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INTRODUCTION
Right after the Euro-Launch, just before the enlargement to the Central and Eastern European Countries, and at the time when all the actors of the European construction are engaged in a debate on the in-depth reorganization of EU institutions, Europe2020 which has actively contributed to this effort through its work of anticipation since 1998, today makes a concrete proposal (see concept of Euro-Ring project in appendix).
Based on the double requirement of EU democratization and institutional reorganization, the proposal consists in rooting the on-going debate and questioning the very basis of a political entity : its centers of power, its institutional capitals.
The question is simple : Is the institutional triangle – Brussels-Strasbourg-Luxembourg – the best possible headquarter for the EU in the 21st century? Are the reasons that prevailed over the choice of this triangle 50 years ago still valid? Are not the current political and economic constraints imposing to re-consider this original choice? Are not the new possibilities offered by technological developments imposing to re-consider the solutions found at the time? What could be gained from a debate on this issue?
The principle is the following: at the time of Internet, High Speed trains and networking, at a time when it has become imperative for the institutions to connect to the citizens, would it not be a solution to de-concentrate / deploy the EU institutional system over a circle of capital cities at the heart of the EU?
For some years already, Europe 2020 has been concerned by this geographical aspect of the institutional reorganization. But in the last two years, the idea to re-examine the principles of EU institutional geography has become less a “taboo”, and and has today become a real theme for a rational and forward looking debate. On this basis, the “Euro-Ring 1” seminar was designed to gather the actors mainly concerned: local representatives and technical operators.
The success of this launch meeting proved that Europe 2020 was right: a prestigious partnership for the project’s launch: the City of Paris deciding to support and host the event at the Hôtel de Ville; and more than 30 participants deciding to get involved in the debate and launch effectively the Euro-Ring Project : the founding-group – local elected representatives of cities such as London, The Hague, Frankfurt and Paris, executives from organizations such as Thalys, Andersen, International Union of Railways, Digital Cities Network, EDF… (see list of participants in appendix).
The debates which kept the participants during the whole day enabled to cover the main founding themes of the reflexion: the new political context in Europe, the evolutions in terms of transportations and physical mobility, the evolutions in terms of technologies and intellectual mobility, the analysis of the economic impact a geographical deployment of EU institutions could have (see programme in appendix). The seminar first and foremost intended to define how a debate on the geographical location of EU institutions could develop, and to initiate a set of activities for the 2002-2003 period in order to study the conditions of feasibility of such a project.
This synthetic report of the seminar’s debate is structured around 6 parts:
I- Streamlining an on-going geographic evolution – A few decisive arguments
II- Endowing the EU with the credible capitals it needs to face 21st century challenges
III- Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by new technologies
IV- Admitting that the choice of a political entity’s capital(s) is determining as to its nature
V- Highlighting a convergence of interests around Euro-Rings
VI- Launching the “Euro-Rings Project”
It is distributed among some 2,000 people, representatives of the institutions, local authorities and private operators concerned by the project, and gathered on a discussion list created to this purpose prior to the seminar.
I- Streamlining an on-going geographic evolution – A few decisive arguments
The project that Europe 2020 today wishes to initiate is by no means a revolution. Indeed a process of geographical decentralization of EU institutions has been going on at least for a decade; however it is important now to become fully aware of this fact in order to identify, study and extend the trend in a rational way.
This trend has been detected in various events of a new kind in terms of location of the centers of power in the EU :
The choice of Frankfurt as host-city of the European Central Bank is probably the most explicit manifestation of this trend. Indeed, given the choices made at the origin of the European construction, an institution as important as the ECB should have been automatically located in one of the 3 cities of the institutional triangle. In fact this possibility was not even envisaged: it seemed obvious that the “best possible city” had to be found to host the Central Bank of the EU. It is also interesting to analyze the conditions in which Germany and Frankfurt imposed themselves as an obvious choice both for the Europeans (considering finance a competence compatible with the image they had of Germany) as for the Germans (welcoming with interest and pride this competence of the EU institutional construction)
The detachment of certain services of the European Commission and their relocation in a number of « peripheral » cities is another sign, a bit more ancient this one (end of the 80s), of this attempt by the institutions to move closer to European citizens. The European Environment Agency, the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market, the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products … therefore settled in Copenhagen, Alicante, London… in order both to build upon some compatibilities between EU competences and national vocations, and to break the image of « ivory tower » of the institution.
Even at the time of the Founding Fathers, the capital chosen for the EEC was not one city; right from the origin, the very nature of the European Community imposed the idea of a network of capitals. Fifty years later the needs and possibilities in this field have so much evolved that it would nearly be a betrayal of the spirit of the Founding Fathers not to integrate them in the debate on the institutional reorganization of the EU.
Technological evolutions (High Speed Trains, Internet…) paradoxically reinforce the natural nodes of activity and power. In fact they can play in favor of decentralization but only within a borderless space in which the most dynamic and powerful nodes of activity become the unavoidable crossroads for the flows of knowledge, power, money, culture. In the end, technological developments increase the distance between these nodal megalopolises and the rest, clearly illustrating that the EU institutions will de facto be growingly marginalized if they stay outside these circuits.
Regarding the public sector, it is a fact that a growing number of multinational companies make the decision to have more than one headquarter, each being dedicated to a specific task (RD, clients, production…), located in different countries and cities, and adopting network-based operating methods. Shell, for instance, chose to keep its double social headquarter (London and The Hague) resulting from its British-Dutch history; rather than simplify the structure to one. The private sector, compelled to very objective results of profitability and efficiency, are a good indicator of on-going evolutions in the modes of work and organization; it is all the more legitimate to wonder to which extend the reasons prevailing over these evolutions would also be valid in the public European sector as well.
II- Endowing the EU with the credible capitals it needs to face 21st century challenges
These developments of a new kind correspond to a radical change in the nature of the European entity and of its natural environment. It is now commonly admitted that since the Fall of the Wall, the Maastricht Treaty, the Euro-Switch and soon the enlargement to more than 25 members, the EU has no longer much to do with the Economic Community created in the 50s. The economic power Europe has become as a result of the success of the project of the Founding Fathers has profoundly changed the nature of the entity, of the challenges it is now confronted to and of the tools it must therefore use.
Among these challenges, 5 in particular would find in Euro-Rings some relevant assets :
The themes of EU democratization, institutional legitimacy, citizen proximity,… are now at the heart of all the debate on the future of Europe. Until now this debate remained very theoretical and lacked operational anchorage: how to legitimate an institution and not question it fundamentally? how to connect to the citizens and not consider one’s location ? A participant had this sentence: “I can see how to move the institutions closer to the citizens ; but I can’t imagine how to move 500 million citizens closer to the institutions ». Indeed, choosing for the institutional heart of the EU a network including capital cities such as London, The Hague, Bonn, Paris, Frankfurt, Cologne, Rotterdam, Amsterdam… would de facto bring the institutions closer to 200 million European citizens (a needed basis of legitimation).
The strengthening of the place of the European Union in the world is another challenge facing Europe. Difficult to assert the existence of Europe in the eyes of the outer world when the cities of reference are Brussels, Luxembourg or Strasbourg which no one hardly hears about? Difficult to present an image of strong entity when the outer work can barely locate its capitals geographically, historically or culturally! A strong entity is rooted in strong cities. After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the first measures taken by Germany to express their recovered unity and magnitude consisted in moving their institutions from Bonn to Berlin.
The EU is the first trading power and the second economic power in the world. But to remain so, the competition is rough. Against economic conurbations such as « Kyoto-Tokyo », « Los-Angeles-San Francisco », « Boston – New-York – Philadelphia », the EU needs to develop and strengthen a “global conurbation” to be the vital node of European economy, research, finance, culture. Only one region is likely to endorse this role, the « London-Delta Metropolis (Amsterdam-The Hague-Rotterdam-Utrecht) – Rhein Gebiet (Cologne-Bonn-Frankfurt) – Paris » Euro-Ring Area, or « North-Western European Global Conurbation ». Following the example of the states making alliances to develop competitive economic nodes, greater cities can elaborate a second level of trans-national integration still under-exploited.
In the last decade, the issue of recruitment and human resources has become a serious and repeated problem for the European institutions. The cities in which they are located cannot provide the appropriate employment tanks (neither for long-term recruitments nor for shorter missions). Being located away from the great nodes of cutting-edge competences in the fields of science, finance, economy, politics, culture… they can no longer attract the high level staff they need despite the salaries offered. This situation will continue to worsen as the image and status of these institutions will keep on declining. Moreover this situation results in the generalization of « incestuous » recruitment practices, with different members of a family holding positions in the same institutions. This phenomenon naturally strengthens the opacity and remoteness of the institutions and diminishes its collective competence. As regards to human resources too, a relocation within the big employment tanks provided by the Euro-Ring area could bring a double benefit : enabling higher level recruitment ; democratizing and widening recruitment within the institutions while preventing family-types of recruitment to prevail among the European institutions.
The place and role of cities within the EU edifice is more than ever a crucial issue, as it appears more and more that cities are indeed the “missing link” of the European integration: EU institutions, states, citizens are systematically referred to as actors and future actors (concerning the citizens) of the European construction in the 21st century; but the debate does not (or little or badly) integrate the cities. Probably because the good articulation has not yet been found: cities already relay Europe (top-down), but artificially; and cities do lobby Europe (bottom-up), but within very local motivations. The Euro-Rings Project, as it proposes to root the EU into its great historical cities, could be the solution to this question of the articulation of cities to the European project. The gradual weakening of states in the European game also contributes to weaken the position of those capital cities chosen in the 50s, as they were state-decisions.
III- Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the new technologies
« Because being remote also results from not using the existing tools to be closer »
A number of relatively recent evolutions have drastically modified the environment and work methods:
High Speed transportations have considerably transformed relations of physical proximity and geographical mobility throughout Europe. Nowadays the cities of London, Brussels, Paris, Cologne and The Hague are less than 3 hours away the ones from the others. By 2020, big cities from the whole of Europe will be connected by railway. In reaction to the competition imposed by High Speed Trains in Europe, airline companies begin to offer extremely cheap flights and thus contribute to democratize and simplify intra-European connections.
The practical constraints which weighed in the 50s over the decision to gather the institutions on a narrow triangle, no longer exist as much. It is now easy to envisage a larger de-concentration of the European institutions and not run the risk to harm the quality of the work of their staff.
Of course new technologies are the other revolution of the last decade greatly affecting work methods. Internet and emails have abolished all sense of distance for tasks such as finding information, connecting to any structure, communicating among fellows, working remotely, networking. With these new tools, there is no longer any need to be in the same city to work better (within the same office, it is often easier to communicate with a colleague by email than live). Thanks to Internet, the habit of office meetings which was beginning to waste a lot of precious time had been held back : indeed if physical meetings are still useful, their utility has changed ; the Monday morning meeting is advantageously replaced by the Internet weekly newsletter/email sent to the whole staff (and new tools in the matter appear every day).
Networking is the third major development to be mentioned here: indeed modes of organization have profoundly changed in the last decades, evolving from a pyramid-based to a network-based model. These developments relate to the three-fold constraint of efficiency, complexity and democratization of all professional activity, resulting in important changes in the very structure of companies and administrations: pyramids flatten and widen, their levels give way to network-functions, complementarities appear, organizations differentiate into autonomous entities. Organizations’ break up easily result in their decentralization and geographical deployment.
For these 3 reasons namely, it has become not only desirable, but relatively easy to deploy the main European institutions on a Euro-Ring at the heart of the network of European capital-cities, and make it the basic network-structure able to integrate future geographic and institutional developments (enlargement, institutional development…): « a Euro-Ring generator of Euro-Rings ».
IV- Admitting that the choice of one’s capital(s) is determining as to the nature of a political entity
Four cases presented by different participants should enlighten us on this question :
We have already mentioned the rather eloquent case of the move of capital in Germany after the Fall of the Wall. This example shows how much the choice of a capital and the historic characteristics of the entity it represents are related. And one of the questions underlying the Euro-Rings project precisely consists in distributing righteously institutional functions among the cities.
The Netherlands provide another interesting case of the various forms can take the centres of power. Indeed the Netherlands do not have one but three (see four) capitals: The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam (and Utrecht), organized complementarily: The Hague as the economic capital; Rotterdam as the institutional capital; Amsterdam as the cultural capital. The Dutch conurbation has more recently integrated also in order to increase its chances to become an economic node likely to compete with the great European and world capitals: the Delta Metropolis. The Dutch system is full of teachings on the “network of capitals” model, on the relation between the economic and the political spheres, on the importance of the visibility of the centres of power, on the tendency to city-specialisations…
The choice of Washington as the capital of the United States -a relatively recent event enabling some legibility- is also interesting to examine, eventhough it is somehow a counter-example. Indeed, the reasons which prevailed over the choice may no longer be those used today: a capital « not too south, not too north », these were some of the very practical constraints which prevailed in the choice of the capital of this brand new state. The symbolic power in the US, and therefore its real capital in the eyes of the rest of world, is the binomial NewYork-Washington (a situation close to the Dutch system). However Washington is also an ancient city for the United States – a lot older than the majority of present American towns-, and the case of its capital must therefore be examined in the right historical perspective.
The choice of Luxembourg in 1952 as headquarter of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), was described in the seminar as a perfect example of a « Community » compromise, disconnected from any symbolic, democratic or historical consideration. The choice imposed itself « because everybody was tired » and because Luxembourg could not worry the others. Fifty years later, it is still on the basis of this sort of « bargaining » that the geographical structure of EU institutions is founded.
These few examples show that the choice of a capital and the forms it can take largely result from the nature of the corresponding entity : an institutional entity (ECSC), a new entity (Washington), a political and economic entity (Deltametropolis), a political entity (Berlin), chose the capitals that represent them the best possible way; a choice that deserves a lot of attention as it heavily contributes to shape in return the entity it represents. Obviously, the EU has reached a stage of development imposing to reconsider the choice of its capital(s) on bases that combine democratic, political, demographic and efficiency factors.
V- Highlighting a convergence of interests around Euro-Rings
Given the context and constraints described earlier, Euro-Rings appears to be a practical solution around which can converge the interest of all the actors of the European construction:
. For European institutions, Euro-Rings is clearly a very decent basis to the on-going thinking conducted on the themes of legitimacy, proximity, democratization, good-governance…
. Member-States, whether there are 15 or 25 of them, would find in Euro-Rings a means to increase the compatibility between their national nature and their European role, the basis for an increased influence, the opportunity to highlight their specific skills and to increase inter-state collaboration.
. Cities, which were until now the missing link in European democracy would find in Euro-Rings the frame to their full integration in the European project; not to speak about the perspectives of economic development that would result from the implementation of Euro-Rings.
. Many sectors of economy would find with Euro-Rings an immense field of long-term opportunities: transportations, telecommunications, public construction, consulting… enough to contribute significantly to economy and employment in Europe for a few decades.
. Last but not least, citizens would be the net beneficiaries of such evolution, enabling to improve legibility of the institutions and capacity of public appropriation, and combining themes of national pride and contribution to European construction.
VI- Launching the Euro-Rings Project
The Euro-Ring 1 seminar has enabled to verify that the hypothesis, as ambitious as it may seem, was no longer impossible to formulate and that a work of preparation to the geographical reorganization of the European institutional system could from now on be conducted. Euro-Ring 1 has therefore filled in its mission as launch seminar of the Euro-Rings project, and enabled to identify a number of study-themes as well as an operational agenda :
The themes which it appeared useful to study deeper as part of a preparation work, are the following :
• What are the external constraints imposing on the EU to endow itself with a « global conurbation », i.e. an area competitive in size and economic weight with identical areas worldwide (Tokyo-Kyoto, Boston – New-York – Philadelphia ,…) ?
• In the field of human resources, what will be the needs of the European institutions and what assets would provide Euro-Rings in this respect (opening of recruitment, connection to surrounding networks of competence…) ?
• What would be the impact of the setting up of a decentralized institutional structure for the European public status?
• Given the strong relation between the “how” and the “where” to govern, what would be the consequences of a decentralization of the centres of power on good governance in the EU ?
• Who are the non-state actors of the invention and implementation of the concept of Euro-Rings ? And what would be their role ?
• The seminar has enabled to evolve from the concept of Euro-Ring (considered too restrictive) to that of Euro-Rings (more matricial and adaptable to the evolutions of EU geographic reality – enlargement, namely); how to build and operate an institutional structure organized in concentric circles of networks of cities?
• How to evaluate, with precise figures, the economic impact of this reorganization (impact of what on what ?) ?
• How to integrate fully the developments foreseen in the field of transportations and new technologies within the plans of reorganization of tomorrow’s institutional system ?
• How to place the concept of network at the heart of the architecture and operating methods of tomorrow’s institutional system ?
– The agenda proposed to follow up the Euro-Rings Project is structured in the following manner :
1st semester 2002 : Launch phase
• Creation of the Euro-Rings discussion list gathering the various categories of actors concerned (local authorities, European Parliament, transportations, telecommunications, consultants…)
• Holding of the launch seminar (Paris – Hôtel de Ville, April 15th, 2002)
• Creation of the Euro-Rings Group of Founders
• Creation of a Euro-Rings special section on the website www.europe2020.org
September 2002- September 2004 : Deepening the thinking
• Holding of the Euro-Rings 2, 3, 4, 5… seminars (around 1 every other month) in and in partnership with the cities interested (London, The Hague, Frankfurt, Brussels, Cologne…) on themes to study (global conurbation, distribution, public status…)
• Building the network of operational and financial partners of the Euro-Rings Project
End of 2004 : Presentation of the Euro-Rings Project to the public opinion
• Organisation of communication campaigns, trans-European opinion polls…
CONCLUSION
The first Euro-Rings seminar was a success. In terms of content, the debates enabled to validate the relevance and utility of a strategic and operational reflexion on the question of the future geographic location of EU institutions. They have also enabled to identify clearly the growing awareness of the fact that the current institutional geography was an obstacle to any serious, sustainable and significant reform of the institutional system inherited from the 50s.
There is no possible reflexion on the future of EU governance that can avoid the effort of a preliminary debate on the structure and nature of its network of capitals, unless it remains as disconnected from political and historical reality as a debate on « institutional triangulation » can be.
In parallel to this, for reasons of democracy as well as for reasons of global economic competition, it is useful to study in detail the « heart » of the Euro-Rings system (the participants unanimously decided to add an « s » to the project’s title, highlighting the existence of a series of concentric Euro-Rings), i.e. the emerging Central North-West European Global Conurbation.
Finally, it is necessary to examine carefully the specific structure of the network of European capital cities, namely regarding the second circle of Euro-Rings (Madrid, Rome, Prague, Budapest, Warsaw).
Europe 2020 wishes to thank the City of Paris and the Group of Founders of the Euro-Rings Project for their confidence, openness, creativity which made possible the effective launch of the project, and invites them to the “Euro-Rings 2” seminar in September.
For information, Europe 2020 has decided that from September 2002 on, all its work of political and institutional anticipation would take place in the framework of the Euro-Rings Project. There is no democratic future not based on geographic choices, no political system not rooted in precise centres and cities. Europe 2020 fully adopts these conclusions and applies them to its own work.
