International The Telegraph

INTERNATIONAL

-Marc Abeles,

In the initial stages of European construction, European official constituted a small group of pioneers highly committed to the Community ideal, but the order of values was very quickly reversed. The European civil service was not, in fact, as highly thought of as it is today. Brussels was not a very popular choice for national civil servants. Graduates of the ENA attracted by this career were unusual. When older people familiar with the 1960s are questioned, they are all in agreement in emphasizing the “missionary” aspect of this choice, which was seen as a sort of commitment. They stress the almost militant motivation that was theirs. Today things have changed a great deal. Many young Eurocrats followed this track because it opened up new prospects on a job market that was often limited nationally. Salaries and job stability are weighty arguments in attracting young graduates to Brussels. In addition, since the end of the 1980s, Europe has represented a major challenge on a worldwide scale, and the Community career has acquired real prestige.

Of course, the old criticizes the young, pointing out a certain lack of enthusiasm among them. They also underline their lack of imagination and occasionally the ruthlessly ambitious side of their young colleagues. It is true that today everyone becomes part of complex machinery as soon as they enter the European institutions. Not that the Brussels bureaucracy is very different from the French public services. After all, the status of European civil servants was copied from the French model.

Recreating oneself each day: The Eurocrats, however, are trapped in a sort of perpetual motion. In the European organizations, one actually likes working under pressure. This authority is particularly efficient when it finds itself being assigned short-term objectives. The word “finalize” recurs frequently in civil servants’ vocabulary. Whether it involves a problem, a meeting or negotiations in progress, it is important to finish by the deadline, and the action taken must be carried out. In periods of decline, the atmosphere becomes gloomy. Within the Commission an air of uncertainty, even anxiety, can be observed. The absence of a strong reference point for national civil servants, as represented by the State, its regulations and its government, becomes tangible. What then transpires is the Community’s inability to do any soul-searching. In these circumstances we can gauge the difficulty both experience in relating to a historical context. “Every thing happens more quickly at the Commission than in an ordinary administration. You forge ahead without looking back”, notes one official. It’s about digesting the event by avoiding commenting unduly on its various implications.

Everything happens as if Europe had to recreate itself each day and assert its continuing relevance. We seem not to know how the memory works, so much so that each successive crisis is buried under a blanket of oblivion. Reference to the past is limited to a brief mention of the founding fathers. There is no evidence of the presence of a tradition. Torn between the urgent matters of the present and the ideal of a better future, the Eurocrats themselves feel that they are a very long way from this. Or these, European society, or societies, towards which they are working. “ We are angels with no bodies”, one of them notes cynically. Hanging on to an ideal or caught up by the circumstances of the present, Europe’s’ practitioners are in a perilous situation, which makes them excellent targets for criticism emanating from various social categories and which causes stress and anxiety among the most vulnerable of them.

An another characteristic of community life is that it mixes up cultures, traditions and languages, which are very different. Running Europe is to engage in a vast tinkering operation where the attempt is made to combine know-how, languages, administrative and political concepts that are some times difficult to reconcile. The written output (memoranda, regulations, circulars, etc) resulting from this unrelenting blending of cultures if often described as esoteric. To many it is quite simply incomprehensible.

It is precisely because we take account of the different languages and the need to compensate for bad translations that we arrive at this kind of jargon. “ Euro-speak” is one of the jewels in the crown of multi-cultural tinkering by the European institutions. But beyond this, in the daily lives of the officials, the continuing co-existence of different cultural worlds, while an incomparable factor of openness, may also give rise to some destabilization. Divisions are alive and well between those originating from large and those from small countries, between the traditions of the North and those of the South and between wine drinkers and beer drinkers. Continually being confronted with other ways of thinking and speaking forces everyone to show great flexibility.

But Eurocrats sometimes need to rediscover their roots. Each nationality has a club or association where they can meet their fellow countrymen. An attempt is thereby made to compensate for this feeling of being in no man’s land. All the more so since, in Brussels, even European officials have the reputation of being privileged. Exemption from taxes paid to Belgium, but retained at source and paid into Community budget, the levels of salaries and allowances and the fringe benefits are frequently misunderstood and subject to a constant torrent of often unfair criticism.

Behind the concrete wall put up by the Community institutions, however, we see men and women who are coping with a complex situation. The relative exteriority of officials in relation to their place of residence fuels a certain anxiety. Perceptible today, it becomes apparent when they view the future, retirement and their children’s destiny. A privileged elite at first glance, they are also more fragile beings than it would seem, harnessed to an interminable task, far from their native country and immersed in the cauldron of multiculturalism. (The author is Director of National Center for Scientific Research-Anthropology research center of the welfare institutions and organizations: Director of Research at the CNRS; Director of LAIOS, Paris, France. Text courtesy: Label France, Number 40, July 2000-Chief editor).