Sorting facts from myths
László Andor speaks frankly to Tim King about the EU’s policy failures – and some successes – and doubts the need for super-commissioners.
The advent of a new European Commission resurrects an age-old question: to what extent is a European commissioner a politician or a technocrat? There is no right answer to that question: every commissioner answers by striking his or her own balance. Occasionally, however, there is a wrong answer: within recent memory Antonio Tajani was too much a politician and insufficiently technocratic.
Sometimes the balance is influenced by the dossier that the commissioner holds. Competition has a strong technocratic element, for instance. But Karel Van Miert, commissioner for competition in 1993-99, was instinctively more political and less technocratic than the man who succeeded him, Mario Monti (1999-2004). And, in another heavily technocratic policy field, agriculture, Franz Fischler (1995-2004), was clearly a better politician than Dacian Ciolos (2010-14).
László Andor, who is reaching the end of his term as European commissioner for employment, social affairs and inclusion, has over the past five years been carving out his own distinctive answer to that politician-technocrat question. When we speak, he has just been giving yet another speech about labour mobility. It is a speech that in some respects is wilfully unpolitical: it argues that the brouhaha – particularly in the UK – about the free movement of citizens is numerically unjustified. Andor sets out to discredit three myths about labour mobility – that flows of EU citizens are enormous, that they have increased during the economic crisis and that mobile workers place a burden on the host countries.
He lays out his argument with the dogged reliance on data that one might expect of an academic economist. But reading the speech I could not help but think a more political animal would betray greater interest in how and why these myths had taken hold. How is it that the UK Independence Party is making electoral hay from these myths and the mainstream political parties are running scared?
Andor, who to his credit has taken his argument to the British media and has battle-scars to prove it, expresses only regret that the facts have not yet won out. The argument has not been put across sufficiently well: his faith in rationalism is untouched. “It is a political problem for the national elites,” he says. He is adamant that elsewhere in Europe “there is nothing comparable to the British UKIP and Daily Mail rhetoric”, on labour mobility. That debate, he says, is characterised by “distortion and manipulation”.
For Andor, “it is a question of the single market”. The four freedoms are, he says, “one package”. “You cannot have a European Union in which commodities have more rights than people.”
Faith
I ask about how the eurozone crisis has shaken faith in the EU as a transfer union, citing the German distaste for bailing out Greece where people retired so early (an example plucked from the scrapbook of Angela Merkel, a consummate politician). Andor resorts to the data again – which show that the relative retirement ages in Germany and Greece are only nine months different. “We have not managed to respond to all the stereotypes, which sometimes spontaneously, sometimes through manufacturing, were created in this period identifying false causes and false solutions.”
None of this should be taken as suggesting that Andor does not have political skills. He knows how to claim credit for “proposals and initiatives to provide a very rich and comprehensive economic and social agenda”. He describes how Europe 2020 strengthened his employment and social portfolio inside the Commission and how the economic crisis gave impetus and legitimacy to an increased budget and prioritised his policy initiatives.
But he does not have a politician’s preoccupations and priorities. For instance, he does not feel bound by the politician’s obligation to pretend to be in permanent control in his frank admission that the Commission – and the EU as a whole – was knocked sideways by the eurozone crisis. The assumption at the start of his term of office was that the EU was on the way to recovery from the turbulence of 2008 and was in search of smart, sustainable growth. But the crisis changed the agenda.
“Instead of sustainable growth and job creation, we had to come up with initiatives – the most important of which were the employment package of 2012 and the social investment package of 2013 – that were aimed at restoring the employment potential and social protection of the European Union at a time of unprecedented crisis.”
Andor glosses over differences within the Commission. He finds it easier than might some other members of the college to claim to have been working “side by side” with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for demand-side interventions and for more attention to be paid to reducing inequality.
He manages, while hinting that the prevailing economic policies were wrong, delicately to suggest that the Commission had “helped work out” a consensus in support of unconventional measures – notably the Youth Guarantee, with the twin aims of bringing relief and reform.
Asked about Juncker’s plans to create a tier of vice-presidents within the next college of commissioners, who will take control of particular policy areas and filter initiatives, Andor manages to voice dissent while couching it in largely positive terms.
“What I saw before the election was a lot of discussion about how complex the EU is, how complex the European Commission is. I think it was a lot of distraction. It was a deliberate distraction to avoid a real discussion about the policies. It is not the structure of the Commission that failed. It is certain policies that brought the EU into a second recession in 2011…So maybe some of the organisational changes are a product of this: that you want to resolve a problem that didn’t really exist. The idea of clusters has become very fashionable: that already existed. I was chairing the group of commissioners on pensions [Olli Rehn, Michel Barnier, Viviane Reding, Algirdas Šemeta, Janusz Lewandowski], which had a real agenda… So you don’t need a very complex structure in which one line commissioner can be subordinated to one or two vice-presidents.”
He observes, tactfully, that: “It may take some time to ensure this functions in a smooth way.” It is a belated attempt at a political answer.
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