Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 388)
THURSDAY 26 APRIL 2007
RT HON LORD PATTEN OF BARNES
Q380 Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean:
It has lasted several years with Israel.
Lord Patten of Barnes: Not really.
Q381 Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean:
I remember being told if I went to speak to Yasser Arafat as a
Middle East minister I would simply not be welcome in Israel.
That really does diminish one's ability then to negotiate, having
listened to both sides of the debate.
Lord Patten of Barnes: There was never a moment
in my five years when the Israelis did not turn up to a Euro-Med
summit, did not want to come and talk to the European Union about
different aspects of the Barcelona Process. At the same time,
Mr Sharon would say that he would not talk to any European if
they had first been to see Mr Arafat. But if you allow yourself
to be bullied out of what you think is right by that sort of temporary
unilateralism then you do not get anywhere.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: Fair enough.
Thank you.
Q382 Lord Lea of Crondall:
We touched much earlier in the discussion on whether there is
an institutional reason why Europe lacks clout and you are the
world's leading expert almost on the institutional dimension of
European foreign policy. We are speaking now at a time when it
is clear we are moving towards having an EU foreign minister.
The Prime Minister, with Gordon Brown's support, has sent a letter
to Angela Merkel or something like that. Do you think any institutional
change can do much to avoid the catch-22 that prime ministers
and presidents, Blair, Chirac, Merkel, need to have a profile
in the Middle East on any major question? They have voters to
think of. At the same time, we know that it is precisely because
the Americans cannot pick up the telephone, they say, and talk
to somebody that there is an alibi for Europe never being able
to get its act together. Obviously you know this inside, out,
backwards, forwards and sideways, but could you say a little bit
more about it Is it all a red herring this institutional stuff
or is it quite important to Europe's clout?
Lord Patten of Barnes: I think the institutional
stuff, first of all, applies in Washington as well as it does
in Brussels. For most of my time in Brussels you would not have
known who to phone in Washington to find out what foreign or security
policy was. Was it the President who knew? Was it the Vice-President
who knew? Was it Mr Libby who knew? Was it the National Security
Council? Was it the Secretary of State? Was it the Pentagon? I
think the Henry Kissinger question can be asked in reverse. Secondly,
I have never believed—and this has put me at odds with some
of my colleagues—that you always need to make institutional
changes or have institutional fixes to deal with political problems.
I think it is true on the whole that institutional changes can
produce political impetus and political pressures, but I do not
take the view today that you need a European Constitution—because
there are 27 Member States of the European Union and now the place
is not working properly. I do think part 1 of the late lamented
constitution has a great deal to be said for it. Dealing with
the institutional issues, dealing with issues which are of great
importance to individual nation states, like a two-and-a-half
year term for a full-time President of the Council, like double
majority voting and like a double-hatted High Representative (I
think the word for double-hatting—which Europe has not used
yet but doubtless will before long—is bi-petasic),
would not render irrelevant or impotent the Quai d'Orsay or King
Charles Street or other foreign ministries. It would mean that
the sort of powers I was able to summon up or the money I was
able to call up as a European Commissioner would be part of the
armoury of things that a High Representative of the Council was
automatically able to do. There is a consequence of this which
I think we have been a bit coy in dealing with and that is the
role of the delegations of the European Commission around the
region and around the world. If you are a representative of Europe
in Cairo and you are not only responsible for relaying the decisions
taken by the Council of Ministers on political issues to the Egyptian
government but also have at the same time £200 million or
£300 million of development assistance and access to soft
loans and your own trade negotiator, then your relationships with
your fellow . . . not ambassadors, because European heads of delegation
are not ambassadors, but your fellow Europeans in this or that
capital are obviously profoundly affected. It is why I have always
believed that the European Foreign Service, if you can describe
it thus, should be composed not only of Commission insiders but
of representatives of the Member States; in other words that there
should be much more in/outing between the foreign services of
Member States and the Commission. Of course, if you are in the
foreign ministry of some Member States, however brilliant and
good you are, you are going to find a job working for the European
Union almost anywhere in the world a lot more responsible and
a lot more interesting than a job working for your own government,
so I think you would get some very high quality people. I would
hope that at some stage the European Commission and the Council's
secretariat would see the point of establishing—they are
always called a committee of wise men and women in Brussels, and
sometimes they are wise—of establishing a committee to look
at how you could amalgamate much more effectively Commission staff
and the staff from nation states, because that is one change in
the treaty which would make delivery on the ground different in
quality than it is at present.
Q383 Lord Crickhowell:
You have touched on some of the issues in question 9, which is
what is the assessment of the roles played by the EU High Representative
and of the EU Special Representative to the MEPP. You have talked
about the Commission's delegation to Egypt and so on. Particularly
in this connection, how do you see the coordination of the relationship,
shall I put it, between the Special Representative and the Commission's
delegations to Israel and the West Bank and Gaza? I think we got
the message when we were in Brussels that the Special Representative
kept in very close touch with the European foreign ministers,
having very regular, I think fortnightly meetings, and you could
see how that link was taking place. But how do you see the role
of the Special Representative and the relationship with the Commission?
Lord Patten of Barnes: I feel myself that if
you have a double-hatted High Representative and you are attempting
to bring together the work of the Council secretariat in external
relations and the work which is already done by the Commission,
the argument for having Special Representatives on the ground
is considerably weakened and that you should regard your heads
of delegations on the ground as Special Representatives. I think
it is very easy to undercut the role of heads of delegations,
whether in the Caucuses or Middle East or elsewhere, by, in my
view, the rather incontinent appointment of Special Representatives,
so I would have hoped that the bi-petasic Javier Solana
would be able to work through heads of delegations rather than
a number of Special Representatives. Some of the institutional
tensions which exist at the moment between the High Representative
and the Commission would not be eliminated, they would be changed
by the sorts of proposals in part 1 of the treaty. For example
you would no longer, I think, have tensions with a Commissioner;
you would have tensions with the full-time President of the Council
and with the President of the Commission. But whoever drafts institutional
arrangements can never draft their way around the fact that whether
or not people get on together depends on their personalities and
their good sense rather more than the precise definitions of their
jobs. Javier Solana and I regarded it as imperative that we got
on well together whatever the tensions between our respective
institutions. But those tensions are not very helpful. There have
always been some people in the Commission who have thought the
Commission should take over foreign policy—which would be
completely barking. There have always been some people in the
secretariat who thought the Commission budget should be something
which they could raid whenever they wanted, in order to meet this
or that paragraph in a communiqué. So there are problems
on both sides.
Q384 Lord Crickhowell:
Parliament hates the whole business because it has no control
or involvement with Solana at all. We got that message very clearly.
Lord Patten of Barnes: They had huge involvement
when I was there, I have to say, with the Commissioner for External
Relations. Indeed,
Q385 Lord Crickhowell:
They do not feel they have effective involvement with Solana.
Lord Patten of Barnes: That may or may not be
the case but I used to sometimes feel that my engagement in the
parliament—which of course, I much enjoyed: it was a salutary
democratic experience!—underlined my belief that parliaments
talk most about the things over which they have least control
and influence and I endlessly found myself in debates about European
policy on parts of the world where Europe is unlikely to make
any impact whatsoever but it was an agreeable experience—up
to a point.
Q386 Lord Hannay of Chiswick:
Could I go back to the issues of relations with Israel and ask
you to comment on the two aspects. You had an exchange with Baroness
Symons about how we should handle it if the Israelis try to cold
shoulder us when we decide who to talk to amongst the Arabs. Would
you feel that the capacity of the Europeans to strong arm the
Israelis is not very great?
Lord Patten of Barnes: Yes.
Q387 Lord Hannay of Chiswick:
And frankly will always drive the Israelis straight back into
the arms of the United States, who will then respond in a rather
knee-jerk way which will split the Europeans from the Americans.
You may get as many plaudits as you like in Arab capitals but
not advance the process very far. If you agree with that, do you
not feel, as I do, that we might be doing better in concentrating
on the political horizon which no one talks about, which is what
Europe's relationship might be with a post-settlement Israel?
How is Israel to fit into the European Union's view of the world
if there were a settlement in the Middle East, given the fact
that the idea that it will just become another Middle Eastern
country is frankly pretty visionary, shall we say, if we are being
polite. It will not become just another Middle Eastern country
and it will want. That is somewhere where it seems to me Europe
has something that Israel desperately wants, whether it is markets
or values or an ability to get even more deeply involved in a
whole range of European policies in higher education and elsewhere.
Do you think that political horizon might be worth sketching out
a little bit more fully as part of an overall approach to getting
a Middle East settlement?
Lord Patten of Barnes: Yes, I do. I agree with
most of what you said in your introductory remarks, though I do
not think it is written on marble that Europe will not have as
much influence in encouraging movement in Israel as Elliott Abrams
and as in preventing movement in Israel. I think we should have
a lot more influence than we do, not least through America on
Israel. As I said at the outset, we should have done more to raise
the political price of inaction in Israel or in America or of
doing things which are plainly wrong. Clearly, Israel's position
is going to be different, not only if and when there is an agreement
but if and when Turkey becomes a member of the European Union
as well. Indeed, I think our relations with the whole of the Middle
East changed quite a good deal in those circumstances. But I would
certainly see a very strong case for Israel having the same sort
of customs agreement and the same sort of trading relationship
with Europe that Turkey has today, perhaps even more. When you
look at the trade flows and the investment flows, you see how
important the European market is to Israel and the other way round.
Israel has been doing economically extraordinarily well because
of its very effective IT sector in the last few years. I think
there are very strong reasons for stressing the economic relationship
with Israel in the long term. I repeat what I said at the outset:
we should never underestimate the number of Israelis, including
prominent Israelis, who rather share our view of what should be
happening in the region. They are sometimes inhibited from saying
that because to say anything good about Europe and Israel tends
to make you very unpopular.
Q388 Lord Boyce:
You have given us a flavour of how important you think the European
Union is in general. I wonder if you would like to say something
about the effectiveness of some of the European Union instruments.
You touched on the Euro-Med dialogue, but what about the Neighbourhood
Policy. Perhaps you would say something about that. And what about
some of the operational missions, such as the election monitors?
If you think it is not all it should be, how could it be improved?
Lord Patten of Barnes: I think our election
observation mission is one of the most important and useful things
that we do. I think it has been extremely important not to undermine
the credibility of those operations by allowing observation missions
to take a role where we do not actually think the situation on
the ground is conducive to a fair election in the first place.
For example, I remember declining to send an election observation
mission to look at the referendum campaign in Venezuela. It was
perfectly plain that the arrangements on the ground were crook
from the beginning. If you sent an observation mission in and
they told you that everybody on the day had been able to vote
in the right way and ballot papers had been collected properly,
you were overlooking the fact that the whole system was distorted.
I think the credibility of the election observation missions is
very important and that they have undoubtedly done a better job
in a number of parts of the world, Zimbabwe, for example, than
the communiqués and Council conclusions that we drafted
with infinite patience and not much effect. The Neighbourhood
Policy—though I am, I suppose, largely responsible for it
or partly responsible—falls down on two grounds. First of
all, our reluctance to accept that enlargement has not yet finished.
The Neighbourhood Policy was really designed in retrospect as
a way of answering the question that Ukraine posed about how we
would be prepared to recognise their "European vocation".
I am a strong believer myself, provided you do not dilute the
criteria, of Ukraine and Maldon becoming members of the European
Union, of Turkey in due course and the rest of the Balkans becoming
members. And I do not think that makes it impossible to run the
club if you do all that. I of course accept that you cannot go
on enlarging the European Union until you get to North Korea.
There are limits and those border areas, like the Caucuses, like
the Central Asian republics in due course, should encourage the
use of different and more preferential economic arrangements.
That raises the second question about the Neighbourhood Policy.
I think sometimes it does not offer people quite enough in return
for the political obligations and other things that we ask of
them, whether in terms of access for their products or financial
support. I repeat what I said: the Neighbourhood Policy is to
some extent an attempt to avoid the enlargement question. We tried
something similar before, when Austria and Sweden and Finland
wanted to become members of the European Union. I think I am right
in saying—and Lord Hannay will correct me if I am wrong—that
Monsieur Delore suggested they should have something that was
not quite membership of the European Union but was a warmer relationship
than they had then. It is like telling people that they can join
the club provided they do not play golf at the weekend. It is
simply not acceptable to most of them. That is an instrument which
I think reflects a political hesitation or indecision in the European
Union, though it is well intentioned. The Euro-Med process was
a visionary process. When America decided it supported democracy
in the Middle East and put $50 million on the table for doing
so, we had years of experience of spending hundreds, billions
of euros directly in grant and spending, I would guess, 3.5 billion
in soft loans through the EIB, whose activities in the Mediterranean
area now should not be underestimated, so I think we have instruments
which should be perhaps delivering more than they have. Perhaps
I could add one personal thought on that which relates to the
question of human rights and political values. We at present apply
negative conditionality in our development assistance. If a country
infringes too radically our view of how well they should be behaving
and how well they should be protecting civil liberties, then we
say we will take money away from them. We hardly ever do because
there is nearly always some Member State which has a particularly
strong relationship with the country and is against penalising
in that way. I have always been in favour—and I think we
have started to shift in this direction in the Euro-Med partnership—of
positive conditionality; that is trying to reach agreements with
countries on what they are proposing to do and then rewarding
them with the payment of additional grant for doing it. When I
left the European Commission, about 10% of the Euro-Med budget
was intended to be used in that way. I am not sure whether it
has been or not and I would myself like to see a bigger amount
used in that way.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for the
amount of time you have given us, which is rather more than we
originally suggested to your office. Obviously your own first-hand
experience while you were a Commissioner but also subsequently
in the region has been very valuable to us. Although we have come
to our preliminary conclusions, I think almost all the things
you have said will have confirmed us in the direction we were
already pointing but they have given us a good deal more useful
evidence to sustain the positions which we were adopting. Again,
thank you very much indeed. Having had the chance to come before
us, I hope you will not mind too much if on some subsequent inquiry
we call on you again because tapping your experience of the Commission
and its work is very useful to us and you do not have to come
quite as far as some other witnesses. Thank you very much indeed.
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