THE NORDICS VERSUS THE LATINS

Rachel Johnson reveals the top-secret Commission document on Europe's eternal divide

Brussels SCOOP! At last, with trembling fingers, I take the document, here on the ninth floor of the rue Archimede. Outside the window looms the famous Berlaymont building, still swaddled in its upholstery of cream canvas and rearing above the quartier Europeen like some gigantic pouffe. After months of trying, I have penetrated the shabby offices of the Commission's think- tank, the Cellule de Prospective; and here it is, out of its filing cabinet.

Here is that long-rumoured analysis of the EU Commission by a Cambridge anthropologist; and as I turn the pages I can see why the Cellule has decided to keep it as closely under wraps as the sym- bolic heart of Europe, the asbestos-infest- ed Berlaymont itself.

Brussels, you see, is beset by an army of reformers, falling over each other in their efforts to transform the Commission: Jean- Luc Dehaene is issuing a report on reform next month; Neil Kinnock, the EC vice- president, is in charge of reforming the Commission; and Mr Kinnock's boss, Romano Prodi, is promising a 'comprehen- sive blueprint for reform in February 2000' that will streamline the work of the Com- mission and transform the 'culture' of the place; but if anything has proved the futility of their efforts, it is this, An Anthropological Study of the European Commission.

This is the second inquiry by Dr Maryon McDonald of Robinson College, Cam- bridge, who was invited by Jacques Delors in 1993 to assess whether a European identity was emerging in Brussels. It did not take Dr McDonald long to establish there was not: 'Each nationality in the Commission has its club, its own network, its civil service association, even its church,' she reported in 1993.

Five years on, the Commission asked her back to see how the institution was adapting to the inclusion of Sweden, Fin- land and Austria, and to the first internal reform efforts of senior personnel. She spent eight months interviewing, and pro- duced a 64-page report, the final pages of which are devoted to a straight-faced list of titles such as 'Rams and Billy Goats: The Key to the Mediterranean Code of Honour' and 'The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy'.

In her study, Dr McDonald explains why efforts to create a modernised European civil service are doomed. She reveals there is a gulf between les Nordiques (i.e. Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ger- many, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland and Austria), who are not culturally averse to changing 'la maison'; and les latins or meridionaux (i.e. France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Belgium), who are extremely resistant to change.

'It is assumed there is going to be some monocultural solution to the recent prob- lems of the Commission,' she told me. 'But it's not going to happen.' Her report quotes the EC's former personnel director, who told her that 'all one needed to remember about the Commission was that it was run by the German army, the French adminis- tration and the Italian Mafia'.

I can see why the Commission decided to sit on her report, which is full of such ripe observations. There is a chapter called 'And Who Are You?', which describes the hierarchical nature of an institution where the top brass can zoom up to their offices in express lifts, without having to mingle with the worker bees; and there is one called 'Dark Tales', in which Dr McDonald recounts all the scan- dals she was told by her interviewees, including the assertion that 'the documen- tation passing through DG 20 [the depart- ment in charge of financial control] could put up to 30 per cent of the officials involved in prison'.

In fact, Dr McDonald comes up with the same stereotypes one finds on cartoon postcards throughout Brussels depicting a funny ha-ha Europe where the Germans are the policemen, the Belgians the tax inspectors, the British the cooks, and so on. Only here the conclusions are based on empirical observation, which is why Messrs Kinnock, Prodi and the rest ignore Dr McDonald at their peril.

Dr McDonald says the North-South divide is widest when determining, 'what is the European Commission actually for?' There is a Nordic ideal of public service and a southern code of state-controlled

patronage, she says, and never the twain shall meet. For Britons, Danes at al., 'the

Commission does not belong to its officials, it belongs to the European taxpayer, and Europe's citizens are its customers, who will not buy unless the product is good'. For southerners, there is no comparable sense of the role of the public sector. Indeed, there is no good translation of the term 'civil servant' in French, which is why Com- mission officials are universally known as fonctionnaims.

The Italians, for example, see working for the Commission as a duty. A duty, that is, to dispense patronage, even in an insti- tution that is supposedly controlled by a strict statute where most jobs are dished out according to nationality. 'There is a feeling that personal networks dominate,' Dr McDonald says. 'It is well known from self-comparative studies that patronage sys- tems operate fairly openly in southern Europe, as an important if not the only moral system.' The power of patronage, she says, was reinforced by the former pres- ident Jacques Debra, whose cabinet encouraged the use of patronage as a 'major way of getting work done'.

The French regard themselves as an elite corps, and are disgusted by the way that management consultants have been brought in to try to transform their culture, 'as if we are Coca-Cola!' For the southern- ers, the notion of applying private-sector management techniques is an outrage. An Italian official was so upset by being asked to introduce some minor reform that 'he accused his boss of being typically British and un-European, who would walk over a dead body to get what he wanted'.

In her time at the Commission, Dr McDonald made one key observation. In an institution composed of 15 different cul-

tures, the defining characteristic was flou, the French word for a vague murkiness, which suited les latins just fine but enraged

the more meticulous northerners. She heard many times how the Commission operated with no uniform filing system, scrappy minute-taking, with officials hoard- ing information rather than passing it on.

One northern official complained to her about the 'shambles' created when some- one went on leave. 'You feel you are rifling through someone's underwear drawer to try to find the information necessary to answer an urgent query,' she was told. And 'coming afresh to a dossier can be a night- mare'.

This panier de crabes as officials call it, is

the place that the very southern Romano Prodi has promised to transform by Febru- ary 2000, in order to gear up for the chal- lenge of enlargement. And if things are as bad as Dr McDonald describes between the North and the South, what on earth will happen when the East comes on board, one wonders, demanding its share of nationally flagged senior positions and spaces in the underground car park?