When Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty on European integration one month ago, many said their main concern was an increasing concentration of power in the EC bureaucracy in Brussels. It is a familiar refrain in Britain, too; former prime minister Margaret Thatcher never misses an opportunity to attack the idea of a European superstate as socialism by the back door, “combining all the most striking failures of our age.“But Thatcher and most other skeptics miss the point. As it is now evolving the Community is in little danger from the Bolsheviks. Far more likely is a Europe dominated by what the political scientist Theodore J. Lowi calls “interest-group liberalism.” That is the underlying characteristic of U.S. politics, responsible for the paralysis of American public life today. If the EC wants one vision of its future, let it look across the Atlantic.
The EC is not a United States of Europe. It may never be. But it is a governing institution in a way that other supranational organizations–NATO, for example–are not. It possesses some of the aspects of sovereignty–and with its projected common currency and common foreign and security policies will some day have more. Most important, it has the power to regulate the way people do business within its boundaries. It does this through a bureaucracy small by comparison with any national civil service but already well established and steeped in Pan-European attitudes and values. Eurocrats suffer no shortage of good will, but they are subject to the iron law of bureaucracy: all regulatory agencies tend to become captives of their clienteles.
Europeans like to lampoon the minor absurdities of regulation in Brussels: for example, the mania for “harmonization” that led to strictures against curved cucumbers because it’s easier to pack straight ones. Or the setting of microbiological product standards that would force French cheese makers to give up traditional varieties made from unpasteurized milk. In theory bureaucracies do no more than develop rules, then enforce them. As the sociologist Max Weber argued in his classic studies of the subject long ago, the whole point of bureaucracy is government by sheer expertise, free from special influence. It wants decisions to be predictable, uniform, impartial. “The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism,” said Weber, “compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the nonmechanical modes of production.”
It doesn’t quite work out that way in practice. Bureaucracies are never independent of the interest groups that make up their constituencies. And typically, they incorporate those groups into the rule-making process. In the United States, any emissions standard proposed by, say, the Environmental Protection Agency will be subject to heavy lobbying by the automobile industry. Final wording of the rule will inevitably reflect industry concerns about profits or vulnerability to foreign competitors with better pollution-control technology. By itself, this may even be good policy. But when the effect is multiplied throughout the entire regulatory structure of the U.S. federal government, the result is interest-group liberalism, a system in which powerful groups have at least effective veto power within their own niches. As Lowi points out, interest-group liberalism is convenient for politicians. It allows them to avoid confrontation among interests. They simply delegate conflict to the bureaucracy. But then no one has to choose among competing interests even when that becomes necessary. The result is government largely unable to act.
Is the EC headed for some form of Eurosclerosis? At last week’s Lisbon summit meeting, one Community leader after another disavowed all intentions of building a European superstate. But a bureaucracy need not be big to be captive. As part of the drive toward a single market, agencies of the European Commission already routinely generate a welter of directives on such matters as product standards, local-content requirements, government subsidies and public procurement. Spooked by the Danish vote on Maastricht, EC leaders promise adherence to the member states’ national laws and regulations wherever uniformity is not required. But bureaucracy has its own logic. And whenever it must write a
The fact of EC regulation has already led to the development of Pan-European interest groups. In 1990, for example, European car manufacturers created an industry lobby that persuaded Brussels to limit Japanese imports. Farmers, always a volatile element in EC politics, are forging protectionist links across national lines. And just last week, the continent’s three biggest computer makers–Groupe Bull of France, Olivetti of Italy and Siemens-Nixdorf of Germany–formed a joint venture called Trans European Information Systems. They hope to use EC mechanisms to gain competitive advantage against foreign manufacturers. Historically, interest groups flourish where there is no strong political leadership to oppose them. The danger for Europe now is that fear of seeming too power hungry will cause Community leaders to abandon that obligation.
