy at Community level and Davignon’s work at the Commission of the European Communities. Source: Interview d'Étienne Davignon / ÉTIENNE DAVIGNON, Étienne Deschamps.- Bruxelles: CVCE [Prod.], 11.12.2007-14.01.2008. CVCE, Sanem. - VIDEO (02:42:59, Couleur, Son original). Copyright: Transcription CVCE.EU by UNI.LU All rights of reproduction, of public communication, of adaptation, of distribution or of dissemination via Internet, internal network or any other means are strictly reserved in all countries. Consult the legal notice and the terms and conditions of use regarding this site. URL: http://www.cvce.eu/obj/transcription_of_the_interview_with_etienne_davignon_bru ssels_11_december_2007_and_14_january_2008-en-49af1f33-d219-4c3f-9422- 72bebdcd8524.html Last updated: 04/07/2016

1/31 Transcription of the interview with Étienne Davignon (Brussels, 11 December 2007 and 14 January 2008)

Contents 1. The empty chair crisis...... 1 2. Paul-Henri Spaak’s European commitment...... 9 3. The question of British accession to the European Communities and the ‘Harmel Report’...... 10 4. The Hague Summit in 1969...... 13 5. The ‘Davignon Report’...... 15 6. The European Communities and the 1973 oil crisis...... 19 7. The ‘Davignon Plan’...... 22 8. The establishment of an industrial policy at Community level...... 24 9. His work at the Commission of the European Communities...... 26

1. The empty chair crisis

[Étienne Deschamps] Mr Davignon, I am extremely grateful to you for having agreed to give us a little of your time today, here in Brussels, for us to talk about some aspects of your career as a diplomat and a European figure. If you don’t mind, I suggest that we go straight to the heart of the matter, with a look at the familiar topic of the ‘empty chair crisis’ of 1965–66. You played a prominent part in it yourself, and I would be glad if you would tell us what you remember, not just about the crisis, but also about the personal part Spaak, as Belgian Foreign Minister, was able to play in finding a way out of it, of resolving the crisis.

[Étienne Davignon] Well, we have to remember how the crisis originated, because unless we do that it is very hard to understand the procedures that had to be followed to get out of it. So, we were at a time when we were just about to move into applying the treaty in its final form. We were still in stage one of the treaty, and the treaty stipulated that there was a balance between the common market — in other words the part relating, let us say, to industry and freedom of movement — and a common policy, the policy on agriculture. So the Council had to decide on the agricultural policy and its financial implications. The President of the Commission, Mr Hallstein, thought it was a good time for a political revival, in other words for adding to the Treaty of Rome the things it hadn’t been possible to do at the outset: giving Parliament greater powers, more voting and so on, and he drafted a Commission memorandum which, in a sense, exploited the need to devise an agricultural policy as a way of getting, in return for the agricultural policy, more all-round progress on European integration.

[Étienne Deschamps] Because Hallstein was a federalist by inclination?

[Étienne Davignon] He was completely federalist — in fact everyone was a federalist, apart from the French. So, there was a general tendency for him to think it was a tool he could use and he put his plan before the European Parliament before submitting it to the Member States. There he ran into his first hitch because what the Commission was supposed to do, at the time — and you must always look at things from the point of view of what was necessary at the time — was address itself first of all to the Council, to the Member States, and Parliament didn’t play the part it plays now. So that was the first setback. The French said no to Hallstein’s memorandum, but of course the discussions about finalising the agricultural policy, the financial regulation, went on and there was a series of Council

2/31 meetings, then a Council, the last one, which was fairly dramatic and where no agreement was reached. But there it was, the Council of Ministers, no less, couldn’t agree on the agricultural policy. So you must never forget that at the outset, when the French said that the obligations laid down by the treaty were not being honoured, they were right. And a lot of work was put into finding an agreement, but no agreement was reached on the substance. How far was it affected by the fact that there was nothing on offer in return, politically speaking? That’s very difficult to assess. The net result was that that they didn’t come to any agreement. So, the dispute started with a failure to honour a collective obligation and with the new factor of the Hallstein memorandum. And at this point General de Gaulle decided that, if that was how things were, he wouldn’t attend Council meetings any more. That raised three issues. The first one was: Could we take the view that a five-member Council could take decisions, in some way? Would decisions have to be taken by all six members or, if five of them decided and another one didn’t because it was not there, would that be legally valid or not? The treaty had obviously not made any provision for this eventuality, because the treaty had not even made provision for the possibility of leaving the European Community.

That was the first question. The second issue was: There was a default from the commitments everyone had given, as the common market had not been supplemented by the agricultural aspect, or the financial aspect which was to pay for the agricultural policy. And thirdly: How were we to get out of it, given the first two points I have mentioned? Well, to begin with there was a period when Hallstein and a number of countries were saying: ‘Right, well, if France isn’t there, that’s its problem, not ours.’ You should know, of course, that France was still attending the permanent representatives’ meeting; not the ambassador — we were a bit into the traditional diplomatic practice of recalling an ambassador, but it didn’t make much difference recalling an ambassador if you had a representative at the permanent representatives’ table. But it does show that de Gaulle was, after all, still stuck in the traditional bilateral way of seeing things and hadn’t yet grasped the special nature of multilateral politics. And there was a preliminary discussion in the Council, without the French, where Hallstein said he hoped we would take a decision on the arrangements for oranges. There was quite a fierce set- to between Spaak and Hallstein, with Spaak saying: ‘We can’t regard the Council as being properly constituted, we can discuss matters but we can’t take the view that unanimity is automatically required, because there could be a unanimous vote by one person.’ So there was quite a lively set-to, and the first issue was left unresolved. On the second issue: What would become of the Hallstein memorandum? That’s what it actually came down to, the writing was on the wall, because once it became clear that the French wouldn’t want it, it would not be possible to get it approved, because that would require a unanimous vote, as it was something more than what we already had, so that’s clearly where we were; could we use Article 237 or not, the one which lays down that additions can be made to the treaty by unanimous vote. Fairly quickly, then, just before the summer, we got round to asking ourselves what we would do. And of course the question of what we should do was a simple one. How were we to get the French back to the table, since the situation we were in was clearly an intolerable one. You couldn’t say we were acting as caretakers — you must also remember what stage we were at, by which I mean that there was still a huge number of decisions to be taken, of applications to be decided on to get the system to work, as we had no precedent to go on.

[Étienne Deschamps] When you say decide, or at any rate try to decide, on what follow-up action to take, are you talking about the Five or the Five plus the Commission?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, we were fairly soon in a situation where tension with the Commission was at quite a high level, because the Commission also meant Hallstein’s temperament. He said: ‘I made a proposal, I want it discussed, we can’t just shelve it,’ whereas the others, and we could perfectly well carry on setting up the architecture specified in the treaty, because you must remember that the treaty was actually in two parts. There was a first part which was actually, in a way, a governmental declaration laying down what needed to be done by a certain deadline, and then there were the general

3/31 provisions. So the management of the transitional period was by an action programme. This action programme, over and above actually approving a common agricultural policy, involved a whole series of regulations and applications we had committed ourselves to setting up, and at first sight there wasn’t necessarily any dispute over these, though there was a need to take legal texts which the Member States had to adopt. So there was a difference of approach with the Commission there and, necessarily, as to the way of bringing the French back, the Commission’s view was: ‘Well, the French are wrong, so they just need to come back,’ and the others felt that the French were wrong but that that wasn’t enough to get them to come back. So what were we to do? That was when the deputy French permanent representative, Mr Ulrich, came to see me and said: ‘Personally I think we need to find an answer to the question and personally I think that Spaak, given the position he holds, his temperament and so on, could usefully help us.’ As regards the adverb ‘personally’, of course, I didn’t believe it for a moment, and neither did he, but it was a way of saying that it wasn’t an appeal but that, if anything were to happen, it would be well received.

[Étienne Deschamps] Did you know Maurice Ulrich personally at that time?

[Étienne Davignon] Yes, I knew him very well, because we used to go the Council; roughly speaking, he must have been a few years older than I was, and he was a very nice man, so we …

[Étienne Deschamps] … trusted each other?

[Étienne Davignon] … we got on well. And I think that’s why he came to see me and thought that I wouldn’t betray his confidence if I said to him that … Well, I said that I would of course report it to Spaak, and Spaak thought we needed to act, it was the kind of man he was, but we had to act cautiously. So he took the initiative of convening — well, I say convening — of suggesting a meeting of the Five, and you have to remember that someone needed to take the initiative, because the President of the Council was the President of the Council of Six, not necessarily of Five. So he called the meeting, or at any rate we agreed to have a meeting of the Five, it was held at Val Duchesse, which was symbolically fully in keeping with the practice for European business, and Spaak proposed that we try to get the French to come back, on the understanding that the bottom line for the Five was that we would reject any changes to the treaty. The fact is that the way the French had reacted was a sign that they didn’t think the treaty, as it stood, was likely to serve their interests as regards majority voting, unanimous voting and so on. So the Five agreed that our line would be ‘Yes, we must set about finding how to get the French to come back’, and our common position was no changes to the treaty! And we asked the people working with us to draw up a text, which I did with the permanent representative of Italy, since the Italians were to hold the next presidency, or already held the presidency, I can’t remember — no, I think they had the presidency, because they were due to take the second half of that year — and with Mr Venturini, the permanent representative, I drew up the official text signed by the Five which said: ‘Yes, but there can be no question of amending the treaty.’ And I think it’s interesting to realise that we thought it was worth making that position official. We could simply have said that we’d reached an agreement. But no, we felt it was important to make it official, both as a way of guaranteeing there would be a uniform approach and also because, clearly, these were not the kinds of things which could be kept secret from interested partners.

[Étienne Deschamps] Yes, because politics wasn’t just about making this decision and this document among the five of you official, it was also a matter of automatically notifying France, officially, through diplomatic channels, or you could decide that France would be sure to get wind of it but not officially transmit the document to them.

4/31 [Étienne Davignon] No, we were going to have to tell the French that the way to find a solution was through the existing treaties.

[Étienne Deschamps] And they knew that the Five had concluded a pact between them which was, quote, a closed agreement.

[Étienne Davignon] That’s right. And, what’s more, they either knew about it or they didn’t, but the main thing was to say: ‘We can look at a lot of things, but there’s a line that we mustn’t cross.’ We put out some feelers and it was then decided that the conditions were present for calling a meeting of the Six. So at that point we moved into a situation where we also had to decide who the spokesman would be. Logically, the spokesman had to be the country holding the presidency, in other words Italy, but who in Italy? Mr Fanfani was the Foreign Minister, but there was some concern at Mr Fanfani’s tendency to improvise, and he wasn’t especially knowledgeable about European Community affairs; you must always remember that we were young, so he wasn’t up on the detail of technical questions, and as luck would have it Mr Fanfani was appointed President of the UN General Assembly, broke his femur skidding on the ice in New York and wasn’t available. So we had to persuade him, which the others were pleased about, to delegate the job to Mr Colombo, and it was a rather delicate matter but we got there in the end. Because there was not much love lost between Mr Fanfani and Mr Colombo, as they were both leaders of groups in the Christian Democrat Party, so they were also competing to be the first to hold the post of Prime Minister and so on. Right. Mr Colombo actually became Prime Minister later in his career. Anyway, it was Mr Colombo, and Mr Colombo then took soundings to see if it was worth holding a conference, knowing that it was very difficult to organise a conference of this kind, as you couldn’t prepare for it through the usual multilateral diplomatic channels, since the nub of the subject was entirely political. You should know, although I won’t dwell on the question, as it’s a secondary one, that there was a whole round of arguments about the way credentials were received — but it’s of no historical interest. So we looked at these technical questions and an issue came up, which was that France didn’t want the Commission to be at the table. And on our side we were split on the subject; I don’t mean there was a split among the Five, but we were divided as regards the nub of the matter.

When we said that we didn’t want to amend the treaty, which was a fundamental question, we didn’t want to tackle questions outside the legal framework either, so the issue was to work out how we could get back to working as usual, and not at that stage how we could settle the questions which had led to our earlier differences. What we were talking about was technical, regulatory matters, not the major, political debate. And at that point the French didn’t want the Commission there. We didn’t want to see the authority of the Commission shrinking, and that is why we didn’t want any changes to the treaty, but we were in two minds about whether the Commission being there was a help or a hindrance. Weren’t we ourselves making it into a different kind of meeting? So there we were, between the devil and the deep blue sea. If the Commission wasn’t there, that was not good, and if the Commission was there, that wasn’t good either, even from the point of view of our own position.

So we looked in the Treaty and found that the Member States could hold a governmental conference without the Commission, as indeed happened when they used to appoint the Commission under the old procedures. So we invoked that clause, and obviously the Commission wasn’t happy, which is perfectly reasonable and understandable, and a point was added to show that the normal procedure wasn’t being followed, which is why it was decided to hold the meeting in Luxembourg, not in Brussels. We weren’t holding meetings in Luxembourg at that time. We didn’t start meeting in Luxembourg for the European Community until after the executives were merged; there were Euratom and ECSC meetings in Luxembourg, but not on things which came under the Treaty of Rome, and here we were under the Treaty of Rome. So we tried to put out a series of signs to

5/31 discourage the idea that this was a precedent, which would worry us, for the Council being able to meet without the Commission, and we took precautions designed to play down the drawbacks of meeting without the Commission. There was actually an advantage in a meeting being held without the Commission, because it meant that, for obvious reasons, the agricultural and financial business couldn’t be discussed in depth. So in the end we agreed on that and we met, and the first meeting was in Luxembourg, in Luxembourg Town Hall, as there weren’t the infrastructures that there are now. I can still remember it; you know the Town Hall in Luxembourg, you go up steps, if I remember rightly, there are lions somewhere or other …

[Étienne Deschamps] On either side of the door, that’s right.

[Étienne Davignon] So we met in a very select configuration for that first meeting in Luxembourg, so as — and everyone knew that there would be no agreement — to clear the ground.

[Étienne Deschamps] And it was Pierre Werner in the chair.

[Étienne Davignon] At that time, of course, it was Pierre Werner in the chair. So all the signs that no precedent was being set were in place, and we met to look things over, we saw fairly soon that on procedural and symbolic questions there wasn’t going to be any big deal, we would just go back over the operating features that there already were, but that would be a way for everyone to save face, though there would still be deadlock on the basic issue. And the basic issue was setting limits to unanimous voting, which is what the French wanted, and we began thinking: ‘What is a vital interest and what isn’t a vital interest?’ And obviously we didn’t come to any agreement at the first meeting, and the diplomatic exchanges which went on afterwards showed that it was impossible to decide what was a vital interest with parameters clear enough to ensure that in the final analysis it wasn’t the state which would be judge and jury in the case, saying: ‘I decide it’s in my vital interest, so it is my vital interest and we’re voting unanimously.’ To exclude cases of that kind. They could be tabled, but by definition they couldn’t be gone into in detail or defined. We searched but we couldn’t find any, especially since the system, that is to say the obligation on the Commission not to entertain or take account of any consideration except the European interest, meant that the European interest could not involve fundamentally damaging one of the Member States. There was a contradiction between the assignment on the one hand — recognising that it wouldn’t be carried out properly — and cases which might arise. So we didn’t find any. But we said we’d go on trying. And we decided to hold a second meeting, again in Luxembourg and on the same terms, a very select delegation, and we started again in Luxembourg, although preparatory work had shown that, in the preparatory work at any rate, a compromise on agricultural policy had more or less been sketched out, because working in parallel, of course, they were permanent representatives, doing business as usual, as you’d expect, preparing for the Council meeting with the Commission, and there was no doubt any more that what still had to be worked out could be worked out. So that was it, but it made for a different atmosphere. Let’s go back to the starting point. ‘Where did we let the French down?’ We let the French down on that point, since we’d failed to reach agreement, because the French weren’t prepared to go over to the opposing position adopted by the others, but the net result was that we didn’t do what we should have done. It did lighten the mood, even so, in the sense that that was mainly what had set the crisis off, because the only reason that the political issue accentuated the crisis was because we made a link between the two. You only got what you deserved, if you did something extra which you’d never undertaken to do.

[Étienne Deschamps] You were talking about the atmosphere. What was the atmosphere as these discussions went ahead, with France, meaning Maurice Couve de Murville, there? How did things go? Was it tense, calm, friendly, defensive, one group against another?

6/31 [Étienne Davignon] No, it was, I’d like to say friendly but it wasn’t, because Couve de Murville wasn’t a warm kind of personality, he was an austere man, not unlikeable but austere, so the atmosphere wasn’t a laugh a minute. It was tense because it was a crisis about the European Community’s ability do to what it wanted, and everyone there had been involved in creating it and working in it — so it was their creation. Werner was close to Bech. Spaak was there, Colombo was close to Gasperi, the Germans, Hallstein wasn’t so far off, I mean Adenauer wasn’t so far off, Luns was there, so it was all very emotional in terms of that overwhelming ambition people had to set up a united Europe. But it was calm in the sense that we weren’t throwing inkwells at each other, but we were going round and round in circles and not finding ways out. So, funnily enough, during the meeting, at a particular moment, Schroeder and Luns, one after the other, theoretically the biggest hard-liners, that is, as Spaak was, quote, a ‘facilitator’, with the Luxembourgers in the chair too and the Italians too, so we had, to use the cliché, three doves and two hawks. And during the meeting the two hawks made proposals which actually interpreted the treaty in a way which was on the verge of being an amendment to the treaty. And I didn’t think that could be a way of getting agreement at all, but Couve didn’t say that it was all right by him, which was also a factor, I can’t explain it, a factor …

[Étienne Deschamps] So how much of a margin for manoeuvre do you think Couve had in all these negotiations as regards the Élysée, as regards de Gaulle?

[Étienne Davignon] I think he had a pretty reasonable margin for manoeuvre, I mean he knew he was not going to get an amendment to the treaty. And he knew that he was one of the people who persuaded General de Gaulle that, all in all, it was better to have a policy, the agricultural policy, than not to have it. So, in a way, Hallstein’s argument that ‘The French want the common agricultural policy’ was correct. The mistake he made was to look at the type of compensation from a political angle, which was something General de Gaulle would never have agreed to anyway, as we well knew. So we got there, and at that point Spaak said to me: ‘We’re not going to get an agreement, but is the fact that we don’t agree a good enough reason for not carrying on with the normal business of the treaty? Go and talk to the French and see if they could live with something on those lines.’ So I went to the French to see if they could live with … and, although I don’t know it for a fact, I think they were thinking along the same lines. So one sitting after another was suspended, we put texts together, we drew up texts and then my French colleague said to me: ‘Now we need to make the proposal.’ As a matter of interest, that coincided with the time when Mr Wormser, who was the head of the directorate at the Quai d’Orsay responsible for European affairs, wasn’t in session. Was it a coincidence or not, I don’t know, but it is worth mentioning after all. Spaak put the idea to him, said that if people liked the idea he was even prepared, if he was given enough time, to suggest working up a text he had with him, and Couve said: ‘Well, that could be a way forward.’ There were sighs of relief all round, and so they wrote what was to become the Luxembourg Compromise, which everybody cites without ever having read the text, and the text is extremely clear. The text says: the aim is to get consensus. That is the aim, it doesn’t go against the treaty. The best thing to aim for was that everybody should be in favour, on the basis of a proposal from the Commission to carry the project forward. So, nothing new there so far as the philosophy of the Six was concerned, so no need to transpose the philosophy of the Six to a context which would fit 27. Was there a way of getting consensus among the Six where the number of interests in play and the number of subjects covered wouldn’t rule it out at all? It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that anyone could take us hostage. You need to remember that. Two: It says that if we couldn’t reach a consensus, we should have another meeting to secure it. So we were really following the procedure. So if we noted that we couldn’t bring it off, well, we wouldn’t vote straight away. Actually we never voted. Why did we never vote? Because we couldn’t vote. We weren’t at the final stage, so we didn’t vote because the treaty didn’t authorise majority decisions. So we noted that there was a difference of opinion, but before voting we had another try. And then paragraph 3, which is the only one anyone can remember, says: ‘And if this cannot be achieved, five delegations consider that the treaty applies and one delegation considers that there need to be further negotiations until

7/31 agreement is reached, since its — not otherwise identified — national interests are at stake.’ So we agreed on that. Two points: The first was that no one believed the subject would ever come up. We didn’t think we would come across any cases. Well, we might come across one, but the risk of there being any difference of opinion was very small.

[Étienne Deschamps] Very slight. It was more a textbook exercise than anything else.

[Étienne Davignon] And that that was the view of the French delegation. It was one thing that it was our view, we had a theory … But there it was. I went and talked to Couve about it, when Couve was no longer involved, I went to see him and I said: ‘I’m interested to know!’ He said to me: ‘Absolutely! We were absolutely certain that it would work on an exceptional basis, but that as regards the position of principle that we had adopted, we were still being consistent while at the same time respecting other people’s attitudes, and the future would decide which way it went.’ The last point is that the Five, on their side, had given an undertaking never to invoke that clause. It’s in the text. The Five felt that if there was a dispute in the offing, the treaty rules had to be applied, in other words there should be a vote if the treaty provided for a vote, so it also meant that they were pledging not to use the so-called ‘French clause’. Were we right or were we wrong? I was absolutely certain that we’d done exactly the right thing and I was certain that we’d forgotten something. What we’d forgotten was the procedure for voting. It was a technical oversight, unforgivable in the light of how it was interpreted afterwards, but pretty well unavoidable because we had never voted. So, in this kind of discussion, were we going to say, at the same time: we now need to lay down the internal rule of procedure which governs who can ask for a vote …

[Étienne Deschamps] … when …

[Étienne Davignon] … under what circumstances a vote can be called for and so on. So it went through without anyone noticing.

[Étienne Deschamps] It would have made the discussion even more complicated.

[Étienne Davignon] I’m not sure, because we could perfectly well have said: ‘The internal rules of procedure will be drawn up by the permanent representatives,’ and we would have found a technical feature, the Commission could call for a vote, a Member State could call for a vote, there’s a fairly standard way round it, the chair has the authority to say: ‘We will now take a vote.’ And the fact that there were no rules of procedure meant that calling for a vote was a major political act, an act which would trigger a conflict. And that is why people were able to say, and unfortunately the way it was interpreted bore them out, that we had snuffed out majority voting, that we’d forgotten that the Five had not called for it. The first time there was any talk of the Luxembourg Compromise, it was to be the German Minister for Agriculture who was unhappy about prices, although none of it would have happened if we’d had that text, in the way that we approve the agenda, quite simplistically, and I think that if we’d tried to do it then, it would have made things complicated. If we had done it afterwards, as was logical, when we were going into the final stage and qualified majority voting was becoming a standard implementing procedure, things would not have gone adrift. So what we deserved to be blamed for was letting things slide. A final point, as a reminder that we were consistent about it, when we negotiated with the British, the Luxembourg Compromise was not part of the acquis communautaire. The British therefore had no right to say: ‘We take the same position.’ They and the Danes made a unilateral declaration to the effect that they would resort to the Luxembourg Compromise, but the Luxembourg Compromise is not part and parcel of the legal acts in the accession treaties.

8/31 [Étienne Deschamps] If we go back a bit to the part played by the people involved, since you obviously worked very, very closely with them all through this business, how would you define the role of — you used the term ‘facilitator’ — the role played by Spaak and by the Belgian delegation as a whole, yourself included?

[Étienne Davignon] Yes, but after all it’s the same thing. What I mean is that there was a boss and then there were people who were there to make the boss’s job easier but didn’t put themselves in his place. So I think it was a vital part, as Spaak’s position, like that of others, was a purely European one. He wasn’t for or against the French, whereas there were a number of other delegations for whom the French aspect counted. I mean that as far as the Dutch were concerned, the French weren’t their favourite country, that, at the time we are talking about, relations between the French and the Germans weren’t good, Mr Schroeder was Foreign Minister and nobody much cared for him, as the successor of Kissinger and so on. So relations weren’t good. So there was an element of giving way to the French. As for Spaak, once he’d established that we weren’t going to change the treaty, we weren’t giving way to the French. We were carrying on with building Europe. And I think it was important because we were distrustful, of the Italians, I mean, as being too flexible, and I think the part played by the Belgians and the Luxembourgers, who were entirely motivated by the idea that we couldn’t bring Europe to the point of breakdown, even for good reasons, because it was young enough not to be absolutely enduring, I think it was an important part. That meant the French had to agree to Spaak’s being a bona fide conciliator, which they wouldn’t necessarily do — there had been the quarrels over NATO and many other things. So I think the circumstances led to both sides finding that Spaak — but we mustn’t underestimate the role the Luxembourgers played on this question, also because they were chairing the meeting so lots of people went to see them. So the final point which is important was that in the relationship with the Commission, which was difficult, since the Commission had to come back fully functioning, once there were six of us round the table again, it was difficult for the Commission to blame Spaak for not being pro the institutions, not being in favour of full powers for the Commission, given the part he played in setting it up ten years earlier. So that was it. Lastly, strangely enough, the least obvious factor was that the French up to a point trusted Spaak — I say up to a point because they also distrusted him for being in charge of the process, and, in a way, agreeing to a proposal made by him and backed by the Five was also by no means a foregone conclusion, because the tensions between Spaak and General de Gaulle from when he was the Secretary General of NATO had, of course, left their mark.

[Étienne Deschamps] And to end with this empty chair crisis, throughout the negotiations, of course, all through the strictly political stage in the negotiations by the Five, and then by the Five plus the French, the Commission was in fact rather on the sidelines. I suppose, though, that there were personal issues which played a part. Did someone like Jean Rey, who was at the Commission at the time, approach Spaak, so to speak, or explain to him what Hallstein, who was more at the cutting edge, might not do, or didn’t that count at all?

[Étienne Davignon] No, no, it did count, absolutely. You can’t compare relations between Spaak and Hallstein to the relations between Spaak and Rey. First of all, they knew each other from Belgian politics. Actually they were on opposite sides in Belgian politics, but there was clearly something which brought them together, it was that passion — and that is the right word — for building a united Europe, and the fact that, in a sense, what was important was to reassure the Commission that the agreement wasn’t going to be reached at its expense …

[Étienne Deschamps] … leaving it to carry the can …

9/31 [Étienne Davignon] … leaving it to carry the can. And there were contacts going on all the time over that, and in any case the Commission knew what people had in mind, didn’t know that there would eventually be an agreement not to agree, which in the end protected the Commission’s points very well. What was left was the Commission’s disappointment at the fact that its memorandum, and the way it was presented, and its idea of becoming a political instrument, which the treaty does not provide for in those terms, did not succeed, and I don’t think it was wise either.

2. Paul-Henri Spaak’s European commitment

[Étienne Deschamps] So Spaak, in all this, played a very important part as conciliator, facilitator, and, as we’ve also said, ten years earlier he was one of the leading lights in setting up what was to become the Common Market and Euratom. If we look at things from farther off, with a bit of hindsight, how would you, 40 years later, describe the idea he had in his mind of what a united Europe would be?

[Étienne Davignon] I think that the first word I would use would be passion. What I mean is that the men of that generation believed that they had a duty to reshape politics fundamentally, because the traditional politics had led to two wars. It was a generation that had lived through two wars. It wasn’t a generation which had heard that there had been two wars, it was a generation that had lived through two wars. So I think they were hard-wired to think that their role, I don’t mean in history, that their responsibility as politicians at that time had to be to build something which would be different. That very clearly the break with the Soviet Union, in other words the end of the dream of having a United Nations which would solve the whole world’s problems, made it all the more important to create a united Europe. So it was a passion. Secondly, he was convinced, once again from the experience of the League of Nations, that a system which operated on the basis of unanimity couldn’t work. He was to defend this idea at the San Francisco conference which set up the United Nations, and he was to argue against unanimity successfully, as we know. But that was it, it was passion, and institutional necessity. He agreed completely with Jean Monnet’s approach as regards the institutions, but also the second part of Jean Monnet, as regards people: ‘Institutions without people don’t work.’ Which is why he was very concerned that the institutions should be the guarantors of the machinery which would lead us forward step by step, but that it was very important that the people should not conflict with the institutions, which would have held up the momentum. And the third factor, which people tend to forget as time goes by, is that he was unbelievably impatient. He was dissatisfied with the rate of progress. He pushed the whole time for things to go forward at a speed which could well have put him at odds with this idea of getting people to carry things through, so he was going to be in a serious dilemma when the Fouchet Plan came up for discussion, of having to say no to what contained an element of progress but on terms which for him were unacceptable. He was right, and actually the Belgians and the Dutch did not eventually turn down the Fouchet Plan, for the same reasons. The main factor for Spaak was the disappearance of the institutional element, it was to be purely intergovernmental. He wasn’t such a purist as others who said: ‘The governments and the Member States don’t count any more,’ but he was in favour of the institutional structure and he wouldn’t give an inch on that. Which is why he didn’t give any ground on the treaty at Luxembourg and wouldn’t agree to a parallel community at the time of the Fouchet Plan, thinking that his pragmatic view of things, that the way things were moving was towards more of an institutional and less of an intergovernmental arrangement, would be put at risk if, on top of what was the most spectacular achievement, i.e. the elements of an external policy, we were to set up an element which for its part was strictly intergovernmental.

10/31 [Étienne Deschamps] But unless I’m mistaken, he was, at least in principle, in favour of Britain joining the Communities. Wasn’t he afraid at the same time that letting Britain in could potentially weaken the institutional or political system or compromise the political successes achieved over the previous 10, 15 or 20 years?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, as to that, you must always look at what negotiating with the British was like when it was happening and not the relationship with the British as it is now. It’s hard to do, but it has to be done. So for him, and I’ll give you an example, it was simple: the British hadn’t grasped the opportunity at the outset, so they had to accept the system as it was. And when General de Gaulle issued his first veto, when there were those preparatory talks whose status wasn’t very clear, since they weren’t really accession negotiations, it was a bit like what was done later, checking to see whether it would be possible for Britain to join or not, and when General de Gaulle made his proposal he said to the British: ‘Stop and say you agree to everything!’ So he wasn’t an accommodating negotiator when it came to the British. He was a negotiator who had no reason not to give the British a transitional period, as we gave ourselves, but that’s how you get from point A to point B. The treaty was there — take it or leave it. And the negotiator or negotiators he had to deal with at that time, Heath and his team, that was their philosophy. So the debate was much more about the practicalities of the transition and the technical, economic and commercial commitments, what to do about the Commonwealth and so on, than about the institutional methodology. The institutional methodology didn’t come into the discussion until after Heath’s defeat in the elections and his replacement by Wilson and the Labour Party, much to the surprise of both Heath and Wilson and of the Labour Party, who’d put into their manifesto that they were going to renegotiate what … But they knew perfectly well that they couldn’t renegotiate it, they put it in because they were quite convinced it would win them votes but that they wouldn’t be held to it. And I’ll always remember a first meeting, at Val Duchesse again, between Wilson and Brandt, who came to Brussels and more or less said: ‘And now what do we do? We’re stuck with our memorandum, and now what do we do?’ So that changed things. So the French were seriously worried, the others less so, given the negotiating procedure, and in a way, although saying that diplomacy or European integration was not simply based on the structure of the balance of power, as it had failed during the first half of the 20th century, the fact that there was some comparable power was not necessarily a bad thing for European integration.

3. The question of British accession to the European Communities and the ‘Harmel Report’

[Étienne Deschamps] In December 1967, the Foreign Ministers of the NATO Member States approved the Harmel Report, or what would be known as the Harmel Report, on the future of the Atlantic Alliance. Professor Stengers, whom you know, has said of this report that it was, and I quote: ‘a masterpiece of diplomacy’. We know about the part you played in preparing and drawing up the Harmel Report. Do you share Professor Stengers’ view, and whether you do or not, could you tell us why?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, you have to be true to history on this question. I’ll answer the question after making two or three comments. The first point, and it’s pretty standard, again, is that the crisis was caused by France. France decided, for reasons you already know, that it no longer wanted to keep the headquarters in France, because national sovereignty was affected, because the American delegates could come to France without asking for permission, and that really wasn’t on. It’s a minor detail but it played a large part, and also they didn’t like them. So, there was a crisis. There was a crisis at a time when NATO was important. NATO was important, it was just before the missile crisis and a whole series of things like that. So the Soviet threat was one thing, and deterrence was the response to the Soviet threat, so as not to get into a bellicose situation. So we had to avoid weakening

11/31 NATO. The first objective was how to avoid weakening NATO, as there was both a definite factor, which was that the headquarters had to move, so it had to be done in such a way that the decision would be interpreted in a way which reduced NATO’s forward momentum as little as possible. So that was the reason. The reason was to say that NATO was still functioning, even though the headquarters were moving. You could say it was so as to reduce it to a logistical decision, which of course it wasn’t. So Belgium would be putting all its diplomatic effort into softening the blow, which was not at all like what we have being saying about the … that the empty chair crisis didn’t turn into a crisis for Europe, that the transfer of the headquarters didn’t turn into a crisis over the credibility of our security and defence system. So the first objective being pursued was to show that the Alliance was still alive. To show that the Alliance was still alive, we reached agreement with the British, we set up a research exercise, four working parties, we were pretty sure that that would not necessarily produce any results, because what was useful probably wouldn’t be agreed to by France, the group chaired by Spaak would look again at what the three wise men had done, i.e. a political dimension involving consultation, which the French and the Americans were hesitant about for similar but contradictory reasons. Right, and what it actually was, in a sense, was letting the dust settle. But we did have to come down to earth somewhere, so we came down on something and looked to see where there might be a consensus, in other words, defining a mission which would not make much of a change to NATO’s way of operating, but giving NATO a mission which fitted in with a political vision, a vision which was not mainly political and not just about security. That was what we were aiming at. The aim was to create consensus on that, so that NATO’s state of health wouldn’t be affected. Did we realise at the time that it would turn into a reference document for the changing circumstances, that, in a way, what we said on the spur of the moment would become more important as the circumstances changed? To say that the people involved realised that would not be honest, I think. We said to ourselves: ‘It won’t be pointless, because at all events it has met one objective and, what’s more, it might meet some others,’ and the point was to get that going. But what we didn’t know at the time was that there was going to be a conference on security and cooperation in Europe. There were a number of things that were unknown, which simply meant that we weren’t completely wrong about the fact that it wasn’t a purely artificial exercise of throwing dust in people’s eyes, which had a bit of substance to it, or a little more than just a bit of substance, and that substance became critical in a different situation from the one in which it had been drawn up. So much the better. So, I think, when Stengers said: ‘It’s an important document for the members of the Alliance and for the Alliance,’ history showed that it was! As to imagining or saying that we knew it would play that role, the answer is no, because I don’t think anyone could have known it.

[Étienne Deschamps] And when the report was published, at the end of 1967, how was it received by the partners, by the French of course, but also by the others?

[Étienne Davignon] Oh well, it was a long time maturing, what we had there was a fairly classic case of something that had to mature. So the two main interlocutors — the others were more or less agreed on a consensus as to the approach, I don’t mean they weren’t important, but they had no difficulties in principle — potentially the most difficult partners were the Americans, as it was hard for them to agree to go down a path of opening out which was not necessarily in line with their bilateral attitude vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, which counted enormously and to which they had to pay heed. And secondly, we had to manage France, which agreed to take the view that NATO had a political mission to perform, since they were still in the Alliance, because we invented the concept whereby you could belong to the military system and not be part of the military organisation while you were there, which was a complete invention. I’m telling you there was nothing in the statutes which provided for that, and nothing which provided for the opposite. But the way NATO is structured is, you could say, the other way round, in the sense that if you’re not in one, there’s no point in being in the other. So what it all came down to was not changing the basics, while at the same time making adjustments to allow for the difficulties. So we were back and forth between the French and the Americans many times to get them to agree to a position which was fairly well accepted by the others.

12/31 [Étienne Deschamps] In 1966, you changed bosses, if I can put it like that. Pierre Harmel succeeded Paul-Henri Spaak as Foreign Minister. You were still chef de cabinet to Pierre Harmel, who, I believe, stuck to the same political line, in favour, in principle, of UK accession. From the point of view of Belgian foreign policy from 1966 and the months and years which followed, how was that reflected in political action as regards the British? Was there what we would nowadays call a proactive policy on Belgium’s side to promote possible UK accession?

[Étienne Davignon] Yes, there was. There was, given the position taken by the British. So somewhere in the attitude the Belgian Foreign Ministry adopted towards the British there were two aspects. One aspect was: ‘Don’t imagine that we’re going to negotiate anything for you that we haven’t negotiated with the French,’ and the other was: ‘Don’t imagine that once that prior condition has been accepted, we won’t do what needs to be done to make things easily digestible for you.’ So, we got onto the transitional periods, the arrangements, I don’t know. And it would go on being the same. And as the British decided that that they would have a second try, it became logical. So we talked to everybody, we said: ‘You’ve got to help with this.’ And when there was the second French veto, we tried, as we’d tried after the first one, not to break off our ties with the UK, because in a way the negative factor, provided the UK accepted the philosophy and the obligations they would have to take on, the opposition, which by its nature was from France, was a passing thing. So the problem was that the British shouldn’t get discouraged by the rejections they’d had. But as we could see that it was a stance taken by the General, which was itself opposed by different sides in France, we were able to say that one day the General wouldn’t be there any more — and thanks to the biological scheme of things sooner or later people aren’t there any more — so whatever the circumstances, we would keep our irons in the fire. So when the French issued their second veto, we tried to keep a seven-sided dialogue going with the British. We always thought of WEU as a way of activating this kind of thing, which the French were opposed to because they were proposing a six-sided system from which the British were excluded. Our idea, that is, was to have a second armour-plated door beyond the armour- plated door of the Treaty of Rome.

[Étienne Deschamps] At the end of the 1960s again, in 1969, February 1969, there was the Soames affair. How did the Belgian Foreign Ministry react to the news coming from Britain by a somewhat roundabout route concerning General de Gaulle’s European plans, which should not, officially, have become public, or at any rate not in such an abrupt way?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, we weren’t told about it in a roundabout way at all. The British Ambassador approached us officially and actually read out one of the telegrams from Soames, I’m sure it wasn’t the only one, but one of the telegrams from Soames reporting on the conversation with General de Gaulle. We had two feelings about this. Firstly, we felt that what General de Gaulle was saying in the text was consistent with what had always been his position, whether it was the executive board at NATO or the rest. So, provided the British gave pledges, it was a fairly traditional alliance view from the standpoint of an institutional way of organising a multilateral arrangement. So to say it came as a shock would be wrong. We knew that that was what General de Gaulle thought, we knew about it at the time when the Fouchet Plan was being discussed, because there was a part of the Quai d’Orsay which was completely opposed to General de Gaulle’s position and used to tell us, rather disloyally, I would say, as far as the official position was concerned, but they did it out of loyalty to their own convictions. So it was no surprise that there was that kind of thinking, since we’d seen the amendments in General de Gaulle’s own hand to the proposals in the Fouchet Plan. So there was all that going on as regards the rival community …

[Étienne Deschamps] There was continuity.

13/31 [Étienne Davignon] … the executive board of the major powers, so non-acceptance of an institutional system, right. Secondly, we also said that the British approach hadn’t been completely disingenuous, because it showed that they were the good guys and the French were the bad guys. It just made us think of two things: the first was that it didn’t change anything at the time, but it did show that the General realised the British couldn’t be kept out forever. For us, that was the lesson to be learned. The lesson was that even the General, when it came to the question of enlargement, was going to have to give and take, which he had shown he could do on a number of other important issues. So, personally speaking, no one will ever be able to prove whether I was right or wrong, but I’m fairly sure that even if he hadn’t lost the referendum, we would have had a Hague Conference with the General, but that the drive towards the enlargement of the European Union, or I should say the Community, as it was called at the time, was …

[Étienne Deschamps] … it had made some headway in people’s minds.

[Étienne Davignon] … it was on the cards.

4. The Hague Summit in 1969

[Étienne Deschamps] Looking at the Hague Summit in December 1969, which you took part in, to what extent would you say it could be described not just as an historic summit but as a summit which set things in motion again?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, you see, if we’re talking about the questions which irritated people, there were three of them, but as for fundamental questions, there were 20, or 20 000, that we quarrelled over, but that wasn’t the issue. The first was that we were going to enlarge the Community, according to Community principles, which was a problem that held everything up, as those disagreements over enlargement had an effect on the whole subsequent progress of the Community, as there was no political will there to consolidate a situation different from the one we wanted. So it was a bottleneck, a major obstacle which disappeared. Another major obstacle which disappeared was that people agreed that the common market should go further than just the common market. Economic and financial union, never mind the rather portentous sound of the words, in reality meant that we were going beyond a customs union, you see. It was called a common market, but in fact it was just a customs union. So we reintroduced what would later be called the internal market, in other words a much broader dimension, building on the success of the customs union. So it was a second opening up to the future on a range of subjects which had been taboo. And the third subject which divided the Six was the Fouchet Plan. We said: ‘We’ll have a look.’ The text is extremely circumspect: if anything could be done on the diplomatic level, the word political was used, but in fact the matter in hand was external policy, not institutional policy. So we did more than sweep away taboos, we suggested new ways of going forward. And that was a new situation which had come about since the empty chair crisis. In a way, between the empty chair crisis and The Hague, we talked about a lot of things, but we stayed within the strict framework set by the Treaty of Rome and the Treaty of Rome didn’t give, didn’t stretch beyond the strict limits set by the treaty at the outset. So it was, undoubtedly, a renewed opening out to growth which was still in line with the treaty, but a growth involving some significant and very important elements of shared sovereignty, and that had been at a complete standstill until then. So we said we would see if we could, but previously, of course, we had said that we couldn’t talk about it; that was a huge difference, and then what happened later showed that the facts were catching up with the title.

14/31 [Étienne Deschamps] And were the people attending the Hague Summit, whoever they were, already aware at that time that you were on the point of, how shall I put it, crossing a threshold, breathing fresh life into events, opening up new prospects and therefore genuinely giving Europe a fresh boost, after the years of crisis we had been through?

[Étienne Davignon] Absolutely. If you look into the writing of the time, you will see The Hague, the Hague Conference and so on. It was a sign of willingness, so there were all the commentaries, more circumspect or less so, saying: ‘It’s going to be a success,’ ‘It’s not going to work,’ and so on. But there we were, driven forward on the tide of European integration, which incorporates the time element. In a way, the time element, between 1964 and The Hague, had been lost. From The Hague onwards, we rediscovered it. That didn’t mean that things would happen that afternoon or the following day or the day after that, it just meant we were back on track with the integration process. It’s rather like the Lisbon Treaty which is due to be signed in a few days’ time, which also doesn’t say that things will be done the next day, but gives a fresh boost to a kind of integration which will probably take a wider variety of forms than what we have seen before; but this unique mechanism which is the European Community and the European Union has moved forward, not at the speed we would like, not necessarily with all the subjects we want to take on board, but it is a mechanism which moves inexorably forward. You only need to look backwards to grasp how real it is, this bulldozer which advances by fits and starts, but advances nonetheless. Everyone was very aware that things had been set free, and from then on it would be what people made of it. But there was no going back any longer.

[Étienne Deschamps] If I can ask a rather anecdotal question, was there any special atmosphere which showed that people had that awareness? You’d taken part in dozens of summits. As you remember it, was there anything special by way of mood or a heightened atmosphere at The Hague, if I can put it like that?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, because of the very specific hold-ups and the time they had taken to overcome, everybody heaved a sigh of relief that things had changed. It was, in a way, as if we’d been in front of a basin of dubiously clean water and then we’d pulled the plug and turned on the fresh water tap again. We really felt it was important because of the people there. Pompidou came, after all, so did Brandt — there was a stream of people who carried a certain weight. Those people felt that something major had happened at The Hague, and actually all historians nowadays looking at the various positive or negative dates conclude that The Hague was a milestone.

5. The ‘Davignon Report’

[Étienne Deschamps] Can you tell us what were the circumstances which led to your becoming the chairman of what became known as the Davignon Committee, and what was it exactly?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, you have to go back a bit, I mean that happened against the background of the preparations for the Hague Conference. The Hague Conference was to be the conference to give Europe a fresh start, since the point which had divided the Six for so long, British accession, became a question we could talk about now that Pompidou was in power. The question then was: should we just talk about that business, or were we in a wider context? And Maurice Schumann, who was the Foreign Minister, came up with the catchphrase that we should go for deepening and enlargement at

15/31 the same time. The question that then arose was this: as we went for deepening, should we have another attempt at settling the second topic which had always divided people in Europe, how to handle questions, which was not dealt with in the treaty as such, in other words what was called political cooperation but was in fact diplomatic cooperation at the external policy level, outside the sphere of competence assigned to external policy in the Treaty of Rome. And it was a difficult question, because it really had divided Europeans through every stage of what was known as the Fouchet Plan, and it was something the Five could not completely agree on either, because there were varying levels of concern at the idea of setting a political community up alongside the European Community. We Belgians thought it was something that needed exploring and we thought that our best interlocutor for that was the Federal Republic of Germany, as Mr Brandt was heavily committed to those questions, which meant that if we found common ground for an understanding with them, we could envisage being able to find a solution which would be acceptable. So we talked a lot to the Germans about the question and it was one of the few questions which wasn’t prepared for before the Hague Conference. On the other issues, that we were going do something, the plan, what was to become the Werner Plan and all that, as always when the preparatory work is being done for Councils, things went ahead. As for that item, it was just roughed out, there was no text before the conference. And during the conference, Egon Bahr, who had been appointed to do it by Brandt and was his close adviser, and I found a way of proceeding which involved exploring around the subject, if I can put it that way. We asked whether we could do something in that context and if a committee could be appointed to do it, and the committee appointed to do it would work with the Foreign Ministers’ most trusted associates in the diplomatic services, in other words what were called the political directors. The suggested approach was accepted and the committee met and the Belgians happened to be holding the Presidency at that moment, so of course that committee, like all the others, was chaired by Belgians, and as such I was the chairman of it. But it was going to meet at the foreign ministry, not in the context of the Council, since we didn’t really know where we were and the idea was not to make it a legal text, in other words not to make it a text which was already a text amending the treaty, [but to] draw up a text of political commitment in the form of a report which would be submitted to the minister and in which the three major questions were: ‘How far does the commitment go?’ ‘How do we make a link with the existing treaties to prevent a parallel structure being set up?’ and ‘What is the organisational machinery we want to establish?’ So it was a group, and circumstances often played an important part at that level, because the people who were to be involved were very close associates of the ministers. They were Mr de Beaumarchais in France, who was very close to Schuman and the Élysée, it was Mr von Staden in Germany, who had experience of the European Community as he had been a European official at a certain time, it was Mr Ducci in Italy, who was one of Italy’s great diplomats and officials and had been involved in the drafting the Treaty of Rome, it was Mr De Ranitz in the Netherlands, who was an undisputed authority in the foreign ministry, and it was Mr Würth in Luxembourg, who, in the same way, was very close to those ministers. So we had a group with a margin for negotiation that the ministers had given them, because they were capable of gauging what they could do and what they couldn’t do. The people in the group had very companionable, friendly relations with each other at that level, I mean that we were to find ourselves in the best of all possible scenarios, where every one of us used his margin for manoeuvre to the fullest extent allowed to him by the ministers so that the window of opportunity would be used to the full and not by everyone making demands of everyone else. Well, the first item to be decided on fairly quickly was to determine — it was a report, you see, a political proposal to be approved by the ministers regarding a working method. So we didn’t try to do as we did with the Fouchet Plan, make a legally binding treaty, because we would only do it in the light of the results that were or were not obtained. The second question, one which was very difficult and would only be resolved at the end, was the relationship between what we were doing and the rationale behind the European Community. And the way that question was resolved was by referring to the preamble to the Treaty of Rome, since the aim, as the Treaty of Rome, the preamble, puts it, was to attain, to pool our objectives. So there was a discussion as to whether there was a willingness to have a common policy, to move towards a common policy; of course that was part of the discussions and the caveats, but it was to prove difficult because it was a non-negotiable for some and patently created difficulties for the French. And the third item was the operating methodology. As for the operating methodology, we were to get to that

16/31 fairly quickly, because we discovered that the foreign ministries were behind with their understanding of how the European Community operated. The foreign ministries were in the same state they had been in before the European Community existed: apart from Belgium and Luxembourg, the political directors were not knowledgeable about the coordination of European policy in general, which meant that there were not inconsiderable administrative differences. The permanent representatives distrusted the political directors, and the political directors had no power over the permanent representatives. So we said that it was absolutely vital that the actual ministries commit themselves, because if the actual ministries didn’t commit themselves, it couldn’t be delegated to the permanent representatives, otherwise we would have answered a legal question which we hadn’t answered, to which we couldn’t yet give an answer, and if we wanted to set up a committee of delegates it wouldn’t work because the ministries wouldn’t have come together. So we devised a structure to run things, the Foreign Ministers’ associates, in other words the political directors. Secondly, we set up what would be called the Europe correspondents, i.e. the deputy political directors, who would have a coordinating overview of the various geographical or subject-specific directorates in the foreign ministries and then coordinate them and set up collaboration between the representatives of the states concerned abroad, which would be called coordination between the ambassadors, and so on. And that was what we were to propose to the ministers, with a fourth point which was of importance, to say that there was actually a review clause. What we said was: ‘Here is what we are putting before you today.’ And there and then we announced that there would be a second report to draw conclusions from the first one, to conduct an assessment and see how we could proceed further, in such a way as not to create the illusion that we had settled matters once and for all. It was a balance between experience and development which was part of the overall compromise, as a means of saying we were not stopping there, and with the last, difficult question, whether the Commission would be involved or not, with a sentence saying that the Commission would take part in the work, whether it went from the ministers to the political directors or any other committee, since it touched on questions which were obviously covered by the treaty, by the various Community treaties. The Commission was going to be very worried by those developments.

[Étienne Deschamps] During your work, which went on over several months, you met regularly in Brussels. During that time, did the Commission stay completely in the background and not take part, as such, in the negotiations?

[Étienne Davignon] It couldn’t take part as such in the negotiations because it hadn’t been instructed to — it was, of course, kept up-to-date by us on how things were developing, but it was extremely reluctant to come forward because it had a legitimate concern and a concern which went too far: a legitimate concern that we shouldn’t move towards a two-way split in the organisational structure and a concern that went too far in that it aspired to play the same part in that area as it played in purely Community affairs, which was to have a monopoly right of initiative for which it had neither the instruments nor the representations nor the requisite information. It was in a much worse position, because the legitimacy of its proposals depended on the power devolved to it, and in that area it hadn’t been devolved to it. But we were sure that once those precautions had been taken, and supposing it worked, there would be an inevitable progression and the smallest part would be overtaken by the largest, not counting the fact that we were talking about the same ministers going to the same meetings, since at that time the Foreign Ministers were still the coordinating structure of the European Community, which they aren’t any more now. It was the General Affairs Council, it wasn’t just the Foreign Ministers Council.

[Étienne Deschamps] You drafted your report. What did your six ministers think of it? What was there by way of practical follow-up to that report, and the second one, the one in 1973?

17/31 [Étienne Davignon] Well, since the people doing the preparatory work were the ministers’ close associates, the outcome of the various discussions was that getting the ministers’ approval wasn’t going to be a problem, as they had authorised their associates to go that far and we went to the ministers with a report with nothing in brackets, so there was nothing that still had to be decided on, and we got our imprimatur, which turned what we had, a preparatory structure, into a structure for managing the points at issue. I would add that during the period when we were discussing the report, we also discussed subjects in a way which sort of prepared the ground for this new, collaborative approach, so it was approved by the ministers, and the comments we got were that it wasn’t anything much, which wasn’t wrong but wasn’t true either. It wasn’t anything much in comparison with a treaty which incorporated the external policy dimension into the Community structures, so that was quite true. It did, however, overcome a difference which had been setting the Six against each other since the various Rome Treaties had existed and been signed.

[Étienne Deschamps] And if we do a bit of forward thinking, or rather if we look at it with hindsight, what do you think remains in the policy, the CFSP, out of the initiatives you were able to take at the beginning of the 1970s on political cooperation and external policy?

[Étienne Davignon] I think there were three, once again three, elements which come out clearly. The first is that we had brought the foreign ministries round to the idea that working together on European matters was a natural feature of their day-to-day lives, their joint action, joint consultations on how they voted in international bodies. So there was a great deal of activity at the United Nations when the general assemblies were on, as the aim was to adopt the same position whenever possible. The difference was that it wasn’t compulsory to do that as in Council decisions, but whenever it was possible, and if you look at the statistics on how the votes were divided at the United Nations before and after, you will see that there’s no mistake about it. In the same way, with the attitude that the Foreign Ministers in the various countries met the ambassadors together, well, there was a big shift in approach and manner, as we were also careful to give it the logistical features which made it possible, as we were setting up a structure, nowadays you’d call it an intranet, between the foreign ministries, at that time it was a special system for cooperation called COREU, European cooperation, European coordination. Secondly, this had the aspect that the first important topic that appeared on the table, after the report had been approved, was the whole set of negotiations on the CSCE, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, at which, to everyone’s surprise, there was European opposition from the Six, plus the British when they were associated, once the negotiations had started and before ratification, so there was a completely new phenomenon in a major round of international negotiations on a European position which had been announced as such, which caused tension with the Americans as regards coordination within NATO, but which was resolved. So there was an objective new factor, the asserting of a common position springing from the legitimacy of the commitment given by the ministers when approving the report. And thirdly, the way things were going with the Commission would be that the Commission would play a direct part in these negotiations on cooperation in Europe in what was called the second basket, in other words the one dealing with economic questions, where it would be a party to the discussions, so that drive became more insistent up to the time, after the rather ridiculous business of the oil boycott, when we met in political cooperation in Copenhagen, because it was the Danish Presidency, and in the afternoon we met in the Council of Ministers in Brussels — it was so ridiculous that it was stopped. Nowadays there’s no difference any longer, except that the preparations for the meetings were to go ahead in a different way, by subject, since this structure indirectly involving the ministries when the preparations were under way still exists today and because, finally, what we had thought was that it would go into the treaties, and nowadays it is in the treaties.

[Étienne Deschamps] Well, I’m jumping the gun slightly, but since we are specifically talking about it, if we look at the situation as it is right now, what do you think of belonging to two bodies at once?

18/31 I’m looking at this from the point of view of the Lisbon Treaty, in the hope that it will be ratified and enter into force. What do you think of the future High Representative for Foreign Affairs belonging to both the Council and the Commission? Having regard to what we’ve just been talking about?

[Étienne Davignon] I think, if you like, that it amounts to taking what was in embryo in the report through to its conclusion, as long as we haven’t decided that the pooling of sovereignty by the Member States vis-a-vis the Council is the same as the traditional external policy field, I would say, considering the external features of Union policy. I therefore think it is the consequence of greater integration, but one which still leaves this question hanging in the air: Have we given the Commission the same kinds of power in this area as we have elsewhere? The answer is no, for a whole set of reasons, but that we are incorporating the separation and making it difficult by taking a pragmatic step, such that there is a second consequence which is important and moves us in the direction of overweighting the reality of the European Union by setting up this common external service, which is obviously a step forward, as the European institutions, never mind whether it’s the Commission or the Council, have a common external structure. So the developments weren’t over yet, but the trend was clearly in the direction of an attraction towards the European Union and not towards a separate community, in which you would find the intergovernmental aspect on the one hand, where the Council would only have the people coming under a secretariat-general, whereas if it were in the Commission, the Commission is a not a secretariat of the Council. So I think it was a step forward, it wasn’t ideal, but it was certainly a step forward which was consistent with the way things were going as I said, that each time we did something new we moved closer to full integration.

[Étienne Deschamps] Staying with the Lisbon Treaty, more generally, looking beyond the future role of the external policy representative, how do you view the institutional reforms brought in by the Lisbon Treaty? Do you think they’re effective, ineffective, advanced, not very advanced, promising?

[Étienne Davignon] It depends on what people will make of it. There’s no reason to believe that what’s in the Lisbon Treaty will automatically sort out, as far as effectiveness is concerned, all the problems facing us today. Is it an attempt to sort them out? The answer is obviously yes! As there are more votes, as the composition of the Commission is going to be changed, as — never mind the nay- sayers — there is going to be a move to bring the Commission in on thinking about external policy in the widest sense of the term, and as an attempt is therefore being made to boost the factors for efficiency, especially through having the chair of the Council of Foreign Ministers held by a standing President who isn’t a representative of the Member States. So all those are positive factors; now what we make of them, what circumstances make of them, remains to be seen. But to turn our noses up at what’s on offer seems to me to be a mistake; concluding that all the texts are so clear that from now on the sun will be shining every morning also seems to me to be going too far, but to my mind there’s no disputing that it’s a step forward.

6. The European Communities and the 1973 oil crisis

[Étienne Deschamps] 1973: the oil crisis. Can you remember how the Nine responded to that crisis?

[Étienne Davignon] Oh yes, very, very well. To begin with, the Nine reacted badly to the crisis: you remember that the crisis was just that, but it led, in the boycott by the OPEC countries, to a breakdown in the relations they were to have with the Nine. Among the Nine, there were friends, among the Nine, there were all-comers, and among the Nine there were those who ought to have been sanctioned and penalised. And the great sadness is that the Nine didn’t say: ‘There are nine of us, not

19/31 two plus six, plus two, plus three. Which comes to … That just isn’t on!’ So they said nothing at all. And each of them tried to protect its supply capacity with the OPEC countries as best it could, and each of them separately received the delegation which OPEC sent, with the Saudi Arabian minister Yamani and the Algerian minister whose name I have forgotten, who went round Europe to resolve these questions bilaterally.

[Étienne Deschamps] And was it that the Nine couldn’t agree on anything because they didn’t really try to, was it a failure to take concerted action, were they taken by surprise, or were the national interests of each one of them such that it would have been pointless to try to adopt a common position?

[Étienne Davignon] I at any rate don’t know what was in the hearts and minds of each of them, I think it was just a selfish reaction not to turn to the European Community to solve their problems and that they thought they could solve them separately better than together. So that’s how things went, plus, as I was saying a moment ago, the fact that in Copenhagen we received the envoys in complete disorder, that it was obvious it was a problem which didn’t only concern the Nine but affected, I would say, the whole Western economy, and that it would therefore have been useful to have worked out a position with the Americans, which was a different question, a different position from that of the French, and which, having not succeeded in getting an agreement among Europeans, was to see if it was possible to come to an agreement between Europeans and Americans, and it would be the Washington Conference. But it was quite plainly a setback, and the attempt to secure a common position was very soon seen as illusory, so Europe’s failure switched to: ‘Is there any way of securing a common position with the Americans and the Canadians?’ And that was to be the Washington Conference.

[Étienne Deschamps] Indeed, not long afterwards the International Energy Agency was set up within the OECD, and you chaired its board of directors from 1974 to 1977. What was the basic function of that body? And how would you sum up the action it took during your chairmanship?

[Étienne Davignon] Oh well, the purpose of the Washington Conference was to get agreement on the attitude to take to this new factor, the use of oil as a political weapon. So the Washington Conference tried to deal with these two questions: on the one hand, what was our political reaction? And on the other, what was our economic reaction to that situation? How could we insure against its happening again? What kind of solidarity could we establish, in the sense of sharing the resources we had so that the economic shock, which would be extremely severe, would be cushioned? And at the Washington Conference, then, the front put up by the Nine fell apart, as France refused to be associated with the conference conclusions, and in extremely vigorous terms during the conference Schmidt or Carrington said: ‘If the Europeans are asked to choose between the Americans and the Europeans on this subject, they won’t choose the Europeans.’ The conference was heavy going. So, as we were rather beginning to lose hope, we set up a committee of experts to do what the conference hadn’t managed to do, as there hadn’t been a consensus at the conference. So a conference of experts met to draft a treaty on what measures needed to be taken in the economic field, strategic reserves, how would we share the hardships if there were a new boycott, and meanwhile what messages would we be sending to the oil-producing countries. And when this conference met it agreed on a treaty which the French didn’t sign and which was set up inside the OECD, but with special procedures, a structure to be called the International Energy Agency whose task was to conduct an economic analysis of the situation, decide what stocks had to be held, maintain ongoing relations with the oil producers to see what instruments people had, and to maintain a structure for sharing resources and stocks in the event of a crisis, as there was a sharing system in the event of a crisis over which the United States — and I think it was one of the few treaties in the world where this was the case — did not have the right of

20/31 veto. So the Americans had to share their resources so long as they did not get a blocking minority, as the decision whether or not to invoke a state of crisis was taken by qualified majority. As you see, we learn from what the European Union has done, as the concept of a state of crisis is like the concept of a state of crisis provided for in the Paris Treaty: if there are shortages, hardships are shared. So there was the treaty, Belgium was asked to chair the preparatory conference; it shouldn’t normally have been me who chaired the preparatory conference, it should have been the Belgian Ambassador to the OECD, Mr Ockrent, who was a major economist and had been extremely active in running the Marshall Plan with Spaak, Snoy and himself, but unfortunately, two days before the Brussels Conference was to open, he had a heart attack, and the only person who had had enough experience of involvement in presenting and negotiating the Washington proceedings was me, so I chaired the preparatory conference and I was to be the first chairman of what I would call the permanent structure; the members of it were the ministers, but there was a steering committee that I chaired for a short while, until I went to the Commission.

[Étienne Deschamps] How do you account for this policy of, if not boycotting, at any rate of deliberately sidelining the French, both when the Nine adopted their common position — their common non-position — then at Washington, then on the International Agency?

[Étienne Davignon] I think there were three factors again — it’s funny how there are always three — but yes, three factors. The first was certainly a personal factor in the case of Jobert; you should know that it was at the time when Pompidou was extremely ill and Jobert had become Foreign Minister and, in effect, had devolved powers, and there was this rivalry between Jobert and Kissinger over attracting the attention of the media and so on. So there really was a personal element which played a part, this personal element played an enormous part during the Washington Conference. I myself, with several others, had worked out a compromise formula which was acceptable to the French officials and which Jobert rejected, as we were in the midst of this rivalry in the form of sound bites between Jobert and Kissinger. The second reason was obviously that France still had an Arab policy and therefore felt that it wasn’t in its interests to be seen as subordinate to the United States in that context. And thirdly, which always comes to more or less the same thing, there was the fact that without being there we were there anyway, because, clearly, the crisis should have played a part, we should have done a share-out, France would have said it agreed to the share-out inside the European Union and things would have worked out. So the risk it was taking wasn’t a major one, it was extremely complicated, they were obviously kept informed, their oil company was involved, so it was a legal split more than a refusal to participate and the fact that they were completely out of it, because at the same time they were inside the European Union and the Commission had an observer’s seat at the Agency, so it was involved in these effects, it really was a personal element – in that way, it has an effect on external policy, for better and for worse sometimes. And the fact that the risk wasn’t great, the problem was always this: once none of these reasons no longer existed, how could one get in nevertheless? So it took a fair amount of time before France joined the Agency, and it is a member of it now.

[Étienne Deschamps] Because what you’re telling me, if I understand you correctly, is that it didn’t have many direct consequences, the fact that France wasn’t there?

[Étienne Davignon] It didn’t, because the economic facts were the economic facts, the necessities were the necessities, and France had no difficulty holding strategic stocks. So there you are. But it was, in terms of image, whether it was the European image or that the image of having a consistent position as regards interests was important, because, of course, it was a subject of some interest, because there were three, at the time, major oil producers which belonged to the Agency: Britain, Canada, the United States and Norway. So, the idea that we were aligning ourselves completely

21/31 without the United States was an exaggeration, but as regards the content of the treaty or the usefulness of that organisation, the fact that France wasn’t part of it wasn’t a major factor.

[Étienne Deschamps] Your opposite numbers when you were at the International Energy Agency, your opposite numbers from the oil-producing countries, did they regard you as a European or did they try to play both sides off against each other a bit, if I can put it that way, and on the possible or potential tensions between European and North American interlocutors?

[Étienne Davignon] You have to realise, of course, that even if, as I have just explained, the job of working out a common position between us wasn’t plain sailing, finding a common position within OPEC wasn’t any simpler. Saudi Arabia, for very fundamental reasons which went to the heart of the matter, wasn’t interested in getting embroiled in those kinds of quarrels; some of them were, however. So, within OPEC, there were some who were basically concerned with the economic problem and some who were concerned with using the economic problem to isolate the United States, to force a division between the United States and the others, thinking at the political level that this was a weapon of war against the oil-producing countries, which of course it wasn’t. So we were to see two illustrations of that: one when the French proposed to make the OECD, that great conference with the developing countries, for a long time there was a difficulty, because, in view of the subject, people wanted the Energy Agency to be represented as such at the table, which others said was completely unacceptable and so on. A solution was found eventually. And in the end, with the passage of time, the objective factors won out over the manipulation of those factors in terms of subjective political considerations, and at a particular moment, though on Yamani’s initiative, I was received by OPEC in Vienna for the purpose of setting out the features of cooperation, of intelligent management of the question which the Agency offered. But there were certainly those who sought to exploit this idea by using the fact that the French didn’t belong to it to demonstrate that it was an American weapon of war to which people reacted as such; but things settled down after a time.

7. The ‘Davignon Plan’

[Étienne Deschamps] In 1977 you became a Member of the European Commission, where you were in charge, in particular, of the internal market, industrial affairs and the customs union. In that capacity you were faced, not for the first time in your career, with a new crisis, the steel crisis, and you tried to respond to it by using all the resources given to you by the Treaty of Paris, the ECSC Treaty. What was the precise aim of the Davignon Plan, and what did this concept of a manifest crisis in the steel industry actually involve?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, before I arrived, there was tension in the steel-making sector, because commercial groupings were being set up between the Germans, the others and so on; and secondly, because there was obviously structural overcapacity, since everyone had invested as though, when the market grew, they would be working it on their own, and, thirdly, because throughout this time, the Commission had not enforced compliance with the rule forbidding all forms of subsidy, since the Paris Treaty was brutal as far as that went, there was no aid. It was a self-financing Community and the Member States could not give aid. We were faced with a situation where steelworkers couldn’t manage their own situation by adopting moderate positions somewhere between supply and demand, where there were new forces at work in the iron and steel sector, electricity producers able to offer fairly simple products at much lower prices, which fell outside the major integrated structures, and there was that explosion in public-sector aid which kept companies which should have been going through major financial difficulties alive. So the first step would be to find out whether, working with the Commission and the producers, we could establish some degree of discipline on the market, so

22/31 that we wouldn’t be selling at a loss simply to keep market prices up, so that we’d bring newcomers into it and have some oversight over imports within Europe, a particularly complicated problem because you need to know that the incorporated factories were among the importing factories, in order to bring their prices down. So it was a very complicated situation and a continuation of public-sector aid which it was not all that easy to act on, because why would we have taken action at this or that time when for ages the Commission had let things take their own course? We eventually ended up concluding that the basic danger was that the common market in steel would fall apart. The treaty provided for it, of course. The treaty laid down safeguard clauses stipulating that in very specific situations a Member State could close its borders. So it wasn’t a move that conflicted with the treaty, it was using one aspect of the treaty to make a safeguard clause work — or rather, stop it working. After looking at matters from every angle, spending hours with the trade unions, the producers and others, I came to the conclusion that if we didn’t stop the clock, in other words if the Commission didn’t take charge of managing what was actually going on in the steel industry, so as to prepare the ground as efficiently and painlessly as possible for its restructuring, we would be heading for the collapse of the internal market. So, bearing in mind that the treaty gave the Commission responsibility, correction, obliged it to act — it wasn’t an option, it was an obligation under the treaty — and that after intermediate measures had been tried, you had to go for extreme measures, in other words declare a manifest crisis, in which the Commission could then determine what everyone could produce. When I explain it like that, of course, it sounds fairly logical. What you need to know is that the treaty provided for that in completely different circumstances from the ones we were applying it in: the treaty stipulated that there should be solidarity as regards shortages, so that the point of declaring a manifest crisis was to make sure that everyone would have concrete wheels, sections, frames, whatever they’re called, whereas I was busy applying the treaty in the opposite situation, where there was too much and we had to get the market back into balance alongside restructuring it, in other words bring it down to the size of market which the economic situation dictated. Of course, those who didn’t like the measures because they thought other people were to blame, not them, complained to the Court of Justice, which accepted the way we’d interpreted the treaty, which was an important factor, vital in fact. The fact is that under the treaty those decisions were taken by the Commission and ratified by the Council, which means that it wasn’t the Council which took them. The Council could hold them up, and the discussion was about the fact that it was decided by qualified majority and the qualified majority was calculated on the basis of the actual economic position of the steel industries in each of the countries taking action. So it turned into a great big battle because the Germans were against it, because they didn’t think they had anything to gain from it, that it would be more in their interests to create a large, integrated German steel industry, outside the Common Market, so, starting from the idea that we were in the former situation, in other words that the producers in each Member State were entitled to a monopoly of the consumers in that state, which was obviously a disaster for the Benelux countries, which had developed their industries on the basis of a common market and were therefore overwhelmingly exporters, given the facts of their markets, and complicated when it came to Italy, which did not have the production capacity and was an importer. So we had to get the various parties involved to agree and, what is more, have the technical capacity to manage the agreement, because we were deciding on the quotas for each of the undertakings, so we hadn’t to make too many mistakes, plus we had to monitor things to make sure there wasn’t too much cheating, because they didn’t have to produce, they could sell these quotas to someone else, so it was a lot to organise; and then we had to make sure the restructuring plans were accepted. The restructuring plans then dictated whether action by the European Community and the Member States to make it easier to set up social measures, restructuring investment and so on were agreed to. So it was a titanic battle, in which the Commission displayed an extraordinary degree of solidarity. The deciding vote was taken by the big meeting in Luxembourg, as it was Luxembourg’s turn to decide, to hold the Council meetings. Mr Jenkins, Mr Ortoli, Mr Haferkamp, a whole series of Commissioners were there to demonstrate clearly that that was the Commission’s position and that Mr Haferkamp disagreed with Mr Lambsdorff’s position and so on. That’s how much it was hurried through as regards collegiality, Commission solidarity, at a great moment in the Commission’s history.

23/31 [Étienne Deschamps] And when you said a short while ago that the Germans were against a whole range of measures which you were advocating, were you thinking of the German political authorities, the trade union authorities, the trade union interests or the industrial interests directly involved?

[Étienne Davignon] The industrial interests and political circles were, de facto, defending the same position, i.e. that it was the others who had given aid, that there hadn’t been any in Germany, which was not true, because even if Germany, the federal government, hadn’t given any aid, the governments of the Länder had been ladling it out, so there was a sort of position that right was on their side in the context of this free-market economic view, that it was other people’s fault, not theirs, so they were entitled to protect themselves in that respect. The trade unions were more measured and, in the context of decision-making or the process leading to the taking of decisions in the ECSC, there was consultation of, as its name suggests, the Consultative Committee. The Consultative Committee consisted of the producers, the traders, the market and the trade unions — not of representatives of the Member States — and in the end, after a great deal of discussion, IG Metall approved the invoking of a state of manifest crisis before the Consultative Committee, though it opposed resorting to it at the national level. However, the trade unions put their weight behind a more general measure; I’m not sure they were all that happy about going back to an integrated German steel industry in which the private and public interests, because there were public interests, were shoulder to shoulder. But it was complicated at every level.

[Étienne Deschamps] Although you were a Member of the Commission, as a Belgian do you remember there being any, I wouldn’t venture to say tensions, but any particular concerns expressed by the Belgian or Walloon people you talked to? I’m thinking of the people from the Liège basin, the Athus region etc. I don’t know who the Belgian Minister for Economic Affairs at that time was — Willy Claes, perhaps.

[Étienne Davignon] Claes and Eyskens.

[Étienne Deschamps] How was this episode seen at the more national level?

[Étienne Davignon] There were two guilty parties as regards aid: Belgium was quite involved so, as far as its interests were concerned, it was a vital point because it was a net exporter as we used to say, so defending the orthodoxy of the coal and steel community was a vital factor for Belgium and Luxembourg, and rather less for the Netherlands, though even so it was one. So from that point of view they were great advocates of that policy. Secondly, the tension wasn’t over that question, the tension was over what the restructuring plan meant, since the restructuring plan had to be approved by us if the aid was to continue and the Community’s development funds were to contribute, and there the tension was severe, because the first plans the Belgian authorities put forward were not acceptable in our view. But we worked with them and so, in a very transparent way, I was involved in the Belgian decisions, but with the intention of saying to them: ‘If you put this forward, it will be all right, but if you put that forward, it won’t.’ So I had a hand in the process of teaching the Belgians to get them to understand what they had to put forward or not put forward, and I took part in the negotiations with the trade unions to explain why I wasn’t going to approve whatever they had approved. So we were involved in the discussions at national level in all the countries concerned and we had no choice but to help give reasons for what was being done and take part in the tripartite meetings in Luxembourg and so on. Our involvement was for the purpose of explaining what contribution we were making but to explain that we weren’t contributing without monitoring the consequences of the structure we were setting up. So it was a fairly extraordinary situation; we had set up a steel cartel run by the Commission, with an external aspect in agreement with non-Community

24/31 countries, restricting their imports during that period of time, but saying to them when discussion became difficult: ‘Of course it is a restriction on freedom of movement, but it guarantees you the right to import rather than taking a series of individual steps against you.’ But it was difficult, and complicated too to negotiate with the Eastern bloc countries which didn’t recognise the European Union, so we found sneaky ways of doing it in Geneva through the European Committee of the United Nations but we got there in the end, and the first agreement we reached was with the Japanese.

[Étienne Deschamps] And was it that, do you think, which made it possible to save whatever could be saved of the steel industry inside the European Community?

[Étienne Davignon] I don’t think there’s any dispute about that, so I can speak freely about it, if I’m the one speaking about it, people seem to be saying it was I who did it, but I think that nowadays … The practical arrangements had been commented on a great deal, but I don’t think anyone disputes the fact that the restructuring only happened because Europe set about doing it, by creating a breathing space so the time needed to do it could be found. And the point debated at the time was this: Will there still be a steel industry in Europe in the year 2000? The answer to that is to look at what actually happened.

8. The establishment of an industrial policy at Community level

[Étienne Deschamps] At the end of the 1970s, at the same time as managing the crisis in the steel industry, the Commission wanted to establish an industrial policy for Europe. Can you remind us of the sectors which at the time were in the greatest difficulty, the ones which were most directly affected by these potential joint actions?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, we were in a very difficult economic situation, and in a very difficult economic situation there were sectors of activity which hadn’t adapted to the circumstances. Whether it be the chemical industry, shipbuilding or whatever. So it was difficult to have a clear picture of what an industrial policy meant. If industrial policy meant: ‘There has to be a sectoral policy to develop this or that sector and so on,’ I never believed in it and I still don’t believe in it, because you can’t stand in for the people working in the field when it comes to deciding what will succeed and what won’t succeed. When a sector is going through a crisis, on the other hand, you can, as we did with the steel industry, act in such a way as to recreate the conditions in which it can restructure itself and then get back to normal. So that’s what we did. We adopted restructuring measures where we were able to do it because of the control we held over the public sphere in a number of sectors, on the understanding that eventually, once these measures had been adopted, they would either work or they wouldn’t, but that we were going back to a market operating as normal. So it was quite specifically that thinking about industrial policy which led to the need to complete the internal market. Because the best economic answer is to have an internal market which works properly, in which there are no discriminatory measures and the market can play its part. So it was very important to do it. And at the time we’d taken a decision on the internal market which was absolutely fundamental: that is, that when I arrived at the Commission, the theory and practice were that for there to be a properly functioning internal market, we harmonised the various criteria for norms, for standards, so that there would be only one. That applied to the free movement of workers. You couldn’t be a hairdresser if you didn’t satisfy a number of criteria which weren’t the same in the various countries. And that didn’t work at all. So I found a series of directives on my internal market table going a long way back on which no decisions had been taken and which concerned important questions like toy safety and things like that which really are of significance to the ordinary citizen. And very soon after I got there, the Court of Justice took a decision, gave a judgment, which became famous and which was known as

25/31 the ‘Cassis de Dijon judgment’. What does the Cassis de Dijon judgment say? The Cassis de Dijon judgment says that a standard drawn up in proper form applies to the whole of the European Community, unless it is shown to have adverse effects as regards security or whatever it might be. So the burden of proof was entirely reversed. It meant that national standards were internationally valid, unless it were shown that the composition of a Danish brick was dangerous and it could therefore not be used for putting up a building in the Netherlands because the house would fall down. So when we became aware of that, we at the Commission, on my proposal, decided to give up harmonising things and instead to lay down regulations whereby, provided national standards were laid down in the way I said, they would automatically be valid everywhere, unless the reasons why they weren’t acceptable were determined and demonstrated. And that gave the internal market a kick-start which would lead to the decisions taken by the Jacques Delors Commission. But that was why, in a paper I’d written which the Commission submitted to the Copenhagen European Council, the last European Council before the Commission changed, I explained in three pages why the industrial policy solution, except as regards measures to encourage research or things of that kind, would best be carried out through an actual internal common market actually operating. So that was the answer. Industrial policy can be useful when there is a crisis because it can then create favourable conditions for change and adjustment. But once that is done, it’s always down to the framework in which industry functions, if necessary with aid for research and things of that kind. But a sectoral policy is pointless.

[Étienne Deschamps] And once again, how did the interests most directly affected — the trade union and industrial interests — react to these moves?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, there were two questions. The first was that to devise a sectoral policy at the European Union level, supposing that it was effective — and I’ve told you what I think — was impossible. It was already hard enough with a crisis going on to demonstrate that joint management was better than separate management, in terms of either the effectiveness of the means or of the results. When you’re not in a state of crisis, why should someone who’s got ahead be held up so that someone else […] so as regards the positions taken by the Germans or the Dutch, or the British, there was no way of finding any ground for agreement on approaches which were structurally different. You could like it or regret it, but everyone was aware of that. So from that time on, the trade unions could say that not enough was being done, but they knew perfectly well that there wouldn’t be any decision because the trade unions couldn’t get at the European level what they weren’t getting at the national level. That’s what we were to discover, at any rate, after trying it. It was a difficult period, and that’s why it was important to reinvent the research policy because research policy was a factor which was important in two ways. The first is that it injected an element of hope into an economically difficult situation. Europe couldn’t only be identified with closures and redundancy programmes and not have any forward-looking prospects for the future. And at the same time, looking beyond the subjective aspect, giving an objective content to this collaboration at the European level, which did not go far enough because somehow or other when I started out on this business, as far as undertakings were concerned, European aid actually had a penalising effect because, in some countries’ budgets, whatever went into it from the Community was deducted from the national budget allocation. So we were playing a losing game, because it was clear that what was done at the international level was more effective but cost more. If you bring three people together, well, you have to pay for the preparatory work upstream; in my opinion the result will obviously be better, but the start-up cost is higher. So once we started taking away what they had at the national level in line with what they were being given at the European level, they were losing out in the short term. So we had to turn that all round, which was quite a battle too, for different reasons in the various countries. In Germany it was because they didn’t want to surrender that element of power to someone else. In France it was because they didn’t trust the international idea. So it was a difficult but important business, all the more important in that research plans are no use unless they are for a number of years. We had to find a new way for the Community to operate in the research field, focusing on well- targeted aspects with a preference for European cooperation and, in a sense, reservations as regarded

26/31 anything purely national.

9. His work at the Commission of the European Communities

[Étienne Deschamps] Can you tell us how it came about that you were appointed to the Commission by the Belgian authorities, and what was your experience of working within that institution, which you were very familiar with from having worked with it from the outside when you were at the Belgian Foreign Ministry and then in Paris at the International Energy Agency? What effect, if I can put it like that, did it have on you, finding yourself inside the Commission? On a day-to-day basis, did it match up to your expectations?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, in Belgium, nothing ever happens in a completely straightforward way. So my appointment didn’t happen in a completely straightforward way as regards deciding which category of people to look at for the next Member of the Commission. Without going into detail, the idea was that it should really be someone coming from among the Christian Democrats and a French speaker. On that basis, the Prime Minister at the time, Mr Tindemans, asked the chairman of the Christian Social Party at the time if he had anyone to put forward. He said yes, he put forward two whom Tindemans didn’t like, who had no European experience, and another point was that it was the first time a President-designate of the Commission, who was designated six months in advance, would be talking to the Member States when trying to put a team together. So there we were with Mr Tindemans who didn’t like the candidates Mr Nothomb had put before him and Mr Jenkins who, on the basis of what he’d heard, said: ‘Davignon would do for me.’ Well, they had a number of problems, and Mr Tindemans had explained that for that reason the job I would be given would match the experience I had gained. So he asked if I could have foreign relations or something of that kind. The answer was that it couldn’t be done because the German Commissioner, Mr Haferkamp, whom Mr Jenkins would rather have had leave the Commission, was staying on, so he was in a difficult position with regard to him. He was in charge of financial affairs, but Mr Ortoli was evidently staying on at financial affairs since he had been Finance Minister, and so Mr Haferkamp wanted external relations. So, knowing the Commission as I did, I had a talk with Mr Noël, the Secretary-General of the Commission, who knew everything inside out and upside down and who’d been one of the leading lights, one of the founders of the Commission — I’m not saying necessarily of the Treaty of Rome but of the way the Commission operated and the place it occupied — and he said to me: ‘Looking at the issues which are going to come up, there is a splendid portfolio, the one dealing with the internal market, industry and the customs union. Given the situation Europe is in, there are many things the Commission has a legitimate interest in and the needs are there.’ It turned out that he was right, we talked about it for a few moments. So the Belgian Government said to Jenkins: ‘You must give him external relations,’ and Jenkins said: ‘That’s not possible, but I can give him that,’ with the external ramifications of the various issues, liaising with Mr Haferkamp. That’s how it happened. The Belgian newspapers said: ‘Davignon got nothing,’ so I had to go on the radio and explain that it wasn’t that bad, and people stopped talking about it not very long after. Those were the circumstances. I knew the actual situation well, because, having been the coordinator of Belgium’s attitudes to the problems under discussion from the foreign affairs point of view up to 1977, I was familiar with a lot more than just the purely diplomatic issues. I knew the various subjects that came up very well, really well, as we had done the negotiating with Britain and so on, I was very close to the permanent representative, who sometimes asked me to come and help him, so I was familiar with the subject matter and the way things worked. So the way things were done at the Commission was no surprise to me at all. As for the people, I knew quite a few of them too, including a number of Members of the Commission, so it wasn’t a case of going into a setting I didn’t know. So it matched up to what I’d been expecting, and I think the President fully realised what had to be done with the Commission. Meaning he had to be mindful of the collegial nature of the Commission, but at the same time have especially good relations

27/31 with a number of the Members who were at the heart of the priorities he wanted to push forward with and so, I would say, he set up a team within a team, without destroying the collegiality aspect. He managed that very well and we were good friends: Mr Haferkamp, who handled external relations, Mr Ortoli, who had economic affairs, Mr Gundelach, the Dane, who took on agriculture, which was of course no small matter, and competition, which was becoming more important in view of all the questions we have talked about. So we had a good comradely feeling, added to by Mr Natali, a man with a great deal of good sense. I was pleasantly surprised by the willingness of the Commission to be the Commission, and the conditions we worked in were somewhat better than I had thought they would be. It wasn’t less good, it was somewhat better.

[Étienne Deschamps] And you didn’t have to fight or try to revolutionise working methods or people’s thinking?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, yes, I did, but once there is the […] having the choice of subject makes it easier to choose the procedures. Once you can clearly identify the fields in which the Commission needs to act, and that the need is there, the issues have to be dealt with, it isn’t difficult to mobilise. Then you need to take the trouble to see how it’s done. We had to reconstitute a whole management structure for the steel industry, which had completely fallen by the wayside owing to the Commission’s lack of interest in it. Simonet had made a bit of a start, but well, to go on from that to saying we wanted extra staff to do what obviously needed to be done, it was a question of not being too clumsy, of being influential enough and finding solutions to … But your question is a relevant one, because if a Member of the Commission doesn’t concern himself with how to get things done, he won’t succeed. It isn’t enough to define a policy, he has to have looked into the logistics and he has to know that one of the powerful factors in his ability to persuade the Member States is that he is more competent with his departments than the Member States are. So he has brought with him an element of knowledge and competence which, added to the legitimacy of the action he takes, creates the conditions needed for exerting influence.

[Étienne Deschamps] Do you remember the circumstances in which the Commission, in the mid- 1970s, tried to be present at G7 meetings and the G7 summit, and in what way was that decision by the Commission important in winning recognition for it?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, it was a subject I knew a lot about because it was a subject on which Belgium had had an opinion before I joined the Commission. The opinion and the discussion were at two levels. The first level was full participation by the Commission in the European Council. Remember that at the outset full participation by the Commission in the European Council was on the list of Community questions, and that at the dinners of Heads of State, for example, where political affairs were discussed, they weren’t invited. So we had to keep up the fight for the overall presentation of the Commission, when the Heads of State and Government were meeting, it was up to it to be careful about the subjects where its legitimacy was not identical to that of others. And in the same context, when there were G7 meetings and people couldn’t imagine the G7 not being representative of what was being discussed within Europe, we had to find a way of involving Europe more fully at that level, which raised a twofold question, which was that that was when the larger countries become the G8. That was the first question, and so it was fairly easy for external countries like Canada or the United States to say: ‘Don’t bother us with that,’ and the fact that we weren’t satisfied if it was just the Presidency of the Council and not the Commission as well. So it was one of the major priorities of the Jenkins Commission, to settle the question once and for all, which was a fundamental discussion that was difficult, not counting the fact there were extremists in the Community camp, I would say. For instance, the Dutch used to say: ‘We can only talk at the G7 about the position defined by the Community in advance, and only the Commission representative can talk,

28/31 and the French President or the German Chancellor cannot talk.’ Which wasn’t exactly something that was very conducive to finding a solution. And Giscard d’Estaing, who was President, was very much against the Commission being present. So it was a long battle with the same decisions being taken at the G7, in the same way, as had been taken to bring the Commission into the Council, first with reservations and then later with the reservations disappearing. But there was a huge row over it.

[Étienne Deschamps] And there again, afterwards, you sensed the way your international interlocutors regarded the Commission. Did it change when the Commission was actually present and had the right to give its views at the Council?

[Étienne Davignon] Of course, because it meant that you had been involved in the preparations. At the actual meeting, I don’t think that changed the way things went, all that was pretty well prepared in advance, that the Commission had access to the President of the United States and so on, so it wasn’t about becoming familiar with a world that they didn’t know about, but being structurally involved in the preparations meant that you weren’t just reactive, you could be a factor in making proposals, giving guidelines, so it was a very important matter. What’s more, it was a very important matter within the European Community, because there was always that worry that we wanted to set up an executive board, that the small countries would be isolated. That was taking things too far, in my opinion, but of course it always happens, especially when an enlargement is happening and the new countries joining don’t fully grasp the part they can play, which makes them worried and anxious. So it was an essential question, under what chapter heading you wanted to choose, you wanted the …

[Étienne Deschamps] And why was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing opposed to it, up to a point?

[Étienne Davignon] Because as far as a President of France was concerned, the Commission could only be a secretariat. So the idea that the President of the Commission was the same thing as the elected president of France was unthinkable. So he was fiercely, structurally opposed to it.

[Étienne Deschamps] In September 1979 — I found this in the archives — you gave a lecture in Brussels on the part played by the Commission in the strengthening of the Community. I think it speaks to the subject we are discussing. And in the lecture you explained, among other things, that the Commission had to play its political role by taking part in defining the Community’s aims. Could you, with hindsight, say what your thoughts were? You have already sketched them out, but perhaps we can go a little further.

[Étienne Davignon] The day the Commission contents itself with merely running the policies decided on by the Council of Ministers, which it has to do, it gives the priority to its role as an executive agency rather than to the imagination, to the vision it must show in relation to the future development of the European Union as such. And that will be the day when two risks will inevitably arise, that risk of technocracy we keep hearing about, and the fact that, in the end, it will be doing what it’s told to do. That is, as things stand, a great danger. So it’s not a question of protocol. Today, and it was true when there were nine of us, and it’s even more true now that there are 27 of us, the ability to determine what the common good of Europe is can no longer be defined only by the Commission. No one has the data any longer, the thinking, the sensitivity needed to grasp what would be best for everybody. Especially nowadays, if it’s better for everybody, it won’t be better for everybody in exactly the same way. When there were six of us, when the Community made progress there were no losers. There may have been some who were slightly more winners than others, but there were no losers. With 27 of us, as far as particular decisions are concerned, there will be people who are marginally less well off than they were before, or less protected than they were before, but

29/31 overall they will be well off. If there isn’t someone who can define that, there’s something seriously lacking. Secondly, and we see it clearly today, there is no spokesman for Europe apart from the Commission. The Member States nowadays give prominence to the idea that they have stopped the Commission taking steps which were too damaging to them. But explaining why a certain number of things have to be done even though they don’t come across well to public opinion also accounts for why the public distances itself from […] while, for example, in the situation in which we are talking today: Is the public interested in the environment? Yes. Is it interested in energy? Yes. Is it interested in immigration? Yes. Are these three major issues — and I can mention others — which can be resolved outside the European context and within the European context? The answer is no. But there isn’t anyone coming and saying so, explaining it and so on, people have to be asked to reason it out on their own and come to a conclusion on their own. So the need to involve the Commission in defining the priorities and giving voice to the vision of what we want to do is an essential factor when it comes to justifying particular measures which will be taken anyway. So it’s even truer now than it was before, for the reasons I’ve tried to explain. And the whole point of this institution, what makes it unique, stems directly from its ability to play that part, otherwise it is either an executive agency or a secretariat.

[Étienne Deschamps] How in fact can it extricate itself and keep hold of that legitimacy or that head- start? Is it primarily a question of being imaginative in the solutions it puts forward, the programmes it proposes to implement, the standing of its members or the Members of the Commission who represent it?

[Étienne Davignon] I think it’s all of that. I think that, firstly, it’s identifying the priorities and explaining the priorities. It’s very important to put that in a […] and create the proper perspective. The perspective has to be created. People talk about it the whole time. And then it’s a case of illustrating it by measures to implement […]. Because how we describe the damage caused by failing to take a decision on this or that specific issue stems from the failure to create the proper perspective. If we do it the other way round, it doesn’t carry the same weight. And so, secondly, it’s a case of doing it on an ongoing basis, you see. One of the great weapons the Commission has is a skill which it can generate. Under normal conditions, and I stress normal, it has a capacity for managing cross-sectoral issues more effectively, as fewer difficulties should arise between directorates-general and Commissioners than inside a coalition government where power is allocated and shared out, in political terms too. That is vital and it has the skill to do it and to exploit the time element which it has on its side. It is there for five years, which means that it isn’t judged at the end of its first year, the judgment comes later. And it has to be strong enough to accept that the first rebuff isn’t the final decision. Because it has time on its side. ‘You don’t want to talk about it today? Very well, we’ll talk about it next time.’ And I think that, if it manages its legitimacy properly and defines what its objectives are properly, by wheeler-dealing in-house among other things, then it has the capacity to do that.

[Étienne Deschamps] You mentioned a technocracy risk earlier — were you ever confronted with that?

[Étienne Davignon] Well, the question disappears once you’re in a situation where there is real dialogue. The issues I had to deal with couldn’t be resolved solely by working with the governments, so they could be resolved by working with the experts in the field. If you are there and prepared to listen, and to weigh the factors up, you have to accept that the technical solution which looks wonderful won’t apply. That’s why I used to say: ‘A Member of the Commission mustn’t just deal in guidelines and priorities, but also think about how things are to be done’ — so as to make sure that everything works as well as possible and not let things turn into a bewildering maze or a pointless mass of complications, etc., which is what afflicts the Commission now.

30/31 [Étienne Deschamps] And if we go back to the time we’re talking about, the 1970s and the early 1980s, and add in an extra player on the institutional stage, Parliament, how did things go in that institutional triangle, relations between the Commission, Parliament and the Council?

[Étienne Davignon] It was established practice then that the Commission and Parliament were objective allies and behaved as such. A whole range of circumstances, and the growth in Parliament’s powers, have led to the Commission’s being more sensitive to pressure from Parliament than the Council is. So things have become more complicated, also owing to a number of unfortunate incidents. I would only observe now that the growth in Parliament’s powers has made Parliament much more aware of the need for it to take decisions by the appropriate deadlines, and, when it itself calls for a particular power, for it not to be accused of not exercising it. Whereas, when its power was more declaratory than legal, it was often hard to get things moving. Where we are nowadays is that we operate on the basis that the Commission takes Parliament’s importance into account, with, of course, the special feature that the Commission has no majority in Parliament. So on each issue it has to exert itself to put together a majority in Parliament, persuade them and so on. But the skill of winning Parliament round to a view isn’t all that different from the way of putting things across to public opinion or the Council. It takes longer, you have to take more care over it and be aware that that natural complicity no longer exists nowadays. So the Commission has to win Parliament’s trust. It doesn’t automatically have it.

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