EU is expert at last-gasp fudge – and now there’s light at end of the tunnel
IN MAY 1992, Ray MacSharry kept 12 agriculture ministers ‘hostage’ at the Charlemagne Building in Brussels for 50 hours of continuous haggling until they finally cut a deal on his EU farm reform proposals.
Back in that era of innocence and lax security, this writer stood quietly in a corridor and observed ‘Mac the Knife’, the agriculture commissioner, do the rounds of the delegation rooms accompanied by the Portuguese agriculture minister, who was nominally chairing the talks as part of his country’s six-month presidency. Stopping outside one delegation room, the commissioner admonished his chairman.
“Now we offer them absolutely nothing until they reveal their bottomline demands,” the Sligo man warned, grasping the Portuguese minister’s sleeve.
This grinding process of marathon EU negotiations has been called many things. In those days it was dubbed “consensus by attrition.”
All-night talks concluding just before breakfast were a common means of breaking deadlock on problems which appeared insurmountable.
The clattering sound of a trolley laden with bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label Whisky, being wheeled by the catering staff towards the ministerial conference room, was always a hopeful sign. “A stiffener” would be served to the ministers to lower expectations further and reach a compromise.
There was a farcical side. Fishery talks could never, ever, end without
It’s not like the days of the hostage taking to get a deal
an all-nighter – even in less contentious times. So, sometimes those talks did not start until after 8pm.
“We got the best possible deal in very difficult circumstances. There is something in this for everyone,” was the usual early-morning mantra at a series of press briefings from each of the bleary-eyed ministers.
The range of inventiveness to surmount problems has known few limits. In 2002, carrots were given special status to allow Portuguese carrot jam the same standing as fruit jams. In 2010, French snails were given similar treatment to allow snail producers avail of subsidies accorded to some fish producers.
Such moves were and are an easy target for lampooners. But they were part of the oil in the wheels which kept the rickety bicycle, that the EU sometimes is, rolling onwards.
The plain fact is that Brussels is the home of the compromise deal. Rather like sausage-making, perhaps we should not always see how some of these compromises are forged. But we must also get back to first principles and remember why the EU and its various forerunners came into being – to successfully end a centurylong cycle of senseless slaughter.
The most hideous and expensive compromises, which might in extremis emerge, are surely preferable. It is too easy to take six decades of peace and creaky co-operation for granted.
This weekend, a team of EU and UK negotiators go into what is now called “the tunnel” – a format of negotiating purdah, or isolation and secrecy. The tunnel appears to have replaced a form of ministerial hostage-taking exemplified by Ray MacSharry and other tough politicians.
Earlier this week a journalist, frustrated by the dearth of hard information, asked EU officials: “Where is the tunnel.” The cryptic reply was strangely revealing and in keeping with the surreal nature of Brexit. “The tunnel is not a place – it’s a state of mind.”
This time the negotiators are dealing with something which never occurred up until June 2016. One party to the talks, the UK, wants to leave and we cannot assume the implicit premise of all previous negotiations which turned on the need to cut a deal and move on.
The task ahead is also unique. They need to avoid a Border in Northern Ireland, which must be kept within a United Kingdom, which in turn is cutting itself off from the EU single market and customs union.
Surely it is tempting for the negotiators to ask: Want anything else with that?